The View From 1938

But also, a proposal.

I’ve spent the last two years living in 1938.

I haven’t said much publicly about my next novel, and I’m not ready to say everything, but it’s based on real events and concerns, in part, the rise of home-grown American fascism. (This post is not an announcement of my book—I’ll talk about the actual topic down the road—but a chance to share some of the things I’ve learned as I research.)

A lot of friends have been shocked when I mention that in the 1930s there were dozens of Nazi summer camps for children, everywhere from Long Island to Wisconsin. Up until October, people used to be shocked when I told them there was a full Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939, replete with antisemitic and racist speeches. That was before Trump’s dog-whistle rally, eerily similar. The promise of the rally was to “restore America to the true Americans.”

Sorry, I did not specify which rally. The Nazi one.

1939, MSG. As someone unknown (no, not Sinclair Lewis) said, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

These two things can both be true: You can recognize the knell of fascism and also feel like you’re up to the fight.

If you’re someone who is NOT okay with hearing some alarming things about fascism right now, please feel free to skip to Part 2, which is about a plan for action.

For everyone else, here’s…

Part 1:

Someone comes along when times are hard and points to a “foreign” element as the cause of all your woes, and calls for “mass deportation”; he cherry picks isolated, statistically insignificant incidents that make these people seem like a violent threat; he promises a return to a time when everything was great, but can’t tell you what year that was; he tells the men who’ve felt powerless that they are owed power simply by being men; he tries to control conception and contraception; he stirs people’s fears of everything but heterosexual coupledom—putting those who don’t conform to traditional gender roles among his first targets; he talks about moral virtue being linked to genetics; he directly threatens journalists who oppose him; he says he’d like the journalists shot; his followers take it upon themselves to ban books; he shouts about religion but sees it only as a tool; he expresses admiration for other totalitarian leaders; he talks about “the enemy from within,” and conditions his followers to see their neighbors as a communist force to be feared and therefore attacked…

And despite the fact that we’ve seen it before, we’ve seen literally all of it before, half the country falls for it.

Here’s what comes next (and I mean next year): He’ll at the very least declare a state of emergency in order to bypass what’s left of our system of checks and balances; he might, taking a cue from South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol, declare martial law; people you’d never imagine folding in the face of totalitarianism will fold like cheap construction paper; he’ll keep throwing constant rallies for himself; he’ll do everything he can to control the media, possibly with success (cf: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán).

But they’re not the same, because they aren’t completely identical in every way! That is true. Hitler was a vegetarian.

Stop it, I mean Hitler came in there shouting and threatening, and that’s how everyone should have known he was bad! No, Hitler wasn’t usually shouting. Those are just the videos we see. He posed for a lot of photos with sweet children, and people ate it up. Hitler and Goebbels both used humor very effectively. (I’m not saying I find anything they said funny, just that this was the intended and perceived effect.)

But Trump isn’t smart enough to mastermind anything! That is probably true. This man is even dumber than Hitler. What he is very good at, because he’s a narcissist, is keeping everyone around him in a never-ending competition to win his favor (much like Hitler). And in turn, he’s quite easily influenced by the most extreme thinkers around him, because he’s quickly bored and extremes are stimulating.

Come on, he’s not about to commit genocide. No, you’re right, he’s just promising to deport hundreds of thousands of people with no plan for where to put them besides detention camps. What could possibly go wrong?

The world is different now. Yes. The climate is at a more crucial tipping point than ever; large parts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable, sending the world into financial and political as well as environmental catastrophe; and we just elected someone who thinks climate change is a hoax.

Part 2:

Something I’ve had to accept, in researching and writing this book, is that many of the people who fell for fascism in the 1930s were neither inherently evil nor idiots. They were deeply misinformed, and therefore manipulable.

One reason it’s so, so important for us to realize this: Otherwise, people who know themselves not to be evil, and not to be idiots, will assume they are too good and too smart to fall for the manipulations of narcissistic leaders. Many good and smart people saw through Hitler, but many good and smart people also fell for it all.

The internet helps us live in tiny information villages. It feeds people a far greater quantity of propaganda than was available in 1930s Europe. And as anyone who’s ever tried to get through to a conspiracy-believing uncle on Facebook can attest, it’s nearly impossible to convince someone that what they’ve been reading online isn’t true.

One reason people were so susceptible to propaganda in the 1930s was that it was based in unprecedented advances in both communications technologies (radio, film, cheaply produced printed material and posters) and advertising. Otherwise intelligent people were not equipped to filter out information as potentially manipulative. Similar things have happened in the past 20 years: Older generations used to taking TV news and official-looking printed matter as legitimate do not have the framework for understanding Fox News as propaganda. Younger people have a hard time resisting internet wormholes because we have not, as a species, figured out ways to resist the manipulations of overwhelming bias confirmation.

To campaign online, to debate online, to try to spread facts online, is to pit ourselves against a tide of so much misinformation that we don’t stand a chance.

Here’s what I propose: We need a campaign of facts and information that happens off the internet and starts now.

Here are some ways that could work:

• On the back of toilet stall doors in gas stations and truck stops and fast food restaurants across the country are fliers with one single, significant fact. No opinions, no political mantras, just facts. Things like “Immigrants commit far less crime per capita than native-born citizens,” or “Guns are now the leading cause of death of children in the US,” or “Sea levels are rising because of preventable climate change.” Next to the fact are three or four solid sources for the information. And below, it says Do your own research; find out more, followed by a QR code. The QR code takes them to a web page that explains the fact and links to the sources.
  What we’d need is a website compiling and putting up, say, three new facts every two months. Each page would have a printable version, and people who volunteered for the project would receive emails with printable versions of each flier. If you get just 100 people putting up 100 fliers each every couple of months, minus all the ones people deface or take down, times the number of people who see and read each flier, that’s… who knows, but a lot. Plus, people could of course just link to the pages on social media; the internet does count for something.

• We need large organizations to buy up TV and radio ads now, unrelated to any election, sharing facts backed up by sources.

• We need to talk to older Americans about checking sources on “news” they get online, in email forwards, on Fox, on podcasts. Teach them about Snopes, at least. (The one superpower of Gen X is our deep skepticism, and this might be the moment to deploy it for everyone’s good.) We need to talk to younger Americans about the algorithms that pull them into TikTok and YouTube whirlpools. We need to advocate for true media literacy to be taught in schools.

Sending out zillions of postcards two weeks before an election is not working. But the slow drip of education might do something.

I probably do not have the web skills or organizing experience to make something like a bathroom flier campaign a reality, but if you do, please get in touch. I’m good with a roll of Scotch tape, at least.

And meanwhile, I’m very happy to be writing the novel I’m writing. It’s fiction, but fiction is a pretty great way of getting the facts across, too.