<i.>Eighty-eight years today, on May 2, 1933, the end for organized labor came swiftly in Nazi Germany, as the brutal paramilitary muscle of the SA (Sturmabteiling), and SS (Schutzstaffel) rampaged through the offices of the General German Trade Union Federation, or Allgemeiner Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGA).
With additional reinforcement from the Nationalist Socialist Factory Cell Organization (a sort of Nazified alternative union), SA and SS storm troopers occupied ADGA member offices and properties, seized assets and documents, and dragged its officers into the "protective custody" that many would not escape. Those who dared to fought back were simply killed, a fate that befell four union officers in Duisburg, for instance.
Ironically, ADGA had been meeting with counterparts from Christian and liberal organizations, hoping to hammer out a merger that would shore up its rapidly eroding strength and relevance against the growing power of the Nazi state. To that end, ADGA had begun distancing itself from the Nazis' chief remaining opponents, the Social Democrats. ADGA's leader, Theodor Leipart, pledged his organization's neutrality, and its 52 member unions' readiness "to put themselves in service to the new state."
The government further lulled Leipart and his fellow unionists into complacency by declaring May Day, the traditional leftist celebration of labor, as a holiday. In typical Nazi fashion, it had been celebrated with a massive rally, where Germany's newly-minted dictator, Adolf Hitler, told the 100,000 in attendance: "You will see how untrue and unjust is the statement that the revolution is directed against the German workers. On the contrary!" Germany's Fuehrer had his black humor down to a fine art.
Craven and desperate as this collaboration undoubtedly was, it didn't save ADGA from being dissolved, and the slapping of a total ban on all such organizations -- along with collective bargaining, and strikes. (Authorities briefly detained Leipart, but allowed him to return to his Berlin home, mainly due to ill health, and his wife's intervention. He lost his pension, but survived the war, dying at 79 in 1947.)
A year later, the government created its own alternative, the German Labor Front, that every worker had to join. In February 1935, came the "work book," which tracked job skills and performance. No worker could be hired without it, because bosses had to sign off on any departures from a previous job. Finally, in 1938, the Nazi state decreed it would draft citizens for compulsory labor, at whatever job it wished to assign them. Workers, like everyone and everything else in the Third Reich, had now become an asset that solely belonged to the state.
<David Horsey, LA Times:
http://www.ih8trump.org/trump-triumphant/>
<ii.>
The destruction of the unions is often cited as a classic example of Gleichschaltung, which is variously translated as "bringing into line," "coordination," or "synchronization," among other variations. One of the best summaries comes from historians Robert Michael and Karin Doerr, who label it: "Consolidation. All of the German Volk’s social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy. All opposition to be eliminated."
The legal framework for Gleichschaltung, of course, stemmed from the abrupt suspension of civil liberties on February 27, 1933, and the passage of the Enabling Act, on March 6, an all-encompassing initiative that allowed Hitler to dream up whatever laws he wished, without those pesky Reichstag parliamentarians getting in his way.
Though the notorious Reichstag fire of February 27 is widely considered the tipping point for Gleichschatung, I'd add the clunkily-titled Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service, as an equally significant benchmark. Passed on April 7, 1933, the measure allowed federal and state authorities to remove Jews and Communists from professions like law, medicine and teaching -- as well as anyone not showing sufficient enthusiasm for the new regime's desired way of thinking.
Other significant moments came with the abolition of all political entities, except the Nazi Party (July 14, 1933), and the Law Concerning the Reconstruction of the Reich (January 30, 1934), that essentially abolished the state governments, and handed their powers off to the central government, in Berlin. Six months later, Hitler consolidated his power through a series of murderous purges (The Night of the Long Knives).
In reality, the guardrails that characterize a functioning democracy were a faint memory, leaving the Fuehrer free to act as he pleased -- even if he had to tread carefully, at first, against his last remaining rival (SA leader Ernst Röhm), before unleashing the full fury of the Nazi state, as he did on June 30, 1934.
Debate persists to this day how many died with Röhm. The Nazi government only acknowledged 85 murders. The White Book of the Purge (1934), published by German emigres in Paris, claimed 401 victims, naming 116 in particular. Still other sources put the total much higher, at up to 1,000 victims.
Despite these events, several local prosecutors tried to prosecute some of the murders. The regime responded swiftly, by quashing the cases, and retroactively justifying the purges through (what else?) another wordily-titled initiative, the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defence. The whitewashing of murder as "acts of self-defence by the State" marked the final, irrevocable break from Germany's short-lived democratic experiment, the Weimar Republic (1919-33).
“It would not be impossible
to prove with sufficient repetition
and a psychological understanding
of the people concerned
that a square is in fact a circle.
They are mere words, and words can be molded
until they clothe ideas and disguise.”
<Joseph Goebbels>
<iii.>
The Republican Party is giddily and gleefully orchestrating its own version of Gleichschaltung, in the 23 state legislatures it currently controls. Like the Nazi one, it's happening in plain sight, with no attempts made to hide it. The reaction of many GOP functionaries and followers to Biden's victory last fall over Donald Trump struck me as eerily similar to the racist-tinged disbelief that greeted Obama's historic 2008 win (Jeez, it's a black guy, of all people? Now everybody will want a reparations check with their government cheese), even if many pundits and mainstream media writers seemed poised to ignore it, or brush it aside, despite what their own eyes and ears were telling them.
The ongoing rightist anger over Biden's win reflects a darker, more dangerous streak of a party, and a fanbase, that seems ready to embrace authoritarianism as the last, best hope of weaponizing its (mostly) white, fundamentalist, nationalist and nativist grievances for good. (For further reflections on how we got here, see our series, "Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow Creeps" below.)
We see that idea reflected in the dizzying array of voter suppression laws that Republicans and their allies are passing or plotting. These proposals range from allowing state legislatures to overturn Presidential election results (AZ), to allocating electoral votes by Congressional district, instead of "winner take all" systems (MI), and throwing out no-excuse absentee voting reforms that passed without fanfare only two years before (PA).
Other proposed laws, too many to enumerate here, will drastically cut back numbers and locations of ballot drop boxes, or even Election Day voting hours, curtail absentee or mail-in balloting, or impose requirements -- such as having notaries sign ballots -- that would hit particular types of voters hard, like the elderly, or people with disabilities.
Republican-led legislatures are also moving to muzzle expression they don't like. One of the more outrageous examples just happened in Florida, whose Governor, Trump stooge Ron DeSantis, has signed measures to give police sweeping powers to arrest anyone they deem riotous or disruptive, and provide immunity from civil suits to vigilantes who kill demonstrators (see link below).
You can almost hear the trigger fingers clicking in anticipation; all that's missing are the brown uniforms and right arms held in that familiar pose we know from decades of "Hogan's Heroes" reruns. As odious as this stuff all sounds, there's a wicked logic at work, too. Suppressing your perceived (read: mostly nonwhite, young) enemies' votes won't always be enough. By definition, any authoritarian equation also has to include the total suppression and criminalization of free speech rights, as Hitler and his allies demonstrated so long ago.
But the GOP Gleichschaltung project doesn't end there. In other cases, state lawmakers and election officials are openly tampering with the democratic machinery they profess to support. For example, in Michigan, where Republican Aaron Van Langeveld cast the decisive vote to certify Biden's victory -- instead of doing Trump's bidding -- has been bumped off its state canvassing board, for a loyalist who probably would have done what the Dear Leader wished.
That's before we get to the Census Bureau's recently-announced apportionment totals thatdetermine how many seats each state gets in Congress. The biggest winner is Texas, which will gain two seats, followed by one apiece for Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina.
The states getting screwed include California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, which will all lose a seat. Wow, what a shocker. You can almost visualize Republicans in the states they control, twirling their handlebar mustaches like some deranged version of Snidely Whiplash, as they chortle about how to make the latest district maps more one-sided than ever.
"Heh, heh, heh! Curses, curses, too many people voted last time! Well, this map will show them -- it'll keep them out of power for a lifetime! Let's see how they like that! Heh, heh, heh!"
<"The Paradox Of Tolerance">
“The most brilliant propagandist technique
will yield no success
unless one fundamental principle
is borne in mind constantly -
it must confine itself
to a few points
and repeat them over and over.”
<Joseph Goebbels>
<iv.>
At this point, I suspect some of you might be asking yourselves, "Well, wait a minute. What are you talking about? Trump's coup attempt didn't succeed. The system held." That point is technically true, but like most technicalities, it only holds so far. If anything, the 2020 election showed just how goofy the process is, and how fragile it is, too -- if not downright dysfunctional.
Start with the obvious. As many media wags observed, had Biden been directly elected -- instead of sweating the outcome for almost a whole week, in the Electoral College, whose representatives (or electors), cast their votes, based on which candidate wins a particular state -- the race would have ended. No blizzard of meritless lawsuits for Trump to file, and no unhinged press conferences by his acolytes, though he probably would have still sicced his mob of followers on the Capitol, anyway.
So what would have happened, had Van Langeveld buckled in Michigan, or Congress delayed certifying the Presidential election results, to name two scenarios on which Trump pinned his last, desperate hopes of staying forever in office? Any number of nightmarish scenarios would kick in, as Ryan Cooper details in his excellent overview for The Week (see below).
For example, as Cooper details, if Congress fails to certify a presidential winner in the Electoral College, the U.S. House of Representatives gets the job. Since Republicans hold a majority of House delegations in 26 states, there's nothing to stop them from gumming up or canceling enough state certifications to hand their favored candidate the Presidency.
That's because "each state delegation bizarrely only gets one vote," Cooper writes. "Wyoming's one representative will get the same sway as the 50-odd representatives in California." So what happens if the process deadlocks, which is possible in a 50-state setup? It's not clear, because there's no process to break a tie. Many states also have an even number of representatives, which only further muddles the situation, he observes.
Thus, it's not too far-fetched to imagine a scenario where the Democratic and Republican nominees show up with their respective entourages, demanding to be sworn in as President, or a rerun of the 2000 presidential election, which the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly awarded, 5-4, to George W. Bush.
Given the court's current makeup, including three Justices who owe their careers to Trump, it's not hard to guess how that outcome would pan out. This is the legal face of Gleichshaltung, as Nazi-appointed judges began to swat aside defense attorneys' increasingly desperate appeals on behalf of their clients, and the rule of law began to fade away.
Even without the Supreme Court's potential interference, it's easy to imagine Trump-appointed federal judges serving a similar role, as the ex-President's resurgent personality cult begins tearing up the Constitution to retain power indefinitely, and wields the system like a blunt instrument against its real or imagined enemies.
It's the same situation that's played out in countries like Hungary, Poland and Turkey, whose autocrats have boldly co-opted the civil service and legal systems to twist the ground rules in their favor. El Salvador joined the Autocrats' Club this weekend, by ousting its attorney general and five high court justices; no nation, however tiny, seems immune from the virus. In any event, once an authoritarian regime gains the upper hand legally, it becomes virtually impossible to root out, short of armed resistance -- a step that often involves massive bloodletting.
The other critical point is that laws and procedures only go so far in and of themselves, as Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California-Irvine, told Rolling Stone. "We narrowly averted disaster (in 2020). There's only so much the law can do. Beyond that, you’re in the realm of a potential coup or raw power politics where the law doesn’t matter.” And raw power politics, as we've learned over and over, since the 2000 presidential election, is one of the GOP's specialties.
“Every age that has historical status
is governed by aristocracies.
Aristocracy with the meaning -
the best are ruling.
Peoples do never govern themselves.
"That lunacy was concocted by liberalism.
Behind its "people's sovereignty"
the slyest cheaters are hiding,
who don't want to be recognized.”
“If the day should ever come when we must go,
if some day we are compelled to leave
the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard
that the universe will shake
and mankind will stand back
in stupefaction..”
<Joseph Goebbels>
<v.>
There's good news and bad news, as the old joke goes, about these grim facts. The good news? Well, the House has passed a major bill that would institute the most sweeping changes to our creaking system since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The bad news? Short of reforming or killing the filibuster, House Rule 1 (For The People Act) faces an uncertain future, at best, in the current 50-50 Senate.
HR 1 marked the last significant project of John Lewis, the late Georgia Congressman and civil rights action, who wrote the first 300 or so of its 791 pages. For openers, the law would enable automatic voter registration, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and roll back voter suppression techniques, like the imposition of stiffer ID requirements. These steps would spare advocates from having to play the current legal game of Whack-a-Mole in state and federal courts (as in Florida, where challenges are already underway to its anti-protest laws).
Other provisions endorse statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., rein in partisan gerrymandering, along with a series of sweeping anti-corruption measures. The most important would require the disclosure of large donors, and the creation of a small donor fund, as a financial counterweight. Candidates would also be barred from coordinating with so-called Super PACs (Political Action Committees).
It's not hard to see why Senate Republican bullies like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz have bitterly denounced HR1 as "full-bore socialism," to borrow Mitch the Mummy's preferred term. Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, has gone farther, in blasting HR 1 as "the devil incarnate." When you've carved out so many structural advantages for your psychopathic, power-hungry tribe, change is the last thing on your mind.
Yet so far, at least, there seems to be little official urgency on the Democratic side for getting HR 1 across the finish line, not least because its two most regressive faces, Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), have remained publicly unmoved by pleas to get behind the law.
Manchin undoubtedly added more stones to that soup with his latest Bizarro World pronouncement, that passing HR 1 by a simple majority of Democrats would only further erode faith in the system -- conveniently forgetting the vows to kill Vice President Mike Pence, among the many, many threats spewed by the pro-Trump insurrectionists on January 6th.
Is that how true believers in democracy act? And what exactly, do we owe them, other than the legal courtesy of not wearing an orange jump suit for X number of years, if a jury acquits them of major federal crimes? What kind of common ground could any Democrat, never mind someone like Manchin, ever work out with such people? Is there any real point to negotiating with an autocratic wannabe like Trump, who says, "Why settle for an equal share, when I just have it all?"
That's before we get to one other inconvenient truth, suggests Amanda Litman, executive director of Run For Something, which recruits candidates to run for statewide offices:
“This is really an existential crisis. It’s a five-alarm fire. But I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in for members of the United States Senate or the Democratic party writ large. If the Senate does not kill the filibuster and pass voting rights reforms … Democrats are going to lose control of the House and likely the Senate forever. You don’t put these worms back into a can. You can’t undo this quite easily,” she added.
Manchin, for his part, stubbornly continues to insist that his GOP counterparts are negotiating in good faith. He sounds like many Weimar-era politicians, who didn't grasp -- or refused to grasp -- what kind of people they were dealing with. A scan of many social media pages, websites and news articles has convinced me that the GOP's newfound authoritarian posture isn't some temporary aberration, but the shape of things to come, if we allow it.
From that posture, it's possible to draw three inferences. First, that Christianity, and the Republican Party, are America's default religion and political beliefs, respectively. No other opinions need to be considered. Second, anyone who objects to the first assumption must be suppressed, no matter what. Third, when it comes suppressing dissenting power politics, the ends always justify the means.
None of those inferences should come as news flashes, since the GOP and its allies have been saying the quiet part out loud for a long, long time. You can go to such examples as right-wing activist Paul Weyrich's infamous admission to evangelical leaders in 1980: "I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Republican leaders have allowed many, many similar utterances to slip past their double-talking lips since then.
Like it or not, the showdown is coming, up close and personal. Rubber and road are about to meet, and the resulting pileup won't look pretty. However...if we don't stand up to protect voting rights, then nothing else matters. The promise of a brighter economic future rings hollow without the equal promise of expressing yourself freely, and deciding who's best suited in carrying out your wishes.
No nation that's decoupled these promises has ever made that type of shotgun marriage stick, as a glance through history's back pages teaches us. The only constant of dictatorships is that they all get toppled. Some last longer than others, but all Gleichshaltung efforts eventually end up on the historical dust heap.
Now is not the time to let up, as I've said here before. I'll leave you with one final thought, from one of HR 1's other chief architects, Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD): “This is not a matter of ‘we can do it now or later. If we don’t do it now, there may not be a later.”
I couldn't have said it better. Is there a "later" for everyone? We'll find out soon enough. --The Reckoner
Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before One-Party Rule Kicks In):
Associated Press
Former Trump Adviser
Takes Prominent Role In Voting Battle:
Miami Herald Editorial:
Heaven Help Us If Court Upholds
Ramen Noodle Nation:
Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow Creeps (Takes I-III):
The Guardian: Why A Filibuster Showdown In The US Senate Is Unavoidable:
The Week: The Republican Plot To Steal The 2024 Election:
Yahoo News: El Salvador's Top Judges,
