Echoes of the Past; Responding in the Present
I wrote this Saturday afternoon, before reading the news that Trump is sending the National Guard into Los Angeles. I’m posting it unchanged, though I’ll acknowledge here the step forward in the area of force and terror. Perhaps someday we’ll see this as a tipping point, though I wonder how we would recognize that now when the world is so slanted.
It’s become something of a cliché to describe similarities between Germany in the 1930s and the United States in the last few months. Many of those descriptions build on the work of Hannah Arendt — and, more often than not, include pithy quotations from her writings. I’m part of the pack here, having posted multiple Arendt passages on this site as commonplace entries. As important as these allusions to 1930s Germany are, I think we should acknowledge that we in the United States have similar episodes in our own history. I was reminded of one such time this morning by none other than Hannah Arendt. Consider this lengthy passage from a letter she wrote to Karl Jaspers, her mentor and friend in Switzerland:
You probably know a lot from the papers. Can you see from them how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun. Most important of course is the disintegration of the governmental machinery and the presumably quite conscious establishment of a parallel government, which, though with no legal power, possesses the real power. And this takes in far more than just the civil service. The whole entertainment industry and, to a lesser extent, the schools and colleges and universities have been dragged into it. It is essentially impossible to consider any specific parts of the society as set apart from it, for even where the Congressional investigating committees aren’t sticking in their dirty noses, an extremely effective self-censorship takes place. The editor of a newspaper or a magazine, for example, or the director of a business or the professors at a university will quietly conduct a “purge.” … In this self-censorship, everyone actually censors himself. It all functions without any application of force, without any terror. Basically, nothing at all happens — and yet the whole thing eats its way farther and deeper into the society.
Arendt wrote this letter, not in Germany in the 1930s, but in the United States in 1953. She says that there had been hardly any resistance, but she might have noted Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s declaration of conscience in June of 1950. Surely that is resistance worth noting, even if it came to something like full fruition only 4 years later with the Senate’s censure of McCarthy. Similarly, the resistance of some people even early in the Trump administration has grown to include many more people — some colleges and universities, many in the entertainment industry, the courts, and others — today. Such resistance will surely prompt even more force and terror in the government’s response; it will be very interesting to see the dynamics that emerge on days like June 14, when Trump will have crowds at his militaristic birthday celebration even as what I hope and expect will be much larger crowds gathered in protest throughout the country.
To return to Arendt’s letter, I was struck by her observation that the censorship was occurring “without any application of force, without any terror.” On one hand, I suppose that whatever force the McCarthy and others imposed on their victims in the 1950s pales in comparison to what Arendt and others saw in the Holocaust. On the other hand, I think it’s crucial to recognize that the amount of terror one faces in the current situation depends in part on one’s place in society. Some of us have the privilege of wealth, or the advantage of birth or social standing. Others, without the protections offered by such positions and privilege, are in a different position. Many people face considerable terror, wondering whether they will be apprehended and removed from the country, leaving friends and family behind.
Privilege comes into play in another way, in that some people have the option of leaving the country behind. Some exercise this option for professional opportunities; the United States faces a brain drain not unlike that in which German scientists and researchers moved to other countries in the 1930s. Others exercise this option merely because they don’t want to live in a country whose government does the sorts of things that our government is doing. Sadly, some who remain, whether because they choose to remain or because they don’t have the resources allowing them to leave, are critical of those who leave. It seems to me that such criticisms divide resistance forces, and that the division weakens those who would challenge the current regime.
One person who left is Tim Snyder, a researcher who has done significant work not only in identifying how tyranny emerges and functions but also in developing strategies for responding to it. Snyder moved last year from Yale University to the University of Toronto. Some have criticized Snyder for making that move, suggesting that he’s abandoned the United States at a crucial time. He’s now offered what I think is a strong response to his critics. I don’t think he owes any of us a justification for leaving, but I think he addresses the concerns that some have expressed. However, what I appreciate most about his response is how he moves from an account of his own life decisions to a challenge to all of us to work together in the fight to respond to the current administration. The struggle before us is big; the administration has indeed eaten its way deep into our social and political institutions. (Fascinating, isn’t it, that the DOGE engineer who used AI to identify what he thought was wasteful spending in the Department of Veterans Affairs spoke of the government contracts identfied as targets as “munchables”?) Be sure to listen to the end of Snyder’s video. I think he’s right. We need to get into the fight, working to counter the work of the current administration, and to direct our energies against the regime than to work against each other.