Stumbling Through History

My Favorite Wife (aka MFW, for those of you who don't follow this deeply neglected blog closely) and I spent a few weeks in Germany recently, visiting family and friends that we hadn't seen in four years, due to the complications of traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point we found ourselves in the small provincial town of Landau in der Pfalz, walking around the small market square to do a little shopping. As we walked, we came across a number of Stolpersteine. I've seen these many times in various German cities, but in light of recent political developments in my own home country (which I'll get to eventually) they made a completely different impression on me than previously.

These "stumbling stones" or "stumbling blocks" are part of a long-running project of the artist Gunter Demnig to memorialize victims of the Nazi regime that governed Germany from January 1933 to May 1945. Stolpersteine are embedded into the pavement in front of the houses in which those victims lived. You find them all over Germany and in another two dozen European countries. They tell a story that is mostly pretty grim. Back home, I felt compelled to research those stories and was able to piece together more than I had expected.

In front of the house at Marktstraße 81, we found two different stories. The Rosenblatt and Stützel families lived here.

Stolpersteine, Marktstraße 81, Landau in der Pfalz

We can see that in 1938, Nathan and Natka Rosenblatt lived in the house with their children Wolf (7), Doris (9) and Leo (13). By this point in time in the Third Reich, the Jewish Rosenblatts would have been stripped of German citizenship, severely restricted in their movements and prohibited from essentially any participation in public life. The children would have been kicked out of school. Nathan and Natka would have been fired from any job they had and prohibited from practicing any profession. If they owned a business, they would almost certainly have closed it or sold it at a heavily discounted price because the institutionalized boycott of Jewish businesses would have rendered it unviable. At the time there were even more new discrimination and harassment measures in preparation by the Nazi government, but they would not be around to experience those.

From the inscriptions on the Rosenblatt Stolpersteine we can see that they were among around 17,000 Jews deported to Poland as part of the Polenaktion in October, 1938. Its victims were arrested without warning, taken to a prison or transit camp with only whatever they happened to have on their person at the time of arrest, and then transported to the Polish border and forced across. Any who tried to cross back into Germany were shot. The Polish border guards had no idea what to do with the new arrivals; a few thousand were eventually admitted into Poland but most remained stuck first in the open and then in squalid refugee camps that arose in the no-man's land along the border. We can see that Natka ultimately ended up in Auschwitz and was killed there in May of 1942. The fate of the rest of the family is unknown; they may have died of disease or starvation early on, or later in some camp or ghetto, or were shot or gassed or worked to death wherever they eventually ended up. In any case it's safe to assume that there wasn't a happy ending for them, and the fact that only Natka shows up in records is also an indicator that the family was probably separated at some point in their final journey.

We know more about Heinrich Stützel. There's a small street in Landau named after him. Stützel wasn't Jewish, but he was a leading member of the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and an active opponent of the Nazis. After the latter came to power, Stützel, a tailor, was unable to find work. As a member of a small resistance group that distributed prohibited newspapers and pamphlets smuggled into Germany from nearby France, he was subjected to multiple house searches and police interrogations. Eventually arrested in May, 1935, he was imprisoned for his activities until early 1937 on a charge of "preparation to commit high treason". Following his release, he would be arrested and jailed again numerous times. One of his sons later recalled how whenever his father was in jail, the authorities would regularly appear in the middle of the night to conduct searches of the family home.

In early 1945 Stützel found himself in a holding camp from which he was to be deported, but before that could happen, the camp was liberated by the advancing Americans. The French occupation authorities overseeing Landau after the German surrender on May 8, 1945 would eventually, in an act of poetic justice, appoint him to lead the local security police, in charge of internment camps that held former Nazi officials as part of the postwar "denazification" progress. He died in 1951.

Down the street, at Marktstraße 48, we saw the house in which the siblings Friedrich ("Fritz") and Luise Schwarz resided. Friedrich ran a drapery business on the ground floor of the house and was married to a Catholic woman; their two children were baptized. Luise lived in a separate apartment above the store. From the inscription on their Stolpersteine we can see that the two of them met very different fates.

Stolpersteine, Marktstraße 48, Landau in der Pfalz

But first, some historical background. One of the many families caught up in the aforementioned Polenaktion was that of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who at the time was living in Paris illegally, one step ahead of the police who were trying to find and deport him. Incensed upon learning of his parents' desperate situation, he bought a revolver and walked into the German embassy on the morning of November 7, 1938, claiming to have important information to share with the German ambassador. The ambassador wasn't available, so he was sent to the office of a junior official named Ernst vom Rath. He drew his gun and fired five shots into vom Rath, who died on November 9. 

The death of vom Rath was the trigger for the Kristallnacht, a country-wide riot led by the SA (Brownshirts) and Hitler Youth, in which thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were ransacked and looted. There followed, over the next few days, mass arrests of around 30,000 Jewish men. From his Stolperstein we can see that Friedrich was one of them, sent into so-called "protective custody" in the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where they were subjected to beatings, psychological terror and general maltreatment. The arrests had taken place on orders of SS Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Reinhard Heydrich, who was tasked by Hitler with forcing Jews out of Germany; the arrests and subsequent detention were meant as an incentive to leave the country. Curiously, his orders included instructions not to mistreat the arrestees, but here we see the difference between theory and practice.

Most of those arrested were released within a few months, as was Friedrich, who returned to his family in Landau. His mixed marriage afforded him a modicum of protection from deportation, although he was still subject to all kinds of restrictions and persecution. A loyal Nazi party member was moved into the house to keep an eye on things (apparently a common practice, as something similar happened to the—devoutly Catholic—household of MFW'S grandmother). He was later moved to a different house in Landau together with his sister Luise, his daughter Ann and others as part of a common Nazi practice of concentrating all the Jews in one place for better control. His luck (if you can call it that) eventually ran out when he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in about March of 1945. It appears that he managed to escape the ghetto during the chaos of the final days of the war and began to make his way home, but died of pneumonia along the way.

Luise's path was a different one. She was swept up in the "Wagner-Bürckel-Aktion" in late October, 1940. During that two-day action, 6,504 Jews living in the Baden and Palatinate regions were given surprise orders to be ready to travel in two hours or less. They were driven in buses to waiting trains, for a journey of around three and a half days to the Gurs internment camp at the foot of the French Pyrenees. As with the Polenaktion, they were permitted to take little or nothing with them, and anything of value they left behind was confiscated by the government. Friedrich's mixed marriage protected him and Ann from being forced out, but Luise had no such status.

Gurs, by all accounts, was a squalid hellhole in which starvation, disease and death were rampant, but it wasn't particularly well guarded. In March of 1942, half a year before transports of the Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz began, Luise managed to escape with twenty other female prisoners, who made their way across southern France to the Swiss border. Of that group, it appears that only Luise was permitted to cross the border by the border guards, who took pity on her because she was so ill at the time. She remained in Switzerland as a refugee until March of 1951, when she returned to Landau. She died there in 1966.

Our final stop is Xylanderstraße 6, where Emil and Annette Fried lived with their daughter Marianne. Emil Fried, together with his brothers Sigmund and Theodor, owned and operated several cigar factories, processing the tobacco that was a major cash crop in the region around Landau, as well as importing tobacco from around the world. Their products were mostly sold through dealers in the eastern part of the country. The house at Xylanderstraße 6 was the firm's head office.

Stolpersteine, Xylanderstraße 6, Landau in der Pfalz

Recognizing the writing on the wall, the brothers started looking for a buyer for the firm in January 1938. By July they had found one, but the sale was prohibited by a local Nazi official who had other ideas as to who should acquire the firm. Emil, who was the one authorized to sign off on the sale, was arrested on Nov. 10, 1938, in the Kristallnacht aftermath. On November 11, shortly before he was taken away to Dachau, he was forced to sign a contract of sale to the official's preferred buyer. The determination of the final sale price would drag on until July of 1940. The proceeds of the sale paid out to the Fried brothers were based on a very buyer-friendly appraisal of the firm's value, from which multiple charges were additionally deducted, including the Judenvermögensabgaben (Jewish capital levy) that was alone 20% of the sale price.

[According to family lore, the same kind of fate befell a distant relative of my own. As co-owner of a shoe factory in Berlin, so the story goes, he sold his share to his non-Jewish business partner and fled to America while that was still possible. I've long wondered, did he get a decent price, or did his partner pay him pennies on the dollar (or Pfennige on the Reichsmark), as was generally the case with "aryanized" businesses? How much of whatever he got was he able to take with him, and how much was confiscated in the form of the "Reichsfluchtsteuer" (Reich flight tax) levied on those fleeing Germany?]

Emil would not have had much opportunity to make use of his share of the sale proceeds. After his release from Dachau in December of 1938, he and Anna had moved to Baden-Baden, from where they too were deported to Gurs as part of the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion a few months after the sale closed. Sometime in July or August of 1943 they were released from Gurs, temporarily finding refuge in Nice, France, but were arrested in September 1943 and a few weeks later sent to die in Auschwitz.

"Sent to die" sounds ugly enough, but nevertheless glosses over the brutal horror of their final days, so let's consider what that actually meant. At the Drancy internment camp near Paris that served as a collection point for Jews being deported eastward, Emil and Anna would have been crammed with 80 to 100 other prisoners into a cattle car, too tightly to even sit down, with no windows, no food, no water, no heat, no toilet. They would have endured a multi-day journey in these conditions across France, Belgium, Germany and occupied eastern Poland.

Upon arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, assuming they were among those who survived the journey, and assuming they were not shot or clubbed to death on the spot for failing to immediately follow a guard's orders, they would have been forced onto the selection ramp and separated, Emil with those men and older boys who were deemed unfit to work, Anna with the women and all other children. They would have then been marched by SS men to the gas chambers (or loaded on trucks and driven if they were too infirm to walk), forced to disrobe and then herded inside. With the doors bolted shut, guards would have poured in a load of hydrogen cyanide-based insecticidal fumigant pellets through vents in the ceiling. All of the occupants would have been dead within the space of ten or so minutes.

Their daughter Marianne had moved with them to Baden-Baden, then to Berlin, and then in mid-1940 back to Baden-Baden. In September of 1940, five or six weeks before the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion, which she threby escaped, she relocated to Neu Isenburg, near Frankfurt/Main. She was trained as an Erzieherin, or childcare specialist, and appears to have practiced that profession in the Heim Isenburg Jewish orphanage. Her last known address is in Frankfurt, from which she was deported to, and killed at, the Sobibor extermination camp in June of 1942. 

So why am I telling you all this unpleasant stuff? Two reasons.

The first reason is a simple one. I just want to remind myself, and you, that all of these names are more than just words etched into the sidewalk (although it is remarkable enough that they have been memorialized in this way). These were people who were just living their lives, and surely wanted to go on doing that, but instead were subjected to an organized system of persecution and brutal violence that would cost most of them their lives, simply because they belonged to the wrong group (or in one case, the wrong political party). Four generations after the end of the Third Reich, those events seem distant and abstract. I think their stories, or as much of them as I can piece together, are worth remembering. These were living, breathing human beings and not just footnotes to history.

The second reason, as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, has to do with current events in my own home country. But first, back to Germany, now in the postwar period.

Directly after the end of the war, the prevailing attitude was to avoid talking about the crimes of the preceding twelve years and instead focus on rebuilding. In the Soviet occupation zone, which would become communist East Germany, that attitude was state policy. The official line was something like, "we are communists, and the Nazis persecuted communists, so we were also victims"—and thereby absolved from any need to consider what went on under the previous regime.

In the West, under a pluralistic and democratic society (imposed by the Western allies), the postwar generation coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s—MFW'S generation—demanded an actual reckoning. They viewed the horrifying legacy that had been handed to them with shame and outrage and wanted to know exactly what their parents and grandparents and everyone else did during those twelve years. Were they active Nazis? Did they have blood on their hands, and whose? Were they Schreibtischtäter, "desk murderers" who kept the trains to the East running and the war machine supplied without ever getting their own hands dirty? Did they actively or passively resist? Were they just trying to keep their heads down, hoping they would somehow come out the other end alive?

The broadcast of the American miniseries "Holocaust" in 1979 created a much wider discussion in (West) German society. The public reckoning continued with widely and intensively discussed events such as the traveling exhibition "War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" or the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, both of which dealt with—and exploded—different aspects of the myth that the crimes of the Nazi era were purely the work of a relatively small segment of German society.

There are certainly voices, mainly on the right-wing fringe, who say that it's time to stop talking about this and move on, or that it's all exaggerated, or that none of it really happened, etc. But those voices remain a distinct minority (though a larger one in the East than in the West), tend to be shouted down or just ignored, and do not have the power to turn those beliefs into broad public policy. It of course remains to be seen whether that will be the case ten or twenty or thirty years hence, but that's the way it is now and the way it's been for the past several decades.

The history and the crimes committed by the Nazis—and ordinary Germans—are standard topics in German schools in the post-reunification East and West. Teaching about the war and the Holocaust generally begins somewhere between sixth and eighth grade. The treatment of these topics is not simply one unit that takes up a few weeks in history class, but rather is handled in a fairly comprehensive way across the curriculum in an age-appropriate way for each class level. History classes do of course look fairly extensively at the events of the period and the conditions that led up to them, but the curriculum weaves these topics into other subjects as well. For instance, a high school-level German class might read and analyze post-war novels written about the period by famous authors like Günter Grass or Heinrich Böll, or analyze the rhetoric of speeches by Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels. An art class might look at the Nazis' obsession with purging society of what they called entartete Kunst, (degenerate art). 

The depth and breadth with which the topic is treated varies from state to state and school to school, but in general, it's a very frank portrayal of a framework of discrimination and persecution that evolved into a system of organized murder on an industrial scale, within the wider context of a militaristic, totalitarian state that waged an unprovoked war of conquest that killed tens of millions of people and ultimately led to the near-total destruction of the country itself. Classroom learning is frequently supplemented with trips to monuments and concentration camps, to witness the scene of the crime, as it were. There are connections to a difficult past made at a more local level. For example, there are actually two Stolpersteine in Landau that invoke the memory of Marianne Fried. One is the one I told you about above; the other is one of 25 that memorialize the fates of the Jewish students of her former school, a project of tenth-grade students of the school itself.

The message of all of this can be boiled down to this: This is an actual thing that happened in your country, right here in your town, even right here in your school. It was an unspeakably terrible thing that our people collectively—many actively, many others just by looking away when they saw what was happening—did to other human beings, starting with fellow citizens and members of our community. You are not responsible for this thing that happened long before you were born. You are responsible for knowing what happened and what conditions led up to it, and helping to ensure that it can never happen again.

The extent to which that message resonates with the target audience is of course inevitably going to be mixed. What matters—in my mind, anyway—is that this is the officially sanctioned and mandated message. The topic is handled head-on, with a very clear emphasis that this definitely happened and was unequivocally malevolent, no ifs, ands or buts. There is no tolerance for arguments that this is going to make young Germans "uncomfortable" or that it will be "divisive" or other such drivel. There is no state government requiring schools to teach that there was some silver lining, the way that Florida's 2023 state academic standards for social studies prescribe that "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." There are no discussions of "positive aspects", or arguments that those were different times with different rules, or that maybe there were at least some plausible justifications, or that the victims could have done more to avoid their fate, or that bad things happened in other places too and that maybe makes what we did somehow not so bad, relatively speaking. There is no tolerance for assertions that the facts of history are exaggerations or just never happened, or that there was somehow another side to the story that deserves consideration. On the contrary, Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.

I contrast that with how Americans deal with the nasty stuff in our own history. Or, really, don't deal with it. Many, if not most Americans, have at best a vague awareness of these things. We don't talk much about how the original inhabitants of the land were systematically driven off their land, forced to give up their culture, and murdered in large numbers. We, or at least those of us who are not descended from its victims, talk about slavery as a thing that happened a long time ago and was, umm, sort of bad, but we don't really know all that much about it and it's over now anyway and so we certainly don't dwell on it; we don't talk about the physical and mental violence and the general brutality of how slaves were treated. We don't learn about the physical violence of lynching of Blacks in the post-slavery era, or the economic violence of redlining in the north and west. We don't discuss the forced relocation of over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II. Some of us read The Diary of Anne Frank in school, but few of us learn about the undercurrent of antisemitism that created deliberate bureaucratic hurdles that thwarted her father's attempts to find refuge for his family in the U.S. Yes, the information is there if one chooses to go look for it, but seldom if ever is one ever directly confronted with it.

A fairly substantial segment of the population wants to keep it that way and is actively resisting efforts to change that. A considerable number of state legislatures has banned, or is considering a ban on, the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Not that this kind of teaching is actually happening, mind you; critical race theory (CRT) is an academic social theory that is a topic of study in colleges, not kindergartens. What the proponents of these laws really mean is simply that they just don't want the ugly parts of American history to be taught. "CRT" is just their shorthand for any teaching that would confront students with the unpleasant reality of their country's history of slavery and institutionalized racism, and the aftereffects that continue to reverberate decades after the more overt elements were officially abolished.

Another word the same people have taken up a crusade against: "woke". To me, this word simply means acknowledging the historically structural nature of racism in American society and recognizing that the non-white population still faces both subtle discrimination and not-so-subtle maltreatment by state institutions. Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has built a whole identity around this. Other Republicans are attacking the U.S. military for its supposed promotion of "woke" culture. The message is that we must not only not talk about these things, we must wage a war to keep anyone else from talking about these things.

The claim is that doing so is "divisive". That it makes white people feel "discomfort" to learn about the dark side of their history or to contemplate the possibility that racism has structural elements that are built into American institutions. That is why these topics must be avoided at all cost. This, I note, is coming from people who will waste no time in decrying those on the opposite end of the political spectrum as whiny snowflakes who constantly complain that their feelings have been hurt.

But what is the point of this? Are we collectively so morally feeble that we can't handle anything that might cast in a different light the image of The Greatest Country On Earth that we are spoon-fed from our earliest days? Is it just the backlash for the recognition that the country will inevitably continue to become less white? Is it a material concern about being asked to pony up for reparations of some kind? All of the above, I would guess.

Simple ignorance of history might be excusable, but an active political program of a major party and its adherents to deny history, to whitewash it, to hide it, to erase it? The contrast with how the Germans have diligently, even if imperfectly, struggled to come to terms with their own past, something I was once again reminded of as I looked at those names inscribed in the sidewalks of a small town, could not be more profound.

The Price of Freedom

Wayne Lapierre, speaking at CPAC, said this today:

“The elites don’t care not one whit about America’s school system and school children... Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”

We've seen this film over and over: the spectacular act of violence, the shock, the grief, the calls for something to be done, the shouting down of those who make those calls, the petering out of the discussion as other important topics grab the headlines and so on, until the next mass shooting. The thoughts and prayers offered by hypocritical, NRA-funded politicians, followed by the NRA's own assertions about how we need more, not fewer guns.

Follow the Money

It's hardly an earth-shattering discovery to observe that in the modern, industrialized countries that we consider to be our peers among nations, they strictly control access to firearms and they also have low rates of gun violence, whereas in the US, we have significantly looser controls on firearm access (and vast numbers in circulation) and substantially higher rates of gun violence. Even within the US, states like Massachusetts that put strong restrictions on gun ownership have measurably lower rates of gun violence than those that don't. It's a simple, consistent and obvious correlation that gun rights advocates stubbornly refuse to concede. 

Instead, gun rights advocates love to admonish those of us who don't see it their way for "blaming the gun". Don't blame the gun, they say, blame the guy who pulled the trigger. Well, guess what? I do blame that guy. But I also blame the people making that argument for insisting on perpetuating the policies (or lack thereof) that made it possible for that guy to have that deadly tool. And I don't want to hear that if you take away that guy's gun, he'll use a knife or a club or a bottle of acid or whatever to wreak as much havoc as he can. That's just an assertion with no empirical evidence to support it that also ignores the special place guns have in our national mythology and our ideas of masculinity.

Lately the fashionable variant of the "don't blame the gun" argument is a claim that the best solution to the problem of gun violence is to improve treatment for mental health problems and keep guns away from people who have those problems. Well OK, who wouldn't want to do those things? By and large, I think it's the same people who are making that argument, because they seem to be the ones who always vote for the party whose political agenda includes cutting funding for mental health care.

Apart from that, how are we going to identify these people who are too mentally ill to possess a firearm? Are we going to subject everyone who wants to own a gun to a battery of cognitive tests, and are we going to re-test them periodically to ensure that they have not developed problems that weren't apparent the first time? Or are we going to just ask them to self-identify, knowing full well that people with mental illness generally don't recognize that they have it? It all sounds good on paper, but ultimately it's just an attempt to change the subject without addressing the fundamental problem.

I've argued these and other points with gun rights advocates. I've pointed out that I myself grew up around reasonable and responsible gun owners, and really like shooting them myself, but have long since concluded that I don't need one and don't think most other people do either. It always comes down to the same point: more guns, more gun violence. Fewer guns, less gun violence. And then they pull out the Second Amendment and beat me over the head with it. As Americans, they say, we have the right to own guns, and there should be few if any restrictions on that right. Take away my gun, you take away my freedom. It says so right here in the Constitution.

So, freedom is a room full of small children and their teachers ripped to shreds. Freedom is a concert in which dozens are killed and hundreds are wounded. Freedom is twenty-odd dead churchgoers or seventeen dead high school students. But freedom is also the steady stream of a person here or a few there killed or maimed by a guy with a gun in incidents not spectacular enough to make the national headlines, but no less terrible for the victims and their loved ones. You may not like it when your child, your spouse, your parent, your friend or other loved one, or maybe you yourself end up dead or maimed by a guy with a gun, but hey, that's just the price of freedom.

Goodbye Mitt

Donald Trump today confirmed his pick of Rex Tillerson to be his nominee for Secretary of State. I can hardly rejoice about that choice but I can find one small consolation in it. Namely: I think we're done with Mitt Romney.

Romney was governor of my adopted state of Massachusetts 2003-2007. One of the votes he got was mine. I rarely vote for a Republican for any office (although I'm not sure whether a Massachusetts Republican even counts as a "real" Republican) but in my view at the time he was the most qualified candidate running. This was coming off the 2002 Winter Olympics, which I felt he had managed pretty competently, whereas his Democratic opponent just seemed to focus on criticism of Romney as a person, with comparatively little to say about her own policy proposals.

My problem with Romney began about midway through his term as governor, when he seemingly lost interest in being governor and wanted to be president instead. Apart from spending more time out of the state campaigning than in the state governing, he also started to transform himself—outwardly, at least—into a "real" Republican, apparently having concluded that being a Massachusetts Republican was more of a liability than anything else. Mitt's peculiar transformation would continue as he traveled the road to being nominated as the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. The most irritating, yet somehow unsurprising, aspect of that for me was how he portrayed the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as "an unconscionable abuse of power" and called for it to be repealed, because while the latter may not be identical with Romney's own signature achievement as governor, the Massachusetts state health care reform, it's pretty hard to treat them as being somehow fundamentally different with respect to their core principles; unless, of course, you don't mind being a disingenuous hypocrite.

Clearly Romney doesn't mind. It was surprising—or not?—when Romney came out and so vehemently attacked Trump during the presidential campaign, summing up thusly:

"Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

"His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill."

Let's recall that back in 2012, after Trump endorsed Romney, Romney praised Trump for his "extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works and to create jobs". And of course now that Trump has won and was dangling the Secretary of State job before Mitt's eyes, Mitt now wanted us to know that "[W]hat I've seen through these discussions I've had with President-elect Trump, as well as what we've seen in his speech the night of his victory, as well as the people he's selected as part of his transition, all of those things combined give me increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future".

So who's the sucker now?

I wondered as I watched this whole thing play out whether it was just a clever trap set by Trump and his team, baited with Romney's own opportunism and vanity. Whether it was really part of some Machiavellian plan or just lucky (for Trump) happenstance, Romney is now in a pretty poor position to criticize anything Trump or his team say or do in the next four years, and looking at how his whole transition process has been, there will be no shortage of things to criticize (to put it mildly). It's hard for me to see why anyone would take anything the man has to say seriously at this point, and although stranger things have happened in American politics, I suspect that Romney's political career is over. Goodbye, Mitt. I won't miss you.

Coming to Terms with the Aftermath

It's been nearly two weeks since the Nov. 8 election as I write this. The liberal bubble that is my Facebook newsfeed was a landscape of despair for the first several days after the election, but that has since given way to seething anger and outrage. Needless to say (for the two or three of you who read my occasional scribblings here), the election didn't end the way I wanted or expected it to. I genuinely believed (and still do) that Clinton was the most qualified of the entire field of candidates, Democrat or Republican, but I was also conscious of the baggage she brought along for the trip, some of it real, much of it fictional. One might have thought that a substantial plurality of the electorate would have considered those failures, real and imagined, to pale in comparison to Trump's manifest lack of fitness for the presidency (in case you've forgotten, a quick look at James Fallows's Trump Time Capsule series should refresh your memory); one would have been wrong.

So here we are. We had an election and Trump won. As I write this, the latest counts show that Clinton won nearly two million more popular votes, but the Electoral College result—sadly—is what counts. Like it or not, that's the system we have and we all knew the rules going in. I don't think you can excoriate Trump before the election for saying he'll only accept the results if he wins and then say after the election that the Electoral College result is not legitimate because you don't like how the Electoral College is going to vote. I personally think that institution is an obsolete anachronism and would like to see it eliminated. That would take a constitutional amendment, which is a complicated process, but I'm holding out some hope that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will render an amendment unnecessary in time for the 2020 election. 

Now candidate Trump is president-elect Trump; I wince every time I hear that term. In the first few days after the election he made kind of a sobered impression. To some he was looking presidential and statesman-like; to me he just looked like the dog who finally caught the car he was chasing and now has no clue what happens next. Since then he's gone to the White House for a little "Presidency 101" from Obama, for whom it must have been a profoundly bitter experience, the professor preparing to hand over the keys to the carnival barker.

I have mixed feelings about the protests that have followed the election. I won't hesitate to condemn the violence that occurred around protests in Portland, OR; it's morally unacceptable, but also just tactically stupid. As for the peaceful protests elsewhere, those people are exercising their first amendment rights, and I understand the anger, but the fact that they are essentially protesting against the result of a free election makes me uncomfortable at some level. I tend to apply the "if the shoe were on the other foot" standard—if those were Trump supporters protesting a Clinton victory, wouldn't we be sounding warnings about "Trump's brownshirts" and worse to come? At the same time I recognize that we are facing something unprecedented here, a genuine moral crisis, which makes it harder for me to say people shouldn't be out in the streets making their feelings known, as long as they can do it in a peaceful manner. I see the value in reminding Trump and his pals that while they won the election, they did not win a popular mandate for their plans.

Ambivalence about protests at this early stage not withstanding, I accept the election results as the legitimate outcome of the system we have, stupid though it may be, but not the "now all Americans must come together behind our new president" crap I've heard from some quarters. In his acceptance speech Trump said "I will be president for all Americans". Technically that's of course true, but Trump spent the entire presidential campaign demonstrating that in practice he intends to be anything but. If he wants my support he can earn it; the last eight years of Republican obstructionism have taught me that I'm under no obligations here. The role he awarded to Steve Bannon, as one of his very first official appointments, speaks for itself as far as any claim of being "president for all Americans" goes. His appointments of Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are equally indicative of where this is going.

At least part of his constituency thinks it knows where it's going: back to a time when the white man ruled and everyone else knew his place. The rise in incidents of open racism following Trump's victory, many of which cite his name in one form or another, is well documented, as here or here. Trump has issued a sort of weak, half-hearted directive to his followers to "stop it", but only after he was prompted on national television, and he hasn't publicly said a word since then on the topic, even though racist incidents citing his name continue unabated. In Bannon, he's very publicly elevated to his inner circle a man who is intimately associated with the so-called "alt-right", so how can anyone take his "stop it" as anything other than an obvious ploy to establish plausible deniability? So many Trump voters deny racist inclinations and claim to be insulted to be associated with the bigotry of a few, but they've heard their candidate speak and they knew exactly who and what they were choosing when they cast their votes. If you voted for this man, you are a knowing accomplice in whatever comes next. Oh yes, I know, you were just following orders.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Monday-morning (or Wednesday morning, I guess) quarterbacks have been dissecting the election results ever since the election, amidst general finger-pointing on the Democratic side. Hardcore Sanders supporters have assured me that he would have beaten Trump if he had gotten the nomination, but let's not kid ourselves. If Sanders had been the candidate of the Democrats, all we would have heard after the convention is how he's a self-proclaimed socialist, "just like Stalin or Mao or Castro", and how he's going to take away our property and nationalize private enterprises and force us all onto collective farms and set up gulags and reeducation camps and other such nonsense. Trump would have dubbed Sanders "commie Bernie" and the same people who lapped up his "crooked Hillary" line still would have voted Trump into office.

The consensus diagnosis that has now developed goes something like this: The Democratic Party used to be the party of the working man. Then it decided to focus more on college-educated professionals as its core constituency and embraced globalization as an organizing principle for society. In the meantime, white working-class men have seen their economic and social status consistently eroded, and Democrats have done nothing to help them, preferring instead to belittle them as a bunch of stupid hicks. After eight years of Obama, things haven't gotten any better for them, they're angry as hell about it and so, looking for a radical change and also just to make a point, they've voted en masse for Trump and elevated him to the presidency.

I have no doubt that this analysis explains a lot, but it's hardly the whole story, as exit poll results (reported here, among other places) show. Yes, Trump did better among whites of all ages. But he also did better than Clinton in the upper income groups, among white college-educated voters, and in the suburbs. Downwardly mobile working-class whites may be a core Trump constituency, but they clearly have no shortage of allies among what are considered to be the better-off white elites. Demagogues always have friends in high places who are looking for a way to harness and exploit the anger of the masses for their own ends.

I took out my ancient pocket calculator and tried to dig into some of the exit poll numbers a little further. A few things I noted (apologies for all the calculations that follow, I just think I should show my work before I state my conclusions):

• The most up-to-date numbers I could find on the vote (here, as of 11/17/16—may have changed by the time you read this) indicate these results in the popular vote. These are the numbers I used for the following extrapolations: 
• Trump: 61,864,015
• Clinton: 63,541,056
• Other: 7,034,595
• Total: 132,439,666.
• Of the 24,537 respondents polled, 33% said that only Trump is qualified to be president, 46% said only Clinton is, 14% said neither is. Of the last two groups, 2% and 69%, respectively, were Trump voters. Extrapolating to the total vote count of 132.4 million voters noted above, that means that (.02 x .46) + (.69 x .14) = 10.6%, or around 14 million people, voted for Trump even though they do not consider him qualified to be president.
• Asked whether Trump has the temperament to be president, 63% said no, and 20% of those respondents were Trump voters. So .20 x .63 = 12.6% of voters, or around 16.7 million, voted for Trump but don't think he has the temperament to be president.
• 39% of all respondents said that the candidate quality that mattered most was "can bring change"; this was mostly driven by Trump voters (83% of the 39%). 21% said the most important quality was "right experience", 20% said "good judgment"; these choices were mainly driven by Clinton voters (90% and 66%, respectively).

So after all that fiddling with numbers, my brilliant conclusion is that statistically speaking, Trump voters mainly just want a change, but a substantial contingent of them don't give a damn about the qualifications or temperament of the guy they've selected to bring it. That pretty much aligns with the anecdotal evidence from multiple TV, radio or print interviews of prospective Trump voters I saw/heard/read in the weeks leading up to the election, in which this or that person expressed reservations about Trump's readiness for the presidency while at the same time pledging to vote for him nonetheless. Now there's a recipe for success (not).

Trump's voters are going to get changes, but I have no doubt that those changes are not going to make many of those Trump voters happy, especially that core constituency of working-class white men. Let's ignore for a moment (but only for a moment) things like Trump's pick of Jeff Sessions to be AG, and the impact that's going to have on civil rights actions by the DOJ, since the people who will be affected were very probably not Trump voters.

Let's focus instead on things like his tax "reform" plan, which economists think will add trillions to the national debt while benefiting almost exclusively taxpayers with very high incomes. Let's consider Trump's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which is likely to leave millions of formerly uninsured people once again uninsured. Let's think about how much the cost of living will rise for low-income people who depend on all those Chinese imports at Walmart and elsewhere if Trump really slaps a tariff on them. Let's look at the loss of millions of export-related jobs that could occur from a Trump-incited trade war (and are not going to be replaced by an equal or larger number of new jobs mining coal and making steel). Let's ask how those who voted the whole Republican crew into office are possibly going to come out ahead if Trump signs off on Paul Ryan's plans to "reform" Medicare and Social Security.

We should also consider the less direct impact on Trump's core supporters (and all the rest of us too). There's the environmental impact to be expected from Trump's plan to withdraw from global climate deals and destroy the EPA from within—soon we can all be living in Flint. There is the infrastructure program that I think is actually a good idea but which I also think, based on statements from Trump's guy Bannon, will be so uncoordinated and poorly thought out that it—assuming the Republican Congress will even vote for it—will probably waste a massive amount of money without delivering any real long-term benefit (and, I bet, will probably see a lot of that money siphoned off into dubious channels).

Even more generally, there are the already-apparent massive conflicts of interest that I think will make this the most scandal-plagued administration since Harding was president. And then there's the infighting within Trump's transition team that I believe is just a preview of what we will see once the Trump administration is sworn in and which will keep it more preoccupied with itself than with the good of the country.

In short, I hardly think we have grounds for optimism with a Trump administration, and I think the people who are going to get screwed over the most are the people he convinced to vote for him for the sake of "change". They have not merely cut off their metaphorical nose, they have ripped their whole head off—and mine, and my family's, and all of my friends'—to spite their face. Let none of these people complain to me a year from now that they've been negatively affected by this or that Trump administration action, because that will be a very short conversation, possibly involving a lot of yelling.

My heart tells me I should now be pushing my own solidly Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation and all of the rest of the Democrats to fight every stupid policy the Trump White House and it's allies in the Republican-controlled Congress may cook up in any and every way possible. I should be donating to the ACLU and other such organizations. I should be out on the street demonstrating against every anti-progressive policy this administration will try to implement.

But there's also a little voice in my head that says that maybe what needs to happen here is for Trump & co. to get everything they want; let Democrats put up token, symbolic resistance but otherwise step aside and let the country have this foolish populist experiment and see it end in the disaster that I expect. It has been popular leading up to the election to draw parallels with pre-Hitler Germany. Maybe it's time to look ahead to some parallels with post-Hitler Germany, whose citizens drew certain conclusions from the self-inflicted smoking ruins of their own country and of the countries all around them, owned up to (and 70 years later continue to seek atonement for) their country's heinous crimes, and established a prosperous and relatively egalitarian society that undeniably has its problems and shortcomings, but in which even an arch-conservative leader like Merkel is perceived by many in our own country to be one of the world's remaining champions of human rights and democratic institutions.

I hate to end on a dark and cynical note, but maybe it's going to take letting the likes of Trump and Ryan and their pals fuck up the country so badly that the "government is the problem" rhetoric that has been the Republican mantra since Reagan, the stupid idea that the best way to help average people is to award the wealthiest among us an ever-larger slice of the pie, and the ridiculous notion that the best way to make the country work right is to choose an inexperienced outsider to lead it, can be thoroughly and definitively discredited. Maybe, just maybe, we can all learn something and then pick up the pieces and agree to do something a little more constructive. I don't know that that's what I truly want, because of all of the people who will be made to suffer through no fault of their own. But with a vain, ignorant and amoral man like Trump elected to the highest office in the land with the approval of nearly half of all voters, I have to wonder if the only way we're going to get out of our national addiction to stupid and short-sighted policy prescriptions is to finally hit rock bottom hard enough that we're ready to swear off the drug for good.

Home to Roost

You know, I warned those Republicans. Back in December of 2015, after Donald Trump had insisted that we must ban Muslims from entering the country, I urged the the Republican National Committee to disqualify him from running for the nomination of their party because he had promulgated views that were entirely incompatible with American values. I have no idea why they didn't listen to me. I could have saved them a lot of trouble.

Following Romney's defeat by Obama in 2012, the Republicans performed a so-called "autopsy" (officially known as the "Growth and Opportunity Project") of the election results. Among the key recommendations was that the GOP should work to make itself more attractive to ethnic minorities and women. Hah!

What's happened instead? The party has embraced a presidential candidate who has gone out of his way to insult and marginalize Muslims and Hispanics. He has made statements about the African-American community that came across to that very same audience as condescending and clueless. And now, with the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, we can conclude that Trump's idea of outreach to women is pretty much limited to reaching out to them to grab them by their, um, lady parts.

See? I'm reaching out to women.

It didn't have to be this way. The Republican leadership could have stood up at the beginning of this sordid affair and said no way will this guy represent our party. Let him open up a third-party challenge, let him siphon off Republican votes, we don't care, there is no f-ing way that we will let this guy be the face of our party, and if he runs as an independent and takes away enough votes to cost us the election, at least afterward we are going to stand before the voters of this country with our dignity and integrity intact.

But they didn't do that. With a few notable exceptions such as Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, who opposed him from the start, eventually all of the GOP's heavyweights fell in line and endorsed him. Reince Priebus, who even hinted that any Republican not endorsing Trump was in for trouble with the party. John McCain. Mitch McConnell. Paul Ryan. Marco Rubio. Even Ted Cruz, fer crissakes. And many, many others. No matter what offensive statements Trump may have made about whole groups of people, no matter what insults and abuse Trump may have hurled at them personally, no matter what they themselves may have said about Trump's manifest unfitness for the presidency, in the end they all got in line to kiss his orange butt. Most if not all are experiencing some serious buyer's remorse now, but it changes nothing about how ready all of them were to hitch their wagons to an odious, demagogic huckster against their own better judgment.

Hey guys, why the long faces?

Last week I listened to an episode of On Point, an NPR program produced here locally and syndicated nationally. The topic was the Weimar Republic, Hitler's rise to power, and parallels (or the lack thereof) between that historical period and the one through which we are living now, occasioned by the recent release of the book Hitler: Ascent by Volker Ullrich. One of the guests, the historian Eric Weitz, was asked by host Tom Ashbrook about what commonalities there may be between the rise of Trump and the rise of Hitler. Weitz answered that there is really only one: the courting of both by conservative elites who thought they would somehow harness Hitler or Trump, respectively, for their own ends, in the process lending each an aura of legitimacy and respectability that neither previously had.

Well, better late than never, I guess. Now that Trump's campaign is turning into a kind of slow-motion train wreck, these opportunistic fools, these disgusting Mitläufer, are tripping over each other to reach the exits as the whole affair blows up in their smirking faces. It is with a fair amount of satisfaction that I observe the corner into which many of them have painted themselves, fearing punishment from mainstream constituents on election day if they continue to support Trump, but facing the wrath of Trump's supporters at the ballot box for withdrawing that support. These guys aren't a bunch of uneducated hicks who fell for Trump's populist snake oil; they knew exactly what they were doing and why. They created this monster and now that it's turned on them, all I can say is: Good.