Borrowing a Cup of Hope #15: Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: How People Fall For Authoritarians.

Knowing our Awful History Can Help Us Fight the Willfully Ignorant.

I know that there have been times in my life when I stared in disbelief when confronted by something I did not want to know. Denial kicked in hard, and to protect myself from an ugly reality, I had to let the truth seep in slowly, like a small leak in the roof. The best example was The Dakota 38, when the good people of Minnesota hung 38 Dakota prisoners in one drop in 1862, the largest execution in US history, and one of our more egregious war crimes. In my fricken’ home state. But eventually, truth filters in, impervious to resistance, like how water always finds its way to the lowest point.

It’s sad how low our modern political life can go, but it should not be a complete surprise. History teaches us that we have gone even lower in our past, but people like me thought that those low points were behind us; what we are gnawing our livers over now is that the ugliness is recurring. I’m stupid that way; I thought if people listened to Dr. King then they wouldn’t be racist anymore, that it is obvious women should be treated equally to men, that America using brutal force on small nations in undeclared wars is a bad thing and should never happen again.

But as Paul Simon pointed out in “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” And the part of the population that does not want to learn, that is baffled by the speed that technology is transforming the landscape faster than they can keep up (and I’m down with that feeling),they were sold an imaginary past of what America was, and that was accompanied with a promise to return to that past by waving a magic wand. “Make America Great Again” comes from “Make Germany Great Again” and “Make Italy the Roman Empire Again” and even Putin’s “Make Russia an Empire Again.”

I have started reading Rachel Maddow’s NY Times #1 Best Seller Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. It’s excellent, it’s fascinating, but there is some grieving involved. In other words, it’s a good piece of historical reporting.

Rachel has dug deeply into the time when Franklin Roosevelt was transforming the government from being a passive “not my fault” form of barely-there executive to being a hands-on force to make life possible for the poor and disadvantaged; and in the Depression of the 1930s, that was fully a third of the population, broken economically by the rampaging, uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism of Wall Street speculators who bid up the stock market to unsustainable levels, leading to a crash that kept on crashing, across the country and around the planet. But for every action that Roosevelt took to ease the desperation, there is a re-action, and it came from people in the US who liked what they saw in Hitler.

Hitler’s partnership with big business and the armaments industry made what appeared to be a successful means of getting things done; efficient government is a defining feature of fascism, because it does not have to pay attention to details like what happens to the rights of the people it is supposed to be serving. They can just roll right over everything.

Hitler also pegged out who can be the scapegoats for all their troubles, the Jews. You Need An Enemy. He made his central talking point that all Jews were Communists and all Communists were Jews. Which is a lie, of course- but Goebbels believed in the efficacy of The Big Lie, that if you make it big enough, and tell it often enough, it will be believed. Donald Trump, the German-American politician who brags about having superior genes, said that Kamala Harris is a Communist, which is entirely laughable, but it became part of the toxic swill that his True Believers drink by the gallon. Trump has said about lying, “If you just say it, they’ll believe it.” He said Immigrants are An Emergency. And they believed.

So Maddow explores and documents stuff I already knew, but did not know in detail- like how much Hitler got from Henry Ford. Ford was a raging anti-semite, and pushed hard at getting the news out. He bought a newspaper to print his anti-semitic screeds in, distributed them in every Ford car sold. Ford got a medal from Hitler; Hitler had a large portrait of Ford in his office, calling him “my hero.” Ford compiled his ravings intro a three-volume collection called “The International Jew,” and several long passages were found in Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). And Ford’s assembly line was the model for how the Germans organized the death camps where Jewish men, women and children were gassed and burned by the millions.

Of course, Ford also made millions by selling trucks and tanks to both the US and Germany; “Ford Werke and Ford SAF (Ford's subsidiaries in Germany and France) produced military vehicles and other equipment for Nazi Germany's war effort.” (Wiki) So it worked well for him, anyway.

Ford inspired an assemblage of crackpots across the nation to make unsuccessful efforts to organize Silver Shirts (modeled on Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshrts) and actual plans to violently take over the Federal Government. It’s disappointing to read how far they got; but it is also inspiring that they failed. Today’s Tech Bro Silvershirts are more connected, and richer, but I don’t know that they are any smarter; the Tesla Cybertruck was the biggest automotive flop since the Edsel, and that was before Elon got his part-time temp gig kneecapping the Federal Government.

My point is something I have talked about before, grieving for the America of our dreams. George Carlin said “If you believe in the American Dream, it’s because you’re asleep.” And I think Trump is a wake-up call for us to face the reality of what kind of country this is, and always has been. I’ve made it a point my whole life to dig for the Truth about our country, and I know a lot of sludge about how we operate. And yet I have failed to anticipate or appreciate how low Trump has taken us as each event surprises me again. Maddow has shown that Trumpism is not a new thing, that it has cone up before, and we can beat it back again.

We have a better idea now of where the inclination to authoritarian rule comes from: It’s in how we are raised. In 1950, a 1,000 page study was released that “rocked the Academic World,” by Theodore Adorno. It’s called The Authoritarian Personality re-published in 2020 on its 70th anniversary. Here’s a good overview:

Written by a German author, it asks this finely-honed question: “What is it that makes people susceptible to the siren call of an authoritarian?” I’ll give you an over-simplified answer in order to encourage you to watch the brief video. The answer is in how we are raised; if we are taught that respect for authority and that obedience are more important than being an independent thinker and forming your own conclusions, them you are eligible for the Red MAGA Hat. And what is the most direct way to get people to shut down their critical thinking skills? Being in a conservative religious community. Just like Boy Scouts get you ready for the draft, Right Wing Church gets you ready for the sweet surrender of Obedience. You may recall that the regimes of Mussolini, Franco and Petain (Italy, Spain and France) were all very Catholic; Hitler came up in the most Catholic part of Germany, and was himself raised as a Catholic in Austria.
This is not true of all Christians or all religions. I was raised a mainline Protestant, the American Lutheran Church, the liberal wing of what is now the ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (they now largely regret the E), and we were raised to be open-minded, suspicious of authorities like The Pope, and to have respect for other people of other faiths, like the Jewish and Native communities. I am now an Interfaith Presbyterian, PCUSA, which advocates for freedom of conscience, who are anti-authoritarian, queer-friendly, and in favor of DEI. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

There is some practical comfort in knowing this. I do not have to waste my time worrying about convincing people who are against learning, who want to erase any history that makes them uncomfortable, who will do what they are told, who believe in following orders like a Good German. That’s the kind of person Trump is assigning to posts like the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the Press Office. That’s 35% of the American Public. Our job is to build a new voting majority from People Who Want To Learn. Don’t bother trying to make the case to those who will not and cannot have a mind, and a conscience, of their own. Move On.

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