Is It Time To Ask Ourselves, Once More, If Trump Is Hitler? Or Is It Too Late Already?

There are a lot of Republicans wishing Trump hadn't gone on O'Reilly's show and created the impression of moral equivalency between Putin's fascist regime in Russia and our own country.Like many vulnerable Rep[ublican members of Congress, Wisconsin freshman Mike Gallagher panicked and immediately tried distancing himself from Trump. Yesterday Mitch McConnell was on CNN's State of the Union where he tried distancing himself-- and thereby Senate Republicans-- from Trump's statement about Putin and Russia. He told Jake Tapper that Putin "is a former KGB agent, a thug, not elected in a way that most people consider a credible election... I don't think there is any equivalency with the way the Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does." That was a big slap in the face for Trump, who, luckily for him, has a base of support that will probably be unable to comprehend what all the fuss is about. And I suspect not many any Trump voters are New Yorker readers or followers of Adam Gopnik. The latter wrote in the new issue of the former that "Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the couple who did so much to bear witness to the terrible truths of the Second World War, came to town last week to introduce their new memoir to an American audience. In it, there is a photograph that can only be called heartbreaking in its happiness, unbearable in its ordinariness. It shows an eight-year-old Serge with his sister and their Romanian-Jewish parents walking along a promenade in Nice, in 1943, still smiling, still feeling confident, even at that late date, that they are safe in their new French home. Within a few months, the children and their mother were hiding in a false closet, as Gestapo agents took their father to Auschwitz, and his death. What the photograph teaches is not that every tear in the fabric of civility opens a path to Auschwitz but that civilization is immeasurably fragile, and is easily turned to brutality and barbarism. The human capacity for hatred is terrifying in its volatility. (The same promenade in Nice was the site of the terrorist truck attack last year.) Americans have a hard time internalizing that truth, but the first days of the Trump Administration have helped bring it home."

Hitler didn't do it alone. He had millions of accomplices. Trump does as well. And we're not just talking about the top officials, either. It doesn't matter if you want to think of Stephen K. Bannon as someone manipulating Trump or just his alter-ego. There's a lot more to the Trump Regime than just the malevolent presence of Steve Bannon. In fact, many Trumpists-- most?-- have 2-digit IQs and have been brainwashed-- after years and years of long commutes to work and back-- by Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. Shocking numbers of Trump voters are addicted to prescription drugs and very severely mentally incapacitated. "Regimes with an authoritarian ideology and a boss man on top," wrote Gopnik, "always bend toward the extreme edge, because their only organizational principle is loyalty to the capo. Since the capo can be placated only by uncritical praise, the most fanatic of his lieutenants end up calling the shots. Loyalty to the boss is demonstrated by hatred directed against his enemies."

After Hitler became Chancellor but before he became dictator, the German establishment argued he would grow more reasonable once in office and that his cabinet would tame him. A dictatorship? Out of the question! They miscalculated; almost everyone miscalculated. When French Ambassador Andre François-Poncet first met the new chancellor he was relieved, finding him "dull and mediocre," a kind of miniature Mussolini.

Yet what perhaps no one could have entirely predicted was the special cocktail of oafish incompetence and radical anti-Americanism that President Trump’s Administration has brought. This combination has produced a new note in our public life: chaotic cruelty. The immigration crisis may abate, but it has already shown the power of government to act arbitrarily overnight-- sundering families, upending long-set expectations, until all those born as outsiders must imagine themselves here only on sufferance of a senior White House counsellor.

Some choose to find comfort in the belief that the incompetence will undermine the anti-Americanism. Don’t bet on it. Autocratic regimes with a demagogic bent are nearly always inefficient, because they cannot create and extend the network of delegated trust that is essential to making any organization work smoothly. The chaos is characteristic. Whether by instinct or by intention, it benefits the regime, whose goal is to create an overwhelming feeling of shared helplessness in the population at large: we will detain you and take away your green card-- or, no, now we won’t take away your green card, but we will hold you here, and we may let you go, or we may not.

This is radical anti-Americanism-- not simply illiberalism or anti-cosmopolitanism-- because America is not only a nation but also an idea, cleanly if not tightly defined. Pluralism is not a secondary or a decorative aspect of that idea. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, the guarantee of religious liberty lies in having many kinds of faiths, and the guarantee of civil liberty lies in having many kinds of people-- in establishing a “multiplicity of interests” to go along with a “multiplicity of sects.” The idea doesn’t reflect a “weak” desire for niceness. It is, instead, intended to counter the brutal logic of the playground. When there are many kinds of bullied kids, they can unite against the bully: “Even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves.”

Trump supporters don't even read the warnings their vials of Oxycontin, Roxicodone, Oxecta, hydromorphone, codeine, fentanyl-- and those packets of heroin with Trump's picture on them don't even have warnings. So I'll take a wild guess that Trump supporters aren't going be reading Germany's version of Time, appropriately enough, Die Zeit . But who better to warn us about how fascism takes over a country? The German are scared. They know what comes next.

Is there reason to worry? No, thought Nikolaus Sieveking, an employee at Hamburg’s World Economy Archive. "I find the act of viewing Hitler’s chancellorship as a sensational event to be childish enough that I will leave that to his loyal followers," he wrote in his diary on Jan. 30, 1933.

Like Sieveking, many Germans didn’t initially recognize this date as a dramatic turning point. Few sensed what Hitler’s appointment as chancellor actually meant, and many reacted to the event with shocking indifference.

...Hitler’s thirst for power couldn’t have been more grossly underestimated. The nine conservative ministers in the so-called "Cabinet of National Concentration" clearly carried more weight than the three National Socialists. But Hitler also made sure that two key ministries were filled by his men. Wilhelm Frick took over the Ministry of the Interior of the German Reich. Hermann Göring became a cabinet minister without a portfolio, but also Prussia’s interior minister, thus acquiring power over the police in Germany’s largest state-- an important precondition for the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.

Media mogul and head of the German National People’s Party Alfred Hugenberg was seen as the strongman in the cabinet. He was given the Ministry of Economy and Agriculture of both the Reich and Prussia. The new super minister purportedly told Leipzig Mayor Carl Goerdeler he had made the "biggest mistake" of his life by aligning himself with the "biggest demagogue in world history," but his assertion is hard to believe. Hugenberg, like Papen and the remaining conservative ministers, was convinced that he could steer Hitler to go along with his own ideas.

Big-business representatives shared the same illusion. In an editorial in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which had close ties to heavy industry, editor-in-chief Fritz Klein wrote that working together with the Nazis would be "difficult and exhausting," but that people had to dare to take "the leap into darkness" because the Hitler movement had become the strongest political actor in Germany. The head of the Nazi party would now have to prove "whether he really had what is needed in order to become a statesman." The stock market didn’t seem spooked either-- people were waiting to see what would happen.

The conservatives who helped Hitler rise to power, and his opponents in the republican camp, were wrong in their assessment of the true division of power. On Jan. 31, Harry Graf Kessler, the diplomat and arts patron, reported having a conversation with Hugo Simon, a former close colleague of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who was murdered in 1922. "He sees Hitler as a prisoner of Hugenberg and Papen." Apparently Kessler felt similarly, because only a few days later he prophesized that the new government wouldn’t last long, since it was only held together by the "Papen’s cream puffery and intrigues." He argued, "Hitler must have noticed by now that he has fallen prey to a deception. He is bound, hand and foot, to this government and can move neither forward nor backward."

In his book Defying Hitler, written in exile in England in 1939, journalist Sebastian Haffner recalled the "icy horror" he felt when he had learned of Hitler’s appointment while working as a clerk at the Kammergericht court in Berlin six years earlier. For a moment, he had "physically sensed (Hitler’s) odor of blood and filth." But on the evening of Jan. 30, he discussed the views of the new government with his father, a liberal progressive-educator, and they quickly agreed that while the cabinet could do a lot of damage, it couldn’t stay in power for very long. "A deeply reactionary government, with Hitler as its mouthpiece. Apart from this, it did not really differ much from the two governments that had succeeded Brüning's… No, all things considered, this government was not a cause for alarm."

The big liberal newspapers also argued that nothing truly terrible would happen. Theodor Wolff, the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt saw the cabinet as the embodiment of what the united right-wing political groups had wanted since their meeting in Bad Harzburg in 1931. He opened his editorial on Jan. 31 by writing: "It has been achieved. Hitler is the Reich Chancellor, Hugenberg is the economics dictator and the positions have been distributed as the men of the ‘Harzburger Front’ had wanted." The new government, he argued, would try anything to "intimidate and silence opponents." A ban on the Communist Party was on the agenda, he thought, as well as a curtailing of the freedom of the press. But even the imagination of this otherwise so clear-sighted journalist didn’t go far enough to conceive the power of a totalitarian dictatorship. He argued there was a "border that violence would not cross." The German people, who were always proud of the "freedom of thought and of speech," would create a "soulful and intellectual resistance" and stifle all attempts to establish a dictatorship.

In the Frankfurter Zeitung, politics editor Benno Reifenberg expressed doubt Hitler had the "social competence" for the office of chancellor, but didn’t think it was out of the question that the responsibility of his office might transform him in ways that could earn him respect. Like Theodor Wolff, Reifenberg described it as "a hopeless misjudgment of our country to believe a dictatorial regime could be forced upon it." "The diversity of the German people demands democracy," he wrote.

Julius Elbau, the editor-in-chief of the Vossischer Zeitung, displayed less optimism. "The signs are pointing to a storm," he wrote in his first commentary. Although Hitler wasn’t able to achieve the absolute power he sought-- "it is not a Hitler cabinet, but a Hitler-Papen-Hugenberg government"-- this triumvirate was in agreement, despite all of their inner contradictions, that they wanted to make a "complete break from all that had come before." Given this prospect, the newspaper warned that it constituted "a dangerous experiment, which one can only watch with deep concern and the strongest suspicion."

The left was also concerned. In their appeal on Jan. 30, the party executive of the Social Democrats and their Reichstag parliamentary group called for supporters to carry out a "fight on the basis of the constitution." Every attempt by the new government to damage the constitution, they argued, "will be met with the most extreme resistance of the working class and all elements of the population who love freedom."

With their strict insistence on the legalities of the constitution, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership overlooked the fact that the previous presidential governments had already hollowed the constitution and that Hitler would not hesitate to destroy its last vestiges.

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) also made a misjudgment in its call for a "general strike against the fascist dictatorship of Hitler, Hugenberg, Papen." Given that there were 6 million unemployed people in Germany, few had the desire to go on strike. The call to build a common line of defense also wasn’t very popular with the Social Democrats, whom the Communists had defamed as "social fascists" only a short time earlier.

The idea of taking action outside of parliament was just as far from the unions’ minds. "Organization-- not demonstration: That is the word of the hour!" Theodor Leipart, the head of the General German Trade Union, said on Jan. 31. In the views of the representatives of the social-democratic workers’ movement, Hitler was a henchman of the old socially reactionary power-elites-- large landowners in the eastern Elbe region and the Rhineland-Westphalian heavy industry. In a talk in early February 1933, SPD Reichstag lawmaker Kurt Schumacher described the Nazi leader as being merely a "decoration piece." "The cabinet has Hitler’s name on the masthead, but in reality the cabinet is Alfred Hugenberg. Adolf Hitler may make the speeches, but Hugenberg will act."

The dangers emanating from Hitler could not have been more grotesquely misread. Most of the leading Social Democrats and unionists had grown up in the German Kaiserreich. They could imagine repression similar to Bismarck’s anti-socialist law, but not that someone would seriously try to destroy the workers’ movement in its entirety.

The fact that Hitler’s appointment meant that a fanatical anti-Semite had come to power should have made Germany’s Jews, above all, nervous. But that was not the case at all. In a statement given on Jan. 30, the chair of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith said, "In general, today more than ever we must follow the directive: wait calmly." He said that although one watches the new government "of course with deep suspicion," President Hindenburg represents the "calming influence." He said there was no reason to doubt his "sense of justice" and "loyalty to the constitution." As a result, he said, one should be convinced that "nobody would dare" to "touch our constitutional rights." In an editorial in the Jüdische Rundschau, a Jewish newspaper,published on Jan. 31, the author argued that "there are powers that are still awake in the German people that will rear up against barbarian anti-Jewish policies." It would only be a few weeks before all these expectations would prove to be illusory.

...Rarely has a political project so rapidly been revealed to be a chimera as the idea that the conservatives would "tame" the Nazis. In terms of tactical cunning, Hitler towered high above his cabinet allies and opponents. In a short time, he had upstaged them and driven them against the wall, dislodging Papen from of his preferential position with Hindenburg and forcing Hugenberg to resign.

Hitler needed only five months to establish his power. By the summer of 1933, fundamental rights and the constitution had been suspended, the states had been forced into conformity, the unions crushed, the political parties banned or dissolved, press and radio brought into line and the Jews stripped of their equality under the law. Everything that existed in Germany outside of the National Socialist Party had been "destroyed, dispersed, dissolved, annexed or absorbed," [French Ambassador Andre] François-Poncet concluded in early July. Hitler, he claimed, had "won the game with little effort." "He only had to puff-- and the edifice of German politics collapsed like a house of cards."

Back to Gopnik again, in the new New Yorker. "Democratic civilization," he concluded, "has turned out to be even more fragile than we imagined; the resources of civil society have turned out to be even deeper than we knew. The battle between these two shaping forces-- between the axman assaulting the old growth and the still firm soil and deep roots that support the tree of liberty-- will now shape the future of us all." Don't forget, there are congressional elections in 2018. They're the only thing that can stop Trump and Bannon at this point. Meanwhile... these men and women are the voice of The Resistance inside Congress. Support them so they can support us: