During the two years I worked in a church in the north Boston suburbs, I became close with two aged congregants who shared a remarkable past. Political refugees from the earliest waves of fascist persecution in central Europe, one of them had stories to tell of the shelling of Red Vienna's tenement blocks by the repressive Dollfuss; the other had braved the path of secret migration and exile to reach the United States.
Lifelong left-wing intellectuals, they remained committed democratic socialists, and when the 2016 election happened, they were some of the few people in my life who were neither emotionally crushed nor particularly surprised. "You have to remember," one of them told me, "a large percentage of the people in any given society are absolute bastards."
To them, high-stake politics requiring total commitments were not an unfamiliar phenomenon. They could tell you family stories involving Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. One retained vivid memories of the funeral of Otto Bauer. Figures who had populated my vague teenage fantasies of one day running off to join the revolution or becoming a Marxist theorist had once been real presences in their lives.
Talking to them about all of this in context of Trump's election, none of it felt so distant as it once would have. Total politics and titanic struggles had plainly come to the United States. The easy moral equivalence that many of us felt about prior elections, on both the left and the right ("both parties are the same underneath it all," one still heard it said in 2012), vanished. Now, it was all or nothing.
And I had to confess something to myself too, as I began to envision myself now as a figure somewhat like these congregants: engaged in a struggle against evil, facing down the rearing head of fascism in my own society. I had to acknowledge that this thought did not only alarm and upset me: it also excited me. Ashamed to say: I felt exhilarated. As I wrote in a poem at the time:
So sick I couldn’t stand
Then, one day, I guess,
I got better –
Better to say –
The world got sick with me
Crazy as I had been, it
Got crazier
So that now
God help me,
I’m thriving!
In other words—now, suddenly, in my late twenties, long after I thought I had put my teenage Marxism behind me, I was to be unexpectedly permitted to live out my fantasy of revolution. My almost-forgotten leftist convictions were to be put to the ultimate test: join the Resistance! My country needed me! Democracy needed me! The time had come to wrestle fascism back into the bottle from which it had escaped.
In the weeks that followed, I mounted a picture by John Heartfield (a.k.a. Helmut Herzfeld) on my wall—Niemals wieder!—to give me revolutionary inspiration. I had a picture in my cubicle at work that read, "Join the resistance." I thought of hanging another by Heartfield next to it—a photographic collage about the Spanish civil war, depicting the fascist aggressors as hideous buzzards and bearing the slogan, No nos pasaron!—you shall not pass us.
In short, I was ready to go.
Then, a couple months in to the Trump administration, I got tired. Everything that my reading of Koestler and Orwell had told me to expect—everything they'd warned me about—came to pass. The leftists with whom I dreamed of forming a broad popular front to defeat fascism proved to be sectarian and backbiting. There were miserable internecine fights, shameless heresy-hunting.
I realized that I faced a choice far more difficult than I'd ever imagined it would be: speak out, and risk losing a role in the "resistance" I found so psychologically thrilling; or remain silent and become morally compromised.
After a time, I was forced to admit to myself that nothing had changed after all. I had not been granted somehow a return to the world of political absolutes I had cherished as a teenager. Everything I'd learned in the years since was still true: the world is morally complex. One's own side is capable of behaving just as badly as the enemy. The fact that fascism is evil does not mean that everyone who opposes fascism is thereby pure and blameless.
I admitted to myself I was not a revolutionary and never would be. I was a romantic individualist, a bourgeois sentimentalist, and all the other encumbrances considered dead weight in a proletarian struggle for liberation.
I still spent week after week trying to chip away at Trump's propaganda; going to work and writing advocacy pieces under conditions of spiritual exile. But I also realized that I couldn't keep it up every single day that went by. I needed my weekends. I needed on occasion to read a book that was not about the movement, was not about justice, but was simply about love, or trees, or home decoration.
I realized that I was not prepared to spend four years with only a single idea in my mind, however transcendently important that idea might be. And this, I was aware, made me a very bad member of the resistance. In the scope of dialectical time, of the great processes of historical materialism, four years is nothing! How dare I say that it was asking too much of me!
Given that other people were being called to sacrifice their lives, their savings, their safety, how could I clutch at something so paltry as time, as weekends? Was I really that selfish? These doubts (which emanated as much from myself as from anyone without) found confirmation in the fact that I seemed to be the only one who had this trouble. Comrades I knew could get along on the bread of revolution alone.
In the presence of such people, I often felt my loyalties and conviction were being questioned in much the way Hazlitt describes, in his essay on people with only one idea: "If you happen to remark, ‘It is a fine day,’ or ‘The town is full,’ it is considered as a temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going the whole length of the principle."
By the time we came to 2020, therefore, I approached this new election in altogether a different spirit. My political convictions hadn't changed, in the intervening years. I had wanted Trump to go down in ignominious defeat in 2016, and I wanted the same thing still. But if, in 2016, my feelings had been tinged with a kind of morbid excitement—a thought that, now, at last, the great struggle is upon us!—there was no such exhilaration this time to leaven my despair at the thought of another Trump victory.
I was faced, in short, with the thing I have always dreaded most: naked, uncompromising desire. There was only one thing I wanted—Trump to lose—and I could not imagine how I would live if that did not come to pass. Usually, I try to talk myself out of counting too much on any one particular future. I try to pretend that there is a positive side to every possible outcomes. Here, in this election, I could not do so.
Before me lay only two possible futures—one I could imagine, the other of which was total darkness. And this was so not only, I confess, because of how loathsome, criminal, racist, sexist, chauvinistic and vile Trump is—not only because of what a danger he poses to the country—but also because I felt I couldn't stomach another four years of relentless opposition to him.
"No!," said a friend of mine, when on election night it briefly looked as though Trump might seize the lead—"I don't want to be a resistance fighter! I want to get on with my life!" He was voicing my own secret thoughts, and what he said next was cold comfort at best. "Well," he said, "I suppose this is what people feel when a war is declared. They didn't choose it. But now they have to fight."
I didn't want to fight anymore. I wanted a rest. I wanted to buy a new winter coat.
And I suppose my congregants might have told me, truthfully, that they had once wanted the same thing. But they didn't have a choice. Woe to those who have the luxury of deciding, of tuning out the news, of taking a break from the resistance on the weekends to go look at furniture, for they have had their reward.
My relationship with this couple was brought back vividly to my mind this week because I was reading Christopher Isherwood's short novel Prater Violet—a fictionalized account of the time he spent working with an exiled German film director on a movie script. The dynamic between the two characters in Isherwood's book, I soon realized, was cruelly reminiscent of our own.
The Isherwood character, in the exile's affectionate yet uncompromising eyes, is a bourgeois mama's boy playing at revolution. So long as he did not have to make any personal sacrifices, so long as he did not have to give up any of his own privileges and economic security, he was happy to claim the mantle of being a "leftist" and "radical."
But that is only because he lives in a society that enjoys prosperity and freedom of thought; that is only because no real hard choices are forced upon him. If they were, and the dilemma was actually before him, it is not so clear he would choose the hard path of sacrifice. He might decide he prefers things the way they are; he might even opt for the fascists in an effort to preserve some escaping fantasy of the status quo.
I was aware, in my heart, that part of my so earnest desire for a Joe Biden victory in 2020 was unrelated to my leftist scruples (though it was only a part, I swear). The other part stemmed from my desire not to face such hard choices as the film director describes. I did not want to choose between exile and compromise, poverty in the name of truth or prosperity in the name of falsehood.
I didn't want to be put to the sort of test the film director conjures for the young Isherwood—who admits to being unable to imagine another European war in just the same way I was unable to truly contemplate four more years of Trump: "It was unreal because I couldn't imagine anything beyond it;" he writes, "I refused to imagine anything; just as a spectator refuses to imagine what is behind the scenery in a theatre."
I was acquainted with and would mouth—if asked—all the left-wing arguments against this attitude. Even if Biden wins, we're still not out of the woods! people would say. There is no going back to "normal," and even if we could, we shouldn't want to because normal was terrible, unjust, and intolerable long before Trump came along.
Yes, yes, totally agree. But still, in my gut, I did want things to be "normal" again. I wanted Trump to leave me alone. I wanted to no longer have to think about him. I wanted to get on with a comfortable life.
And thus, when he finally lost, I felt my spirit spectacularly soar. The weight was lifted; the curse was broken.
Of course, he still manages to frighten, with his tyrannical ravings, his disinformation about vote frauds and stolen elections, his bogus lawsuits. Perhaps aspiring despots, like wild animals, are never so dangerous as when they are down. As a result, I am still greedy for further victories, further confirmation: I'm still constantly refreshing that election tracker. I want Georgia! I want Arizona!
I want it because Biden deserves to win big and then some; and Trump deserves to lose, and to lose abjectly. There are real and objective moral truths at play. But I want it too, I confess, because I am still attached to that dream of normality. The belief that one can somehow go back.
Is this dream a lie? Is it a fantasy? Will I inevitably have to make the hard choices and the personal sacrifices that Isherwood's film director demands? Even if Trump is sent back defeated and toothless to his tower of Orthanc, will fascism still nonetheless walk at midnight? Will it continue to haunt these shores? Will we have a scouring of the Shire?
I mentioned above that one of the members of the couple I knew from my church had lived in Vienna at the time of the great struggle between the workers and the Dollfuss government; that he had told me how the government wheeled artillery in front of the workers' tenements and shelled them into smithereens. It was with another eery knot of recognition, therefore, that I found the same historic episode described in detail in Isherwood's novel.
But then the knot was wound even tighter. For Isherwood observes, in the aftermath of this episode, that the fascist Austrian government passed a new law—a further act of repression against the workers' uprising—that "stopped the unemployment pay of those who had been arrested." Odious evisceration of political thought from another age and era. Transparent authoritarian knavery, and not something that we should even expect to see here, in this land of the free.
Except, it occurred to me, there is right now a bill sitting in Congress that would make Dollfuss smile. Introduced in response to the summer's Black Lives Matter protests, it bears the suitably Orwellian title of the "Support Peaceful Protest Act." And what would it do? Exactly what the Austrian fascists did to the workers: strip people convicted of any offense in the course of a protest, however minor, of receiving expanded unemployment benefits under federal COVID relief bills.
Yes friends, fascism will remain among us for some time to come.
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