A Final and Disturbing Comment from Stevens

 

Stuart Stevens wrote his book in the autumn of 2019, which already seems like ages ago -- and like a golden age compared to today.  At the time he wrote, there had been no COVID pandemic, no lockdowns, no Black Lives Matter riots, no armed vigilantes, and (of course) not attempts to overturn an election.

He had four quotes that I found most striking.  One was the opening comment on what he believed the Republican Party stood for.  One was his comment on political parties serving as "circuit breakers" because it so closely matched Ziblatt's comment on "gate keepers."  And one was his comment on Republicans seeing themselves as the champions of "real America" against something that is fundamentally un-American, and terrifying.

The last, which seems especially prescient when surveying the horrors of 2020 is a warning to Republicans to heed the memoirs of Franz von Papen, the conservative German politician who arranged the deal that made Hitler Chancellor.  Papen survived the war and was acquitted at Nuremburg.  He went on to write his memoirs, attempting to defend his pro-Nazi actions as the least-bad option under the circumstances.  Particularly revealing are his comments about lifting the ban on Nazi storm troopers:

Right wing meetings were continually broke up and interrupted by left wing radicals. The police, most of whom can under Socialist [Social Democratic] Ministers of the Interior in the States, did not or would not do anything about it.  The parties of the left pretended then, and continue to do so now, that the lifting of the ban on the Brownshirts was the first step in my hoisting the Nazis into the saddle. . . . All that happened was that equal rights for all parties, including both the Nazis and the Communists, had been restored.

I alone can fix it

Reading this, I felt an icy cold chill, thinking of Black Lives Matter riots, right-wing outrage at weak-kneed Democratic governors who declined to call out the National Guard to suppress the riots, and applause for vigilantes, such as Karl Ritterhouse and the Proud Boys.  Riots calmed with the end of summer, but by now riots seem to be the routine response to a police killing.  What will happen this coming summer is anyone's guess.  But the idea has distinctly taken hold on the right that left-wing violence, by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, is running out of control, abetted by weak Democratic governors.  And that vigilante violence is an appropriate response in self-defense.

We have slid a long way down the slippery slope since Stevens wrote his book.