This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.
Opinion by
Columnist
September 25, 2020 at 1:14 p.m. CDT
America,
this is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning.
For
five years, my colleagues and I have taken pains to avoid Nazi comparisons. It
is usually hyperbolic, and counterproductive, to label the right “fascists” in
the way those on the right reflexively label the left “socialists.” But this is
no longer a matter of name-calling.
With
his repeated refusals this week
to accept the peaceful transfer of power — the bedrock principle that has sustained
American democracy for 228 years — President Trump has put the United States,
in some ways, where Germany was in 1933. That is when Adolf Hitler, the
appointed leader, used the suspicious burning of the German parliament to turn
a democracy into a totalitarian state.
Overwrought,
you say? Then ask Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a top authority on Nazism and
Stalinism. “The Reichstag has been on a slow burn since June,” he told me. “The
language Trump uses to talk about Black Lives Matter and the protests is very
similar to the language Hitler used — that there’s some vague left-wing
conspiracy based in the cities that is destroying the country.”
Trump,
as he has done before, has made the villain a minority
group. He has sought, once again, to fabricate emergencies
to justify greater
powers for himself. He has proposed postponing
elections. He has refused to commit
to honoring the results of the election. And now, he proposes to embrace
violence if he doesn’t win.
“It’s
important not to talk about this as just an election,” Snyder said. “It’s an
election surrounded by the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat. The
opposition has to win the election and it has to win the aftermath of the
election.”
If not?
There won’t be another “normal” election for some time, he said. But that
doesn’t have to happen, and Snyder is optimistic it won’t. To avoid it, we
voters must turn out in overwhelming numbers to deal Trump a lopsided defeat.
The military must hold to its oath. Homeland Security police must not serve as
Trump’s brownshirts. And we citizens must take to the streets, peacefully but
indefinitely, until the will of the people prevails.
“It’s
going to be messy,” Snyder said. “He seems pretty sure he won’t win the
election, he doesn’t want to leave office,” and he appears to Snyder to have
“an authoritarian’s instinct” that he must stay in power or go to prison.
It’s
abundantly clear that Trump plans to fabricate an election “emergency.” First,
he claimed mail-in
balloting, a tried-and-true system, is fraudulent. Now his supporters are
trying to harass in-person voters.
When
Virginia’s early voting opened this week, Trump supporters descended on a
polling station, waving Trump signs and flags, chanting and forming a gantlet
through which voters had to walk. When the New York Times reported that this
voter intimidation campaign began at a nearby rally featuring the Republican
National Committee co-chairman, the Virginia GOP responded mockingly from its official
Twitter account: “Quick! Someone call the waaaambulance!”
Let’s
be clear. There is only one political party in American politics embracing
violence. There is only one side refusing to
denounce all political violence. There is only one side talking about
bringing guns to the polls; one side attempting to turn
federal law-enforcement officials into an arm of a political party. And Trump
is trying to use law
enforcement to revive tactics historically used to bully voters of color from
voting — tactics not seen in 40 years.
Some of
what Trump and his lieutenants have been doing is merely unseemly: using the
machinery of government to attack previous and current political
opponents, likening pandemic public health restrictions to slavery, or threatening
to overrule regulators
if they question the safety of vaccines.
But
embracing violence to resolve democratic disagreement is another matter. Trump
embraced the “very fine people” among
the homicidal neo-Nazis
in Charlottesville. He embraced as “very good people” armed
protesters who stormed the Michigan Capitol to intimidate lawmakers. He
embraced his supporter who allegedly shot and killed two people at a protest in
Wisconsin. He embraced the “GREAT
PATRIOTS” who drove into Portland, Ore., hurling paintballs and pepper spray at
demonstrators. He embraced officers who kill unarmed African Americans, saying
they simply “choke” under pressure.
Now
he’s rejecting the peaceful transfer of power. Worse: Most Republican
officeholders dare not contradict him. The
Times reported that of
all 168 Republican National Committee members and 26 Republican governors it
asked to comment on Trump’s outrage, only four RNC members and one governor
responded.
In
Federalist 48, James Madison prophetically warned that tyranny could triumph under
“some favorable emergency.” In 1933, Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag
to do just that. Trump now, it appears, is aiming to do likewise.
America,
this is our Reichstag moment. We have the power to stop it. Don’t let democracy
burn to the ground.