Will We Win The Fight Against Facism?

I have been teaching a 200-level course this spring on the politics of the new right in the United States. Among other assignments, I have been having students read The New York Times in order to keep track of how a new right administration in power operates.

As the Trump Administration has made its initial decisions, it has become quite clear that Trump’s administrators and the members of the Republican party have been acting exactly as fascists do. They’ve ignored settled law, illegally removed administrators from office, threatened violence against those who resist them, reached out to punish private entities that oppose them, reversed international commitments to democracy, joined in quiet alliance with criminal dictatorships, appointed corrupt loyalists to key positions, defunded colleges and universities they suspect of being in opposition to them, and generally committed uncounted, systemic offenses against law and decency. In all of this, they have been joined by both congressional Republicans and the Republican leaders of many states.

My point in this rehearsal is not to add yet one more lengthy description to the detailed corpus of materials regarding the abuses of Trump and his minions. It is to note that in order to teach my course honestly, I have not been able to explain the actions of the Trump administration as anything other than a fascist, authoritarian form of governance that is rapidly destroying both constitutional rule and representative democracy in the United States.

Last Tuesday in class, prior to President Trump’s address to Congress, I asked my students who among them believed he would tell the truth in his speech. No one raised their hand. Guessing that people might be reluctant to reveal their sentiment, I posed the question another way, asking who believed he would deliberately lie during his speech. Almost everyone raised their hand. I then told the class that the only way to understand this belief, especially if it bore out – and it did that evening — was by understanding that the United States is now being ruled by fascists.  

After class it occurred to me that what I had said was significant and troubling. To state this fact is, in the current circumstances, to enter into unknown territory, potentially to expose Amherst College to all manner of attack. So, I wrote to President Elliot alerting him as to what I had done. I provided a link in my email to a recent op-ed in The New York Times by Thomas B. Edsall, in which he surveyed experts in constitutional law and political science concerning the Trump administration, all of whom more or less agreed on the brazen systemic illegality of what is happening. (First of those Edsall cited was Steve Vladek ’01, a former Amherst College student who is recognized as a foremost authority on the politics of the Supreme Court.)  

In my email to President Elliott I concluded by noting that the college has not spoken forcefully against the fascistic policies of the Trump administration; that I had heard that during a trustee meeting the previous weekend, there had been general agreement that this was not the time to speak out. I strongly urged President Elliot and the trustees, as our most important governing body, to speak out now, to speak clearly, and forcefully, against what is happening in the United States.

In response the president thanked me for my email.

Timothy Snyder, perhaps this country’s most eloquent voice on the dangers of tyranny, has repeatedly noted that silence in the face of the early moves of a fascist government is what might be called obedience in advance. Without loud and clearly articulated opposition to the illegal actions and statements of a fascist government in its early days, the task of resisting becomes close to impossible in succeeding days. We are coming close to the end of the beginning of fascist governance in the United States. Before it is too late, it is incumbent on our leaders to act.

So I renew my call, this time in the pages of The Amherst Student — still our common site of free communication, though for how long we must wonder — for the trustees and the president of our college to condemn the actions of President Trump and his administration; actions which directly threaten the freedoms of students, faculty, staff, and people throughout the United States and the world.