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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena, in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025.
Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.
Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.
My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.
The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.
My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.
Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:
In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.
My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.
I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.
Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.
In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.
Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.
My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.
Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.
My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.
The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.
My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.
Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:
In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.
My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.
I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.
Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.
In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.
Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.
My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.
My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.
Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.
My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.
The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.
My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.
Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:
In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.
My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.
I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.
Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.
In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.
Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.
My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.