Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate

Despite the efforts of Republicans to spin the 2016 presidential election results as an uprising of working class whites stressed over economic concerns (a lie that a gullible and lazy media has been happy to Promote), the sad truth of the matter is that hatred was a key element utilized by Donald Trump to rally the GOP base and to win over some past Democratic voters who were outraged to see what they viewed as their white Christian privilege being eroded - eroded by blacks, Hispanics, gays and others.  The other key was the usual Republican tactic of playing to religious extremism best embodied in anti-abortion rhetoric and anti-LGBT sound bites.  This latter ploy not only won over 81% of evangelicals but also duped some Hispanics and blacks to vote against their own interest. Now, with an unfit narcissistic madman in the White House and a GOP controlled Congress, in 2017 it will be all the more important to oppose and counter appeals to hatred.  A piece in The Daily Beast authored by a German sets out why confronting hate is so important.  Here are excerpts:

Late in the evening on Christmas day, Stephanie Pazmino slashed a black, transgender man after he offered her a subway seat. “I don’t want to sit next to black people,” Pazmino told the victim. A couple of weeks ago a man walked into a 7-Eleven in the Bronx. He had no intention to purchase anything but wanted to use the store’s microwave. When the Muslim clerk told him that this was against store policy, the man responded that he could do whatever he wanted. He told the clerk to go back to ‘his country’ and threatened to physically harm him.

At the beginning of December a hijab-wearing city transit worker was assaulted by a passenger who confronted her on the 7 train. “You’re a terrorist and you shouldn’t be working for the city,” said the man, according to reports, as he jabbed a finger at her MTA badge. He followed her off the train at Grand Central Terminus, and then pushed her down stairs at the station. (She was taken to hospital with injuries to her knee and ankle.) The attacker was not apprehended, and there were no reports of anyone trying to intervene.

According to the New York Police Department, bias incidents in New York have spiked 400 percent in the two weeks that followed the election of Donald J. Trump, compared to the same period last year.

Earlier this year, I was a witness to one such attack. Riding the 7 Train into Manhattan from Queens, arguably the most diverse place on earth, I heard someone yelling anti-Muslim insults. A man had pushed a young woman in a hijab off her seat, and the woman was crying.

I decided to stand between victim and perpetrator. I was the only person who responded until a man who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent joined me. My heart was racing, as I explained to her, between gasps for air, that there’s a red emergency button she can push if something like this ever happens again. The woman spoke little English and didn’t seem to understand.

I am not sharing this story to congratulate myself but to illustrate what I’ve learned from growing up in Germany.

I’m a small but furious German. When I went to high school in Bavaria in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the horrors of fascism still echoed through the classrooms. Germans have internalized that the reason why Adolf Hitler was able to rise to power was that no one stood up for the Jews.

I have plenty of problems with Germany, but its people’s willingness to speak their minds and stand up for others isn’t one of them. Whatever you do, in Germany the public good trumps your individual desires.

Germans have also worked hard to understand how the unspeakable happened. They have one of those unwieldy compound words for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “the process of coming to terms with your past.” The concept includes a duty to intervene when another’s dignity or life is in danger.

I vividly recall the teacher-led discussions in high school that dealt with the persecution and deportation of Jews. What would you do if it was your neighbor: look the other way or step up? We read eyewitness accounts of “good Germans” who hid Jews in their attics.

“The Jews had it coming,” my paternal grandmother told me. More than once she said, “The Nuremberg Rallies were the best times of my life.”

Perhaps it is for this reason, more than my schooling, that the recent spike in hate crimes hits close to home.

These aren’t isolated incidents anymore. Yet it is a trend our soon-to-be leader has decided to ignore. So how should we respond? What can we do to avoid becoming bystanders in something unspeakable? If you still think that we should just wait and see, I wonder when will you step in. Will you step in when it is too late?

When you move to the U.S., even from a western country like Germany, there will always be things that remind you that you don’t fully belong. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things I love about America. . . . . And yet for the most part, it is our job as immigrants to this country to assimilate to the American way, rarely the other way around.

I am beyond frustrated that we’re stuck with a president who, just like Adolf Hitler, despises refugees, intellectuals, journalists, women and non-Christians.

[T]he very thing that makes America great—its people’s quiet acceptance of other beliefs, their overwhelming friendliness, their effort to always get along—now threatens to become its downfall. I loathed having to read my friends’ whiny Facebook posts about how they were dreading Thanksgiving because of the elections. “Boohoo, I have to talk about politics to someone who thinks differently than I do!”

Here, this German said it. Will you still like me? I am asking because I believe what stands in the way is Americans’ compulsive need to be liked. At moments like this, though, we need to learn to object and intervene—whether in public protest or simply around the family dinner table. You don’t have to get into a fight to try out my little German lesson, but if you see something, do something.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” wrote the philosopher Edmund Burke. Exactly. So don’t just be good. Be a good German.

Can Morally Decent Conservatives Serve A Trump Administration?

There are some such as New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, who have argued that morally decent conservatives have a duty to stay on and/or accept positions in the Donald Trump presidential administration to counter or steer away the administration from toxic or dangerous policies and actions.  While there is a certain logic to the argument on the surface, others make the case that to serve Trump is to set one's self down the road for moral evil and becoming subsumed into trying to justify normalizing the unacceptable.  One need only look at history and those who tried to serve and accommodate the policies of figures such as Lenin, Stalin and Hitler to see where service to an administration can take one.  Two different pieces make the case against working in a Trump administration.  One ids a op-ed in the Washington Post.  The other is a piece in Just Security.  First are highlights from the Post op-ed: 

[T]he episode has caused me to change my mind about recommending that conservatives serve in the administration, albeit with a firm view in their minds of what would cause them to quit. This was a tipping point. The tenor of the Trump team, from everything I see, read and hear, is such that, for a garden-variety Republican policy specialist, service in the early phase of the administration would carry a high risk of compromising one’s integrity and reputation.

In a normal transition to a normal administration, there’s always disorder. There are the presidential friends and second cousins, the flacks and the hangers-on who flame out in the first year or two. There are the bad choices — the abusive bosses, the angry ideologues and the sheer dullards. You accept the good with the bad and know that there will be stupid stuff going on, particularly at the beginning. Things shake out. Even if you are just blocking errors, it is a contribution.

This time may be different. Trump was not a normal candidate, the transition is not a normal transition, and this will probably not be a normal administration. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty. He gets credit for becoming a statesman when he says something any newly elected president might say . . . . and then reverts to tweeting against demonstrators and the New York Times. By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless. It’s not even clear that he accepts that he should live in the White House rather than in his gilt-smeared penthouse in New York.

In the best of times, government service carries with it the danger of compromising your principles. Here, though, we may be in for something much worse. The canary in the coal mine was not merely the selection of Stephen K. Bannon for the job previously filled by John Podesta and Karl Rove, that of counselor to the president and chief strategist. Rather, the warning signs came from the Republican leaders excusing and normalizing this sinister character — and those who then justified the normalizers.

One bad boss can be endured. A gaggle of them will poison all decision-making. They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes — because there will be mistakes — will be exceptional.

My bottom line: Conservative political types should not volunteer to serve in this administration, at least for now. They would probably have to make excuses for things that are inexcusable and defend people who are indefensible. At the very least, they should wait to see who gets the top jobs.

So what should the policy community do for now? Do what you can do in other venues, and remember that this too will pass, and some day a more normal kind of administration will either emerge or replace this one.  Your country still needs you — just not yet.

The lengthy piece in Just Security takes a similar tone with more emphasis on the moral suicide that service in a Trump administration will likely entail.  Here are excerpts:

Two of my friends, both of them principled and talented conservatives, told me they were approached by members of the Trump team about possible posts in the incoming administration. Both of them find Trump horrifying and did not vote for him. Both had the same initial reaction: No way. Both would have been willing, maybe honored, to take posts in a different Republican administration. All this was before the election.

Now, both recognize that they face an ethical dilemma: If the transition team approaches them again, should they say yes?

A similar dilemma faces career lawyers in government service who object to the new president and fear what they might be asked to do. Should they look for new jobs? As for law students and other lawyers considering government service, including anti-Trump Republicans: Is joining the administration a moral obligation, in order to fight for the rule of law and fact-based decisions in the administration of an erratic president? Or is it an unacceptable moral sell-out? Should you go into the administration because they need your voice? Or is exit, not voice, the principled option? 

That makes the dilemma worse, and so far, unfortunately, the signs are not good. Trump may be in the process of appointing some of the most extreme people in public life to high positions. Douthat counts on the Senate to deny confirmation – but what if the Senate does no such thing? In any event, it seems likely that the new administration will be the most right-wing in U.S. history, more than either the Reagan or George W. Bush administrations. Perhaps it will be more right-wing than Trump himself. And that, unless you share those views, is a problem.

The nightmare scenario is that Trump and his allies aim at an authoritarian Big Man presidency that actively targets political opponents – tangibly, not just rhetorically.

[M]y answer to the moral question is straightforward. Don’t go into the administration. If you’re in it when things start going south, get out. Don’t tell yourself you can tame the beast, because the beast will tame you. And don’t let the words “lesser evil” pass your lips. You will be fooling yourself.

In a powerful essay written half a century ago, Hannah Arendt warned about lesser evils (pp. 35-36):

If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands. …

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. …  

Why do they forget? It isn’t hard to fathom. Once you are inside, your frame of reference changes. The work is challenging and invigorating and cutting-edge. You see that many of the people you’re working with are decent and likable. You tell yourself that decent people like these wouldn’t do anything indecent. Gradually your moral compass aligns with theirs . . . . You lose your sense of outrage, which is, after all, a feeling we experience when we see something abnormal. Once the abnormal becomes routine, outrage fades.

And above all, you reassure yourself of your own decency because you can contrast yourself with the real radicals, the true believers. They’re right down the hall.

[W]hen you stay in your job, and perform lesser evils, you are supporting the administration, even if in your own mind you abhor it. Your own mind is irrelevant: if you participate, you support. . . . In the nightmare scenario, you are deluding yourself to think you can turn the train, or even slow it down. Maybe you could in an administration committed to the rule of law. But that is not the nightmare scenario we are talking about.

What about the large majority of public employees who are not directly complicit in wrongdoing, but for that very reason have no ability to mitigate it? Arendt’s warning that participation is support applies to them as well. Not only do they keep the enterprise going, their participation normalizes it in the eyes of their colleagues and the larger public. They cannot plead “lesser evils.” If they have a realistic, non-ruinous exit option, they should take it. . . . When it comes to rotten compromises of your principles, exit takes precedence over voice and loyalty. Exit doesn’t necessarily mean resigning, although it may. It certainly means refusing to participate.

 These concepts underscore my position: #NotMyPresident.