As the 2024 election heats up, so has the rhetoric. We hear a lot about the threat to democracy and the possibility that Donald Trump could even end elections were he to be re-elected in November. Some have referred to Trump as Hitler or Mussolini. Others have spoken about another Civil War. All the ingredients are in play for a complete fascist takeover of this country and if you think it can’t happen here, that the Constitution will protect us, think again.
Think about how quickly academics and centrist Democrats like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro—not MAGAs like Ron DeSantis—called out militarized police on student protestors who have been doing what students have been doing since I was in college—pushing back against oppression and repression. In Philadelphia, progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner has not charged any of these students even after arrests. But that has not been true of other cities and other Democrats like New York’s Mayor Eric Adams.
And that’s the thing about fascism—it requires normalization. It requires acquiescence. Most of all, it requires what Edmund Burke famously said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
I’m not suggesting that academics and Democrats who are suddenly pro-militarization are evil, of course. But militarization against free speech and peaceful protest, as we saw in 2020 and as LGBTQ people experienced at Stonewall, is a slippery slope and when people on our side embrace these choices, it makes it easier for pro-fascist actions–Jan. 6 is the obvious example—to be normalized, with perpetrators of actual sedition referred to as political prisoners by members of Congress and former president Donald Trump. Republicans who were at the Capitol on January 6 have even said it was a normal protest and a normal day. Gaslighting is a well-established tool of fascism.
And we have entered that period of political interregnum since Donald Trump first refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and then refused the orderly transfer of power and then called for an insurrection. We are in a state of spiraling moral collapse, as historian Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has described it.
Ben-Ghiat said in February that Trump is a “lawless rapist racist money-launderer” and “there are few people who are criminal in so many ways as Donald Trump” and he has “re-made the party in his image” and that “Project 2025 is about re-making our institutions in his image and in a moral collapse.”
In the 1970s, when I was a student at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, several of my close friends were the daughters of Holocaust survivors. I wrote about this nearly a decade ago on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. The mother of my closest friend was unlike other mothers. Nita’s mother was single—we never talked about who or where Nita’s father was. She worked as a hostess in a club of some sort. She was beautiful and she wore amazing, hip clothes that were more like what my friends wore than what mothers I knew wore. She dyed her hair a dark red and wore it long. She had a heavy accent and she was always telling us to “eat, eat” and left us cookies and soda and pieces of very sharp cheese stabbed with a toothpick that looked like a little sword through a slice of tart green apple.
In those days, tattoos were a rarity; very few women had them. But on her arm, inside the soft place by her elbow, were a string of pale blue numbers, one with a European 7 with the line struck through it. The numbers were the mark of the camp where her family died when she was a girl close to our age. Most of the time, those numbers were covered by a sleeve, but one hot day, she was wearing a sleeveless dress and I saw her putting makeup on to cover them, like one would a bruise from an abusive lover.
Before Girls’ High, I had spent nine years in Catholic school. While my parents had many Jewish friends, until high school most of mine were other Catholic girls. And my friends’ parents in both Catholic school and high school were all older–a decade or more older than my very young parents. Many of my friends’ parents were immigrants and refugees who came to the U.S. after World War II, and some fathers had fought in WWII while my own father was in grade school. So the time I spent in these households, with people who had experienced the very worst of inhumanity on so many levels, I was given an education I could not have gotten from any history text, no matter how accurate.
I have thought a lot lately about these girls, my friends, and the atmosphere in those houses I visited in my formative years and how what I learned impacted me. One day, Nita and I were sitting in their Center City apartment, me drinking soda, which was forbidden at my house and her smoking a joint, right there in her bedroom, not even opening the window.
I was nervous, so I told her to at least open a window. She leaned forward, holding the joint like a cigarette, and said in a low voice, “Matka [Mother] says ‘live for today, because they could drag you out of your house tomorrow by your hair into the street and no one would care. They would look the other way like they had never even met you, even though you had been friends for years. So do what you want.’ So I’m smoking this joint.” And then Nita leaned back against her pillow and closed her eyes.
That is, of course, what happened to Nita’s mother’s family who lived in Warsaw, Poland before they were sent to Treblinka, a concentration camp just a few dozen miles outside that thriving metropolis. It was there that Nita’s mother’s parents, her elderly aunt who lived with them and Nita’s mother’s only sibling, her older brother, were killed.
It’s been more than 150 years since a war on U.S. soil with no one still alive from the Civil War. But there are still many survivors of the Holocaust and some were old enough when they were sent to the camps to situate themselves in the period that led up to Hitler’s “Final Solution”—his plan to rid the world of Jews.
It is within the not-so-long shadow of that history that Donald Trump repeatedly tells us that he loves Nazis. It is within that history that Trump has dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Holocaust denialists and white nationalists. It is within that history that one Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, vacations every year with a billionaire who bought Thomas’s mother a house, put his foster son through private school and who has a large collection of Nazi memorabilia.
It is within this slow normalizing of fascism that we learned just this week that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito—the same justice who wrote the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, who has been outspoken about why gay people are bad for America—was flying a distress flag outside his house in the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. That upside down flag was flown at the insurrection and was in fact a symbol of the Big Lie—Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him. The Jan. 6 insurrection is the subject of one of the pending cases before the Supreme Court this session.
That lie has been embraced by more than 80% of Republicans as well as many Independents and even some Democrats. It was promoted on Fox News and NewsMax. The Jan. 6 insurrection as well as the fake electors’ schemes to overturn the election are the subject of two pending legal cases against Trump.
Nita’s mother schooled her daughter in a nihilist code born out of her experience of being abandoned by her friends and neighbors to the Nazis. This was the community in which she’d grown up, in which her parents and aunt had close friends and colleagues. In which she and her brother played with other children who never were put in a cattlecar never to be seen again.
Nita’s mother didn’t share what had happened in the camps with Nita, but we knew from those pale blue numbers that she knew things no girl our age should have known.
And so when people handwave the idea that “it can’t happen here,” that’s what people said in Germany before the Nazis began burning books by Jews in 1933 and paramilitary police smashed Jewish shops during the two days of Kristallnacht in November 1938. Yet it was just a day ago that Trump deleted a social media video about election victory that referenced “Unified Reich”—but only after facing backlash and Biden saying “That’s Hitler language.”
“This was not a campaign video,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men,” this is the way the world ends; Not with a bang but a whimper.” Normalizing fascism is how we get fascism. And we are already in the frog boil.