What keeps me up at night...

I recently received a newsletter from a Maine elected official posing this question: “What keeps you up at night?”  I understood the question to be asking what Maine issues are most important to me, but knew immediately that what keeps me up at night are not local issues but the over-arching state of United States politics and the alarming possibility that our pluralistic democracy in the US will  be replaced by some form of authoritarian or fascist theocracy. Rather than respond to the newsletter naming an important (to me) local issue, I used the question as an opportunity to reflect on my immediate response, consider my biases, validate my facts, and organize my thoughts in written form. 

I see two aspects to the nightmare that disturbs my sleep and distresses me frequently during the day. 

First, the GOP candidates for President and Vice President (and candidates in multiple other state and local races), many of the national, state and local leaders of the current Republican Party, and the most vocal conservative and right-wing public and media figures have abandoned any pretense of valuing facts, truth, or good moral character, are actively engaged in undermining core democratic principles, and do not believe in the value of a pluralistic society that treats all individuals equally. A few illustrative examples:

• The candidate for President and leader of the GOP lies more frequently and egregiously than any public figure in my lifetime, and doubles and triples down on those lies when faced with irrefutable evidence that he is lying. Thirty thousand illegal aliens from Haiti were dropped into a small town and are eating pets? South American gang members have taken over multiple towns? China, rather than American consumers, would pay the tariffs imposed on goods imported from China? Crowd sizes. Crime is way up. Grocery prices are up 50-100%. I'm the father of IVF. Everyone wanted Roe v Wade reversed. He has no connection to Project 2025? Really? 
• The GOP candidate for Vice President knowingly shared the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets, and - when confronted with evidence that he was lying - said he was willing to lie to make a point and direct attention to an issue.
• Both the GOP candidate for President and Vice President continue to insist that Trump did not lose the 2020 election, and the GOP Speaker of the House refuses to commit to following the Constitution and law with regard to certifying the results of the 2024 election.
• The GOP candidate for President is a thrice divorced adjudicated rapist who had documented affairs, paid hush money to keep the affairs secret just before an election, and has been convicted of multiple felonies. He has bankrupted multiple businesses and has a long history of failing to pay contractors. He routinely demeans women, people of color, people with disabilities, other countries, and people who disagree with him. 
• The GOP candidate for President used his position and influence while in office to enrich himself and multiple family members.
• The GOP candidate for President has refused to release his tax returns and information about his health.
• The GOP candidate for President  regularly calls for violence and extrajudicial punishment and weaponization of government, directed at a wide range of those he sees as enemies including but not limited to journalists, media figures and media companies, election officials, and political opponents.
• The GOP candidate for President talks at rallies about the genitalia of a professional athlete and calls the current Vice President ‘a shit Vice President’.
• Elections and voting. Citing election fraud that is too rare to impact the outcome of elections, the GOP and its allies are pursuing aggressive policies to suppress the vote with voter purges (sometimes past the legal deadline), voter ID laws that target minorities, people of color, and Indigenous Americans, restrictions on early and absentee and mail-in voting (even targeting those abroad in the military).  The nonprofit law and public policy Brennan Center for Justice recorded that in 2021 alone, from January 1 through December 7, Republicans in at least 19 states passed 34 laws that restricted access to voting. In May 2024 the Brennan Center reported that in at least 28 states, voters this year will face new restrictions that were not in place in the 2020 presidential election. Varying by state, these laws do things like shorten the time for requesting an absentee ballot, make it a crime to deliver another voter’s mail-in ballot, require proof of citizenship from voters who share the same name as noncitizens, limiting voting places in communities where Democrats vote, removing ballot boxes.  GOP governors and state legislatures are appointing election deniers to election boards. From the GOP candidate for President on down, Republicans  constantly attempt to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the American election process. Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen of Nebraska ignored a newly passed law by shutting down the registrations for people with past felonies in an attempt to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Nebraskans who, until July 2024, were legally and unambiguously eligible to vote. Paxton raided the homes of at least seven Latino Democrats in an attempt to intimidate Latino voters. (No one was charged in the aftermath of the raid.)
• Free speech and education. Since 2022, PEN has logged 365 GOP sponsored bills at the state level to regulate (limit and prohibit) what can be taught or discussed in K-12 schools. Not all have passed, but the number is staggering. At least four states (Indiana, Iowa, Utah, North Carolina)  have passed laws that limit speech on college campuses. The fact that many of the bills are clones of each other makes it clear that this is an intentional and organized movement. (See PEN’s October 2024 annual report on laws curtailing free speech for details.) Similarly, book bans used to be fairly rare and relatively isolated, but they are accelerating with over 4000 instances in the first half of the 2024-2025 school year. Florida directed the press not to cover an amendment protecting abortion access. The GOP candidate for President has repeatedly called for measures that restrict freedom of speech and are clearly unconstitutional, such as prosecution but the DOJ of his political opponents and jail terms for burning the American flag. “"I want to get a law passed. Everyone tells me, oh sure, it's very hard. You burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year. Got to do it, we got to do it. They say, 'Sir, that's not constitutional.' We'll make it constitutional," (Trump quote during a National Guard address in Detroit on Monday August 26.

Note that the above list is limited to rhetoric and actions that are directed against American democracy. They are not complaints about specific GOP policies.

Second - and much more bothersome to me - is nicely summarized in a quote from Hannah Arendt: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” 

Not just Trump’s energized and loyal base but also the majority of the Republican Party and conservatives continue to support him, and this new and extremist version of the GOP. They are not evil people. Their support takes a variety of forms. Many simply remain loyal members of the party, maintaining a careful tactical silence. Others sane-wash the remarks of the Presidential candidate or excuse the extremist rhetoric as hyperbole not to be taken literally. Both-sides-ism is common despite widespread consensus among objective political observers that the GOP is in a league of its own in this regard. Some express concern or doubts about some of this, but defend their loyalty to and support of the Republican Party by focusing on a specific issue or two where their priorities align (gun policy, reproductive policy, regulatory policy, health autonomy).

Why is this second aspect so much more bothersome to me?  The United States can survive a bad President, the passage of bad laws, and unethical national attitudes. We have done so before as a nation, and I am confident that we can continue to do so - but ONLY IF we are able to operate from a shared set of facts and truths using broadly accepted democratic principles and cultural norms. And THAT is what the current GOP is undermining and threatening to destroy.

Anne Applebaum is a historian, Pulitzer Prize winning author, and journalist. She has degrees and credentials in history, economics, and international relations.  She has studied and written extensively about authoritarian governments, how they come to power, and how they maintain power. She draws frightening comparisons between Trump and the current GOP and various totalitarian regimes in recent history. See, for example, her October article in The Atlantic.

Mary Fulbrook is a professor of German History at the University College of London and an authority on German dictatorships. Her 2012 book A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust is a telling account of how a decent man and ordinary citizen accommodated to the Holocaust as it happened. Her most recent book, Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, is based on 250 contemporaneous primary source personal accounts of life leading up to the Holocaust. She documents a process whereby ordinary Germans (who were NOT Nazis) were initially passive observers but over time as social norms changed (the Overton window shifted), evolved through fearful consent, constrained conformity, and ultimately functional and willing complicity. Many of the behaviors she documents are clearly evident in the words and behaviors of current ‘good people’ who are loyal and active members of the Republican Party and do not see themselves as supportive of authoritarianism, or the racism and fascism increasing evident in the rhetoric and proposals of the GOP leadership.

Timothy Snyder, author (On Tyranny and On Freedom, among others), the Richard Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna, has studied and writes on authoritarian and fascist governments in Europe. He has written of the ‘resonance’ between Trump’s rhetoric and that of Hitler (stab in the back, Big Lie, poisoning the nation’s blood, vermin, animals) and in written and oral testimony to Congress, he gave examples of Marjorie Tayler Greene, JD Vance, and Donald Trump explicitly using phrasing and memes that support (and often originate from) foreign propaganda.

Georgetown Professor of History Thomas Zimmer concluded a detailed discussion of fascism in America published in October of 2024 with this:

“Trump is the fascistic leader of a rightwing coalition that unites all shades of reaction and is entirely dominated by extremism. No more plausible deniability for anyone who refuses to see the threat. Should Trump emerge victorious from the election, America will not become a fascist dictatorship on day one. That’s not how that works. And politics will not stop overnight. But the Trumpist Right will try. Conversely, the problem won’t be solved by just defeating Trump in November, just as voting him out of office in 2020 was not enough. Even as a best-case scenario, it will be a long, sustained struggle to move the country forward towards the kind of stable, truly egalitarian democracy it has never yet been. But if Trump is not defeated, things will get worse. Much worse.”

These two quotes from from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism apply frighteningly well to the current Republican Party and its right-wing allies:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” 

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” 

When I find myself a member of an organization or group that is behaving in a way that violates my core principles, I see three possible responses, depending on how I prioritize my principles when they conflict with my group loyalty and membership: 

1. Leave the group or organization, stating why.

2. Remain in the group or organization, but push back on the words and actions that violate my princples.

3. Remain in the group and attempt to ignore or rationalize the words and actions that violate my princples.

A very few are choosing #1, including Liz Cheney and recently Attorney John Wilson who resigned from DeSantis' Florida adminitration in protest when he was told to suppress speech by media outlets. A somewhat larger number are choosing #2, saying they feel Trump is dangerous or unfit and indicating that they will not vote for him - but then not responding to Trump's words and behaviors in real time.  Sadly, I see the majority of Republicans choosing the third option: remaining silent and thereby becoming complicit. I think of a quote attributed to Einstein: "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."

What would I like to see and hear?  I would like to see and hear national, state, regional and local Republican candidates and elected officials state publicly and clearly that the election was not stolen, that they do not agree with or support the lies and misinformation being spread by the GOP candidates for President and Vice President. I would like to see and hear them call out as inappropriate and unacceptable the mockery and demeaning of marginalized peoples and the threats of violence against opponents. 

In conclusion, what keeps me up at night is the fear that the Republican Party has recognized the Conservative Dilemma and have decided to abandon democracy. The know that their policies disproportionally favor the rich and powerful and the status quo where the rich and powerful hold sway, at the expense of the middle and lower classes. They know that their policies cannot win fair elections. Instead of running on their policies or developing policies that would help them win, they are attempting to acquire and maintain power by creating chaos, engendering outrage and fear, making facts and truth irrelevant, subverting democracy, and undermining our deomcratic American society. 

My nightmare is that they may very well succeed.