Does the “American Experiment” End This Week? We Are On The Knife’s Edge.

As most of you know, War Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the approximately 800 military officers of general-level rank (including admirals) to Washington to meet with him – and perhaps Trump – on Tuesday morning. The Washington Post and the New York Times largely minimize the potential ramifications.

The Times expects Hegseth will deliver a “rally the troops message… to ‘get our fighters excited’ about the new posture of the department,” and suggests this is about Hegseth’s “penchant for performative actions to shake up the Pentagon.”

Similarly, the Post anticipates “a short speech on military standards and the ‘warrior ethos.’” While there may be “additional surprises in store,” the Post’s secondary narrative is about the excessive cost of moving these officers and their support staff to and from Washington when this meeting could have taken place online.

Well, why do you need them physically sitting in a room? Each article does mention retired officer Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges’s tweet that German generals were “called to a surprise assembly in Berlin” in 1935 and “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.” But each gives Hegseth the last, sarcastic word: “Cool story, General.”

I’m not so sanguine. Back in January, I was sure that things were going to get worse faster than I could imagine, but I still underestimated how bad and how fast. I was certainly not the only one. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a clear-eyed expert on authoritarianism and fascism wrote this week, “A few things stand out as new. One is the speed of the changes to domestic and foreign policy, which have no parallel in autocracies where leaders have come to power via elections.”

We may very well be on the knife’s edge this week.

Eugene Fidell’s Friday post, FAQ for Senior Military Officers at Hegseth’s Quantico Meeting, exacerbates my fears. Fidell is not nobody. He served as a judge advocate in the U.S. Coast Guard, teaches Military Justice at Yale Law School and is a co-author of Military Justice: Cases and Materials (Carolina Academic Press 4th ed. 2023). He considers several possibilities: mass firings and demotions, or a declaration of martial law, before he seems to settle on the loyalty oath possibility: “In such a case, it seems plausible that those who refuse will be summarily relieved of their positions.”

The rest of Fidell’s post then addresses what officers should do before such a meeting in light of this possible outcome:

Prayerfully examine your values and your options and the consequences for you and your family. Immediately identify, retain, and consult competent counsel…. including whether an order to sign a loyalty oath or take an oral one is lawful…. Assume the worst…. The Trump administration has shown no compunction about purging outstanding senior officers. It has been ruthless and unprincipled and it should not be assumed that either your values, past service, or personal interests count for anything in the current carnivorous environment.

So, IF this scenario unfolds on Tuesday, a second IF then comes into play: out of those 800 generals, how many refuse to swear loyalty to der Fuhrer? If it is 600, then the coup fails, at least for now. If it is 200, then Trump has won. Everything follows from there: the immediate replacement of the “disloyal” with those eager for personal advancement, the widespread deployment of troops to intimidate and suppress mass opposition/unrest, unlawful orders accepted, and the beginning of arrests on a much larger scale than heretofore.

Are Arrests Imminent?

Again, many of you have seen the reportage on Trump’s Thursday memo targeting, the Times reports, quoting from the order, “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in criminal conduct.”

This sounds bad enough, but vague about the immediate threat to the American Experiment, since obviously, in the Times’ framing, “the accusation — that liberal activists and organizations have secretly funded and organized a kind of professional brigade of anarchists [my emphasis] around the country to attack law enforcement officers, destroy property and create public havoc” is complete lunacy. That doesn’t describe me, or any organization I know and work with.

Unfortunately, the scope of the memo is much wider than the funders of “professional anarchists.” Look how broadly Trump casts the net of “terrorism”:

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

As Hamilton Nolan notes, this is

you and me and anyone who… joins a group to protest ICE or gives money to fund such groups. We are talking about Americans engaged in protest and civil disobedience and political opposition that the Trump administration does not like. All of these people, us, will now be subject to the sort of nuclear-level state tactics that have been perfected in 20 years of the FBI entrapping random people at mosques into imaginary bombing plots. The order calls on the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Attorney General, the Justice Department, the Treasury Secretary, the IRS, and all federal law enforcement agencies to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” any and all people and groups who are troublesome enough to be considered bad by, for example, The Fevered Brain of Stephen Miller….

They are going to call protests riots and they are going to call protesters terrorists and they are going to call activist groups terrorist organizations and they are going to call foundations and donors terrorist funders and they are going to try to scare all of the above into not doing what they do. Prudent attorneys and advisors will prudently tell opposition groups to stop organizing protests and foundations to stop funding radicalism and as a result of these purely prudent decisions, the organized political opposition to the Trump administration will be weakened, allowing the administration to achieve its goals more easily.

Here is the trap we are in. As I write this, Trump has announced a new military deployment, to Portland. “‘The president has sent agents here to create chaos and riots in Portland, to induce a reaction, to induce protests, to induce conflicts,’” warns Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley. “‘His goal is to make Portland look like what he’s been describing it as.’”

Should we therefore stop? Should Americans who oppose fascism be prudent, avoid protests, avoid conflicts?

It is tempting, after all, not to put myself in the way of physical danger. At some point, regardless, as the coup unfolds, there will come a bridge too far for me, a step I won’t take – perhaps a loyalty oath at CUNY, where I teach, and I will lose my job, like the four Adjuncts that Chancellor Matos, in a performative display for Governor Hochul and her likely challenger Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, has already fired for their Palestinian activism; or the six tenured faculty under investigation for the same crime.

But by then, it will be too late.

Facing History and Ourselves: The Holocaust and Human Behavior

In 2013 and 2014 I taught a course by that name, using a text from Facing History and Ourselves, which asked students to consider whether they would be bystanders when they saw injustice, or take the harder path of being “upstanders.” I can tell you that I taught that course well, and at least some students were profoundly affected, to judge by the journals they kept, by having to think through these questions. Here are excerpts from two of the readings, about Germans who rationalized being bystanders.

Milton Mayer, an American college professor, wanted to find out how ordinary people reacted to Hitler’s policies and philosophies. Seven years after the war, he interviewed German men from a cross-section of society. One of them, a college professor, told Mayer how he responded.

One doesn’t see exactly where, or how to move. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow….

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last, and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked…. But of course, this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Steps C is not so much worse than Step B, and if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to step D….

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know what themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed…. On this new level, you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have excepted five years ago, a year ago, things, that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Suddenly, you see what you are, what you have done, or more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing.) You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

A German recalled the day he was asked to pledge loyalty to the regime at his job.

Refusal would have meant the loss of my job. I tried not to think of myself or my family. We might have got out of the country, in any case, and I could’ve got a job in industry or education somewhere else. But I try to think of the people to whom I might be of some help later on, if things got worse, as I believed they would. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help, somehow, as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country.

There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages, in birth, in education, and in position, rules, or might easily rule in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935 it would have been the thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have hardened millions. Thus the regime would’ve been overthrown, or indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany we’re also unprepared. Thus the world was lost.