Why Trump’s Family-Separation Policy Failed

As the previous post noted, evil persists (i) when leaders and their supporters lack empathy for other humans regardless of their race or creed, (ii) a majority of the population is willing to rely on the so-called Nuremberg defense to shirk responsibility for their own actions or more on point, their failure to act.  The reversal of Der Trumpenführer's family separation policy demonstrates that while Trump, Pence, Sessions, Kirstjen Nielsen, Congressional Republicans, some 55% of Republicans, and many "Christian family values" groups have reached a moral depravity akin to that of Hitler's Germany, the majority of Americans - at least so far - have not thrown morality and decency aside.  The key going forward will to keep the majority united in opposing the evil that is Trump and Trumpism and in keeping a spotlight on the moral bankruptcy of Trump supporters who embraced the moral evil of the family separation policy.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at why Trump was forced to back down - for now, at least.  Here are article highlights:

[A] top aide to President Trump told Axios that he “doesn’t want to look weak” by abandoning his policy of family separation. Trump “feels boxed in, is frustrated and knows it’s bad politics — but also understands it’s not a fight he can back down from.”

But back down he did. In the face of overwhelming public pressure, Trump relented and agreed the policy his administration had deliberately engineered was a real policy, and that he could change it, and would.

Even a casual understanding of human psychology or American history would have made it patently obvious that the cruel method of terrorizing migrant families by wresting children from parents was bound to provoke a profound backlash. The prospect of losing a child is the most elemental fear any parent can imagine.

The willingness of Trump and his administration to plunge ahead anyway with a barbaric tactic is primarily a reflection of their moral emptiness. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen reportedly opposed it in private, yet energetically obfuscated on its behalf in public. Why didn’t she resign in protest? Why hasn’t anybody?

The reversal also demonstrates the comprehensive failure of Trump’s immigration agenda. Trump is facing the inevitable dilemma of a populist leader: He was elected promising easy solutions, and is discovering none exist.

Trump’s internal assessment is, if anything, even more grim. “Over the past few months, Trump has called Nielsen and [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions to account as the number of immigrants flooding across the southern border has spiked. Arrests on the border nearly tripled year-over-year, rising to 40,344 this past May from 14,519 in May 2017,” reports Politico.

He subjected Nielsen to a tirade six weeks ago that lasted an incredible 30 minutes, and concerned the comprehensive failure of their efforts to control the border. Trump settled on family separation after every other method at his disposal collapsed. On the central policy promise he made, Trump is a flop, and he knows it.

The collapse revealed one more important thing: The power of mass revulsion. There are limits, after all, to what Trump can do without risking his patina of legitimacy as head of state. Outraged voters flooded Congress with calls, as they did to oppose the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, and with the same success. Intense voter opposition matters.

It also matters when Laura Bush speaks out against him, and when Steve Schmidt resigns from the Republican party, and when American Airlines declares it won’t cooperate with the administration. It is a sign that the peripheral elements of Trump’s coalition have a breaking point, that while they can tolerate a great deal of sub-rosa venality, visceral outrages can create a dangerous reaction.

The damage of Trump’s horrific policy cannot be fully undone. But, in the face of his every instinct, Trump was forced to retreat. He didn’t want to look weak, but he does, because he is.

The resistance to Trump and Trumpism needs to continue and, if anything, intensify.  Giving Democrats control of the House of Representatives is the only guaranteed way to prevent future moral horros from being committed by a man who lacks any morals or decency. 

The Parallels With the Nazi Regime Continue

One of the things that students of the Nazi regime in Hitler's Germany often find it difficult to comprehend how ordinary Germans allowed the Holocaust and mass murder of millions to occur.  Three factors were key.  The first, a deranged and hate-filled leader who viewed others as less than human.  Hitler clearly viewed Jews, gypsies and gays as less than human and, therefore, they could be exterminated. Hitler's anti-Semiticism knew no limits.  Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump's racism knows no limits.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the level of Trump's contempt for non-white immigrants:

[Trump's] use of the word “infest” to talk about people is literally out of the Nazi/anti-Semites’ playbook for talking about the Jewish threat. It was also a standard for talking about Chinese in the western United States and it remains part of the vocabulary for talking about Romani (Gypsies) in parts of Europe. This is the most hard-boiled kind of racist demagogic language, the kind that in other parts of the world has often preceded and signaled the onset of exterminationist violence. The verb “to infest” is one generally used to describe insects or vermin (rats), creatures which are literally exterminated when they become present in a house or building or neighborhood.

The second was the so-called “Nuremberg defense” popular with Nazis on trial for crimes against humanity after Germany's defeat in WWII.  As the Intellectualist notes, the acting head of ICE is already invoking this defense, underscoring his own personal moral bankruptcy:

Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday that comparing ICE agents to Nazis is unfair, because “they’re simply enforcing laws enacted by Congress”.  Thomas Homan employed the “Nuremberg defense” – used by German Nazi officials in an attempt to escape accountability with the claim they were merely following orders.

Of course, every ICE employee participating in the family separation policy is just as morally lacking as Hohman.  There comes a time when each of us must say "no" to participating in such moral criminality.  If every ICE employee said no and threatened to resign, the policy could not be implemented. 

The third component is the portion of the population that is either equally racist and morally deficient as their "führer" or to lazy and indifferent to take a stand in opposition to evil.  The "it doesn't involve me" excuse is little better than the Nuremberg defense. It too is an excuse for moral bankruptcy and complicity in evil.  

For those who say the evils of Nazi Germany could never happen in America, they need to open their eyes.  We have begun traveling down a similar path.  Will everyday Americans prove they are no better than 1930's Germans?  

A Necessary Comparison: 2016 Americans and 1932 Germans

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and election, one of the distressing things has been the utter ignorance of far too many Americans on historical precedents for the rise of Donald Trump and perhaps more chilling, his supporters who have been only too eager to rally to calls of hate and bigotry and, of course, scapegoating.  Anything rather than admit their own failings and culpability for their own misfortunes.  This has happened a number of times throughout history, but the most similar perhaps was Germany in the aftermath of World War I through the period Hitler achieved dictator status.  Like Trump, Hitler first came to power through the democratic process and was supported by those who (i) were full of resentment over German's loss of the war and the economic chaos that followed, and (ii) only too willing to blame others for Germany's defeat and/or their economic woes.  Hitler was only too happy to target Jews and communists, among others, as the culprits responsible for Germany's misfortunes. Anytime was preferable to admitting that Germany's decision to go to war had been insanely foolish and, as the book "Ring of Steel" makes clear, more or less doomed to result in defeat.  Fast forward to 2016 and we have America battered from global economic change and still bogged down in wars in the Middle East that it should never have launched.  The question now is, will Americans act like Germans did or will they oppose those seeking to play upon their worse instincts and stand for decency.  A column looks at this issue and reminds us who easily people can go along with horrible actions and policies.  Here are highlights:

Liberals should stop asking whether Donald Trump—or his chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart, Steve Bannon—is a Nazi. Not because the employees of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser said so in an embarrassing paean to the “zealous Zionist” who has Trump’s ear, or even because, like one high school history teacher and Holocaust expert in Northern California, you could be forced into retirement.

No, the reason to resist the temptation to whether our president elect and his ghastly racist retinue are bona fide Nazis is that it’s the wrong question, and it’s always been the wrong question.[T]he efforts to divine the darkest thoughts of their souls and then compare them to various Nazi leaders miss the point in an extraordinarily American way.

The Nazis gained power in Germany through democratic elections and maintained it through maintaining the support of a plurality, if not a true majority, of Germans well into the 1940s. Thus, the question isn’t whether Trump and his ilk are Nazis; it’s whether Americans are, or would be willing to accept it if they were.

[O]ur approach to history, for better and mostly for worse, stems from the nineteenth century Great Man philosophy of history. Under this view of things, all historical change is a project reserved for our leaders; the rest of us are just drawn along in their wake with little agency or responsibility.

The “with little agency or responsibility” disclaimer ought to ring a few bells here. That’s the underlying philosophy that allows white Americans to evade responsibility for the institution of slavery and the long-term harm it has created for African Americans by saying that their ancestors never enslaved anyone.

But history is lived and influenced by more than just “Great Men”; going along to get along is as much a choice as taking to the streets to protest (and possibly risking your life to do so). Our collective world is shaped by everyone’s actions or courses of inaction—which is the philosophy behind Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, one of the most popular and influential critiques of Great Man pedagogy.

Though often decried as a left-wing radical and popularly re-imagined by conservatives as an purveyor of politically correct pseudo-historical inquiry, Zinn was chiefly invested in reclaiming the project conspicuously name-checked in the title of his best known work: a people’s history. In this regard, had a great deal in common with post-war West Germans who, in policy, in art and in academic settings (including mandatory education) grappled—often imperfectly—with the collective responsibility Germans shared for the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.

“Those who do not learn how people like them participated in history are doomed to repeat it.” . . .

The Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald sits on Ettersberg Mountain, broadly overlooking Eisenach (where Martin Luther first translated the Bible), Weimar (the home of German literary greats Goethe and Schiller and the seat of liberal Weimar Republic, established after World War I) and Erfurt (the site of the first-ever university in what is now Germany). Before an Erfurt-based company installed the crematorium on the mountain in 1940—20 meters from the bear exhibit in the zoo established for the amusement of SS families—the SS used to send prisoners’ emaciated corpses on open trucks to the municipal crematorium in Weimar, often losing bodies at the curves of the mountain road.

[O]n that mountain, overlooking many of the places fundamental to the establishment of liberal, modern Germany and in full view of the Germans who lived and worked there, the Nazi regime began systematically starving, torturing, experimenting on, and killing Jews (and Roma, and LGBT people, and people with disabilities and political prisoners).  . . .  nobody said or did much of anything about it, except for the men who helped build the Nazis a more convenient crematorium.

In America, we learn that Hitler and the Nazis committed the Holocaust; in Germany, German children learn that they all participated in it, because the Germans came to believe that acknowledging their collective culpability as individuals was the only way to prevent it from ever happening again.

Americans, meanwhile, continue to debate whether the Civil War was fought to preserve the institution of slavery, as stated by actual Confederates at the time, or to settle a far more abstract and nebulous quarrel over the less morally indefensible concept of “states rights.” History isn’t always written by the victors, especially if there’s a version that makes everyone feel a little less guilty. 

We like to think of Hitler and the Nazis as uniquely evil, but the Holocaust wasn’t just committed by Hitler and the 10 percent or so of Germans who joined the Nazi party: it was committed by tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of people throughout Europe and even the Soviet Union, many of whom said they were “just following orders,” and abetted by men and women across the continent who, at best, simply looked away as atrocities were committed in their names.
 That infamous Nuremburg defense, of course, takes on new meaning when a President Elect has suggested that he will order members of the military to torture prisoners, create (or resurrect) a Muslim registry and encouraged his supporters to engage in acts of violence against protesters. We all like to think that we’d stand up to wholesale abrogations of our fellow Americans’ constitutional rights (or, at least, for the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). But a large body of psychological research suggests that once we’re ordered to do something atrocious, we feel relieved of the burden of feeling guilty about doing it. 

The scariest question to consider in 2017 and beyond isn’t whether President Trump will use the power of the federal government to commit acts that many of us, under other circumstances, might consider at least travesties and at worst atrocities. It is, rather, the question of whether Americans will shrug their shoulders, cheer him on as long as the economy improves, or participate.

Frighteningly, I am afraid that the answer is "yes. many will go along or cheer him on." Hitler never won a majority of votes at the polls, but a majority went along with the growing nightmare.  I am very much afraid that Americans will act in a similar manner.