Commentary: Are We Slouching Toward Bethlehem?  

Photo by Joe Dudeck on Unsplash

I hate to end the year on a downer, but frankly 2024 will probably go down as one of the worst of my life.  I’m not going to go into a lot of personal details, but I have revealed a bit here and there for most regular readers to know that 2024 for the Vanguard was like no other year before or hopefully since.

I will probably always remember the moment of peak despair in February when I invited a group of people I most trusted, and laid out the sobering fact to them.  At that point I was spent.  Little did I realize just how bad things would get.

We are still around, hanging on, and while we have prevailed in our formal, legal battle, it has been costly.  We are far from out of the woods there—which is why there is an appeal pinned to the top of every page on this site.

Unfortunately, 2024 wasn’t just a bad year, it was a universally bad year, and if misery loves company—there’s plenty to go around.

More on that in a bit.

Aside from disaster avoidance, I spent most of 2024 reading—that is, learning.  I read a prodigious amount of books this year—more than 225 to be precise.  The shocking thing is I found that one in every four or five books I read completely altered my thinking on a given subject.

I have shared at various times how much of my thinking and commitment to social justice goes back to my understanding of the Holocaust.  The lessons from the Holocaust are endless, but they start with the dangers of racism, tyranny, hatred, but perhaps most of all—inaction.

In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  We act as though things that are happening to others, and do not impact us all.

They do.  It’s one reason I reject the notion that there are marginalized people and then there are allies, as though the marginalization of some people does not impact us all.

Another lesson from the Holocaust is the failure of the world to step up and accept immigration from displaced people and give them a safe home.  The US refused to take more then their immigration quotients of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, famously turning back the Missouri in the infamous voyage of the dammed.

The British, for their part, blocked immigration to Palestine, preventing many Jews from seeking safe harbor there and forcing—both before, during and after the war—illegal immigration as people fled persecution.

Could a more tolerant immigration stance by the world have prevented the Holocaust?  Probably not.  But it could have made a difference.

The case of Martin Niemoller I have always found rather instructive.  Niemoller was sympathetic to the Nazi regime in the early 1930s but quickly realized, as historian Richard Evans writes, “the racist politicization of the Church was a threat to  his traditionalist conception of Protestant Christianity.”

In 1935, he declared that “the Jews had been  eternally cursed because they had caused Christ’s crucifixion. Yet he  went on to use this argument to urge a stop to their persecution in the  Third Reich: if God had judged them, it was not for humans to intervene  with their own hatred, and in any case, had not Jesus told Christians to  love their enemies?”

He was eventually tried in a show trial, but acquitted of the most serious charges; however, when he was freed in 1938, the Gestapo was awaiting for him and he was rearrested.  He was then placed in solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

From there he eventually issued his famous statement that concluded “when they came for me” there was no one left to speak out.

Evans writes, “Looking back on his arrest and imprisonment later in life, Niemöller came to regret the compromises he had made with the regime, and blamed  himself for pursuing narrowly religious interests.”

It doesn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics to see current parallels with certain contemporary movements that have made compromises in order to pursue narrow religious and/or political interests.

One of the most interesting books is the book I read by Tim Alberta on the Evangelical Movement confronting Trumpism.  Alberta is a young journalist, having written for the National Review, Politico and the Atlantic.  What is most interesting is he was raised in the Evangelical tradition where his father was a pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

He is able to offer an insider’s perspective and he goes around the country and chronicles this fascinating rift.

The battles reminded me of stories one of my long-time friends from college has told me.  My friend, Jeff, graduated from Cal Poly with me, did a mission in Africa and became a pastor in a number of evangelical Midwest churches, but was turned off by Trump and Christian Nationalism.

I asked him if he had seen this book, and he said he has read it and it’s right in line with much of his thinking.

I also read the 2007 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert O. Paxton.  This was interesting because it was written well before Trumpism was a thing in America.

Paxton offers us some interesting observations.

For instance, he argues that Nazism “might have ended as a footnote to history had it not been saved in the opening days of 1933 by conservative politicians who wanted to pilfer its following and use its political muscle for their own purposes.”

More interesting is “the fascist route to power has always passed through cooperation with conservative elites.”

Moreover, “conservative leaders had to decide whether to try to coopt fascism or force it back to the margins.”

Paxton argues that conservatives miscalculated, believing “the Austrian corporal and the greenhorn Italian ex-socialist rabble-rouser would not have the faintest idea what to do with high office. They would be incapable of governing without the cultivated and experienced conservative leaders’ savoir faire.”

Moreover, conservatives were mobilized by what was in Germany and Italy a “very real” fear of communism.  Indeed, both in Germany and Italy, they saw fascism as a way to block or avoid admitting the left into the government.

Finally, conservatives hesitated to get rid of the fascist leader, for fear of “letting the left or the liberals regain power.”

We see a lot of this on the right in the US today as many, while uncomfortable with aspects of Trumpism, have become coopted in one form or another.

In the end, “most German conservatives (with some honorable exceptions) swallowed their doubts about the Nazis in favor of their overriding common interests.”

That seems to be playing out in America as well.

Does that mean we are headed toward the collapse of Democracy in America?  I’m not ready to say yes, but there is a good deal of risk.  I’m also very disconcerted by what seems to be the fall of a democratic moment post-Cold War with the rise of powerful authoritarian regimes in China and Russia, to name but a few.

Here’s Paxton’s 2007 definition of fascism: “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

There are some necessary elements now in place to advance toward a State Two.  But one of his strongest arguments is that “further progress is not inevitable”; indeed he showed all of the key things that had to go right for Hitler and the Nazis to take and consolidate power.

In the end, I am troubled most by the blind faith that this couldn’t happen in the US.  Maybe it can’t.  Maybe it won’t.

After, as Richard Evans points out in his trilogy, the end results of the Nazi regime were not immediately evident looking forward from 1933.

Moreover, as Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has written, “no bureaucrat in 1933 could have predicted what kind of measures would be taken in 1938, nor was it possible in 1938 to foretell the configuration of the undertaking in 1942.”

In 20 years, will this look like a blip that was the mid 1930s in the US when Father Coughlin, Huey Long and others vied for political power, or will this mark a new epoch in American History and the death of democracy?

I’m not ready to accede to the latter, but I can no longer dismiss it out of hand.

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