Fighting to Vote

The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present

MICHAEL TOMASKY, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

If you grew up, as I did, in the 1960s and 1970s, watching (albeit through a child’s eyes) the civil rights movement notch victory after victory, you could be forgiven for thinking at the time that that happy condition was normal. By high school, in the late 1970s, I began reading some history and learning about the struggles people endured to win the right to vote in this country. I thought then that these battles were over and done and won—that a new consensus had been achieved.

This state of affairs extended into the 1980s, and my view was reinforced by the observation that even conservative Republicans seemed to share in that consensus. Ronald Reagan backed the Voting Rights Act, signing into law in 1982 significant amendments to the original 1965 act. The most notable change made it easier for plaintiffs to sue states and localities under the act’s Section 2, which affirmed that they did not need to prove discriminatory intent in voting laws, just discriminatory effect. Jesse Helms mounted a lonesome filibuster in the Senate, but even he stood down. The bill passed both houses of Congress by large bipartisan margins. “As I’ve said before, the right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished,” Reagan remarked when he signed it.

But in retrospect, that moment, in June 1982, may have represented a zenith for voting rights in the United States. Even as Reagan was signing those amendments into law, others on the political right were devising ways to reverse this progress. The standard method was to challenge the Voting Rights Act in court, which produced mixed results at first but in recent years has met with great success, from the Republican Party’s point of view: in 2013 the Supreme Court ruled 5–4, in Shelby County v. Holder, that certain burdens imposed by the act on states and localities with a history of discrimination in voting laws no longer reflected reality—that such discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States. That assessment was a bit optimistic. One measure: in heavily black and Latino counties covered by the Voting Rights Act, there were 868 fewer polling places in 2016 than in 2012, according to a report by the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights. (Before Shelby, covered counties had to get Justice Department approval before they could make such moves.)

In other words, from the moment that black Americans finally won voting rights equal to those of white Americans, a significant number of white Americans started fighting to undo them. My teenage self was quite naive. Forty years later, it appears that what I thought was the new normal was in fact an aberration, a quick little burst of sunshine punctuating an otherwise bleak sky. There is no new consensus and never has been. There is just the old racist consensus, which was successfully pricked for a couple of decades but reasserted its dominance with the help of the many millions of dollars pumped into right-wing foundations and think tanks and activist groups like the Federalist Society.

Chuck Kennedy/When We All Vote

The crowd at a get-out-the-vote rally during a speech by Michelle Obama, Miami, Florida, September 2018

Most of this activity emanated from the places you might expect—Texas, notably, and the deep South (Shelby County is in Alabama). There were and are some northern states involved, when their governors’ mansions and state legislatures have been taken over by Republicans. Wisconsin under its current governor, Scott Walker, is the most conspicuous northern state to attempt various voter suppression efforts, including one of the country’s strictest voter ID laws, a newer weapon in the arsenal. A study by two University of Wisconsin political scientists found that the state’s ID law kept perhaps 17,000 citizens away from the polls in 2016, in a state Donald Trump won by around 23,000 votes.1 (Walker is seeking a third term this year, and as of late September was trailing his Democratic challenger, Tony Evers, by four or five points.)

But the brutal ground zero of the voting wars, their Stalingrad, is North Carolina. This might come as a surprise, because North Carolina, though southern, is no Mississippi: it has lively cities and a diverse population and great universities and funky, artsy Asheville. It is surely among the most cosmopolitan of the states of the former Confederacy.

But it is precisely for these reasons that the state is contested. Unlike in South Carolina, Democrats can win there sometimes. Barack Obama won there in 2008. His narrow victory over John McCain was the first for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 (Bill Clinton never won the state), and only the third in the previous twelve elections. It demonstrated how a Democrat can win in North Carolina: generate a high turnout among African-Americans, somewhere close to 25 percent of the overall vote, and win almost all of it; then take at least one third of the white vote. Obama’s win was narrow—less than a percentage point—but it showed that the state was suddenly in play, no longer reliably red. Also around that time, thanks in part to George W. Bush’s unpopularity, Democrats improbably controlled as many as eight of its thirteen congressional seats. Republicans wanted to shut this down.

In the following few elections, after the rise of the Tea Party, the Republicans roared back to power in North Carolina. In 2010 both houses of the state legislature flipped from Democratic to Republican control, a result in part of the Republican Project Redmap.2 Once they had those majorities, the Republicans drew new congressional districts for the 2012 elections to give them ten of the thirteen seats, and ten is the number they now hold. Also in 2012, the incumbent Democratic governor chose not to run for reelection, and Pat McCrory, an extremely conservative Republican, won that office. Obama lost the state to Mitt Romney that year by two percentage points, despite having brought the Democratic convention to Charlotte that summer. Then in 2014, Democratic senator Kay Hagan lost to Republican Thom Tillis, lately observed speaking up in defense of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Gov. Pat McCrory signed the Voter I.D.bill into law, in 2013 without a ceremony and without journalists present.

With their new power, North Carolina’s Republicans began implementing a radical agenda, one that stunned many observers. They made large cuts to social programs and public education. They tried to pass a bill ostensibly combating Sharia law, to which they attached several abortion restrictions; when that bill failed, they attached many of the same restrictions to a motorcycle safety bill. They passed the infamous “bathroom bill” calling for the policing of public restrooms to prevent transgendered people from using the facility of their choice, which brought recriminations from even the NCAAand the National Basketball Association. (Tillis, incidentally, was the state house Speaker who helped push all this through.) It was in early 2013 that the state’s progressives started their “Moral Mondays” sit-ins at the capitol in Raleigh, led by the charismatic Reverend William Barber II.

The biggest issue of all, though, was voting rights. North Carolina’s Voter Information and Verification Act (VIVA) of 2013—which the state’s Republicans felt emboldened to pass, it should be noted, after the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision—was a sprawling piece of legislation that included some noncontroversial modernizations. But it also limited early voting, excluded the use of certain forms of identification, and took a few other steps clearly aimed at reducing black turnout as much as possible. Republicans denied this, of course, insisting that they were trying to fight voter fraud. But voter fraud, as numerous studies have shown, is wildly inflated by Republicans and in fact virtually nonexistent. A 2014 Washington Post study turned up only thirty-one credible instances of a voter intentionally impersonating another voter—out of one billion votes cast.3

Allan J. Lichtman (above) discusses VIVA at length in a chapter late in The Embattled Vote in America, while his earlier chapters provide a rich historical background to the law. Lichtman is a historian at American University who has been a long-time commentator on current affairs. He turned heads in 2016 for being the only prominent election prognosticator to predict that Donald Trump would win, based on a formula he’d used since 1984 built around the popularity of the incumbent party. The next year, he published a book predicting Trump’s impeachment.4

I would imagine that to most suburban white people who drive to their jobs and thus have valid driver’s licenses, the demand that voters get a license or some other kind of ID doesn’t sound especially onerous. But we often forget that one needs documents to get documents. To secure a driver’s license in most states, a person needs to show a birth certificate and proof of residence, and perhaps a Social Security card. In the case of people who move frequently—young people, college students, poor people, all of whom lean Democratic—the addresses on these cards may not match. Older African-Americans born under Jim Crow may not even have been issued birth certificates.5

Rosanell Eaton

Lichtman draws attention, as some journalists have, to the case of Rosanell Eaton, who grew up in North Carolina in the Jim Crow era and joined an NAACP lawsuit against VIVA as a plaintiff. In a book that is mostly a straightforward history-from-above narrative, Eaton’s story provides one of the more gripping passages:

In 1942, Eaton rode for two miles on a mule-drawn wagon to register to vote at the Franklin County courthouse. Three white male officials confronted her. They ordered her to stand up straight, keep her arms at her side, and recite from memory the preamble to the Constitution. She did so word for word and then passed a written literacy test, becoming one of the few African Americans of her era to vote in North Carolina.

Seven decades later, Lichtman writes, “Eaton had a much harder time qualifying to vote under North Carolina’s new law.” She had a driver’s license, but the names on her license and her voter-registration card did not match exactly. She made eleven trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles, two different Social Security offices, and three banks before everything was rectified. “I was hoping I would be dead before I’d have to see all this again,” she said.

In 2016 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down VIVA. The court’s ruling charged that the state’s Republicans “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” So that effort at voter suppression is off the books. The district lines that Republicans drew in 2011, meanwhile, the ones that gave the GOP an overwhelming majority in the state’s congressional delegation, are still in effect and are the subject of court battles. The Supreme Court may hear a case challenging them next spring.

The great value of Lichtman’s book is the way it puts today’s right-wing voter suppression efforts in their historical setting. He identifies the current push as the third crackdown on African-American voting rights in our history.

The first came in the early days of the republic. In some state constitutions that dated to independence, Lichtman notes, some blacks, usually those few who met certain property qualifications, were granted suffrage. But protests were often immediate when they did vote. In 1803 in Wallingford, Connecticut, losers of a local election complained that “a Negro fellow by the name of Toby” had been allowed to vote for the winners. This affront was compounded, they alleged, because this “Black night walker” had once attempted to rape a white woman. By 1814, the state legally limited the franchise to whites.

And so it went. In Maryland, the original state constitution of 1776 actually allowed property-owning African-Americans to vote. Then their numbers increased, and by 1802, the legislature banned them from voting. New Jersey followed a similar arc, allowing blacks to vote under its original constitution but ending the practice in 1807. In New York, some blacks could vote under the 1777 constitution. A rewriting in 1821 stopped just short of explicitly limiting the vote to whites, but it imposed a property qualification “which we know they cannot comply with,” as one delegate put it.

Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

A civil rights activist teaching a woman to write in order to be able to vote, Petersburg, Virginia, 1960

The second crackdown came after Reconstruction, which ended in 1877. During Reconstruction, blacks in the South gained full citizenship rights, which were enforced by occupying Union soldiers. But even then, the national will to safeguard those rights was scant. In 1875 President Ulysses Grant and some of his fellow Republicans—the good guys, at that time—sought to pass a bill to “redeem” the words of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted the franchise to persons previously held as slaves, by legislating meaningful enforcement provisions. Joseph Gurney Cannon, a leading Republican congressman of the day for whom one of the three House office buildings along Independence Avenue is named, argued, “Will we protect these men [African-Americans] or will we leave them to be overborne and butchered?” The House passed the bill, but the Senate didn’t act on it. Even in Lincoln’s party, opinion was divided on how far they were willing to go to protect and defend black people’s rights.

Once the Union troops left the South, African-Americans’ rights were stripped by means both legal and violent. The violent means—the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—everyone knows about. Somewhat less well known are the legal efforts—the state constitutions passed by southern states that explicitly enshrined white supremacism in law. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” said the Mississippian James Vardaman of that state’s 1890 constitution. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.”6

That was led by the Democratic Party, which was then a white supremacist party (in the South; in the North, it was the party of immigrants). But, as Lichtman writes, it’s not as if the Republicans fought for blacks. After Reconstruction, they ended their efforts in the South, leaving the region and its people to the Jim Crow Democrats. Those African-Americans who could vote were loyal Republican voters for obvious reasons, but over the course of the early twentieth century that loyalty waned. From 1896 to 1932, Republicans controlled the White House for all but eight years, and Congress for much of that time; yet, writes Lichtman, they could never rouse themselves to pass an anti-lynching law. The National Colored Republican Conference complained in 1924, “In the party’s willingness to be fair, many have no confidence, and a change is imperative.” Four years later, when Herbert Hoover proved more tone-deaf than usual on race and civil rights, African-Americans were already prepared to bolt the party for Franklin Roosevelt—belying the idea that the Depression prompted them to switch sides.

As awfully as blacks were treated, the white men who ran the country took their plight more seriously than they did that of women. The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the right to citizenship for blacks, also said, in Section 2, “But when the right to vote at any election…is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State…” It was the first insertion of the word “male” into the Constitution, as Lichtman notes, and it happened over the clear objections of the great women’s leaders of the day. Susan B. Anthony demanded that Republicans “hold the party to a logical consistency that shall give every responsible citizen in every State equal right to the ballot,” but even the most progressive-minded male leaders argued that they could pass legislation enforcing voting rights for blacks, but if they included women’s suffrage, it would fail. “I know that the time will come,” said Ohio senator Benjamin Wade, one of the most radical of the Radical Republicans. “Not today, but the time is approaching.” Women would hear this for another six decades, and they continue to hear it in different forms today.

Still, at least when women finally did win suffrage, the right was largely recognized. This was never so for African-Americans. Nothing that Republicans are doing today is new. In the early days of the republic, Lichtman writes, members of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party raised regular allegations of voter fraud and sought to require men to bring to the polls proof of their property qualifications. As for “ballot security,” as the Republicans sometimes call their efforts, the GOP rolled out “Operation Eagle Eye” back in 1964, the first modern election in which the party sought to appeal to the racist vote. Eagle Eye targeted heavily Democratic, mostly minority precincts in thirty-six cities. It was based on a program that had already been tried in Arizona, which involved voter intimidation, the circulation of handbills warning that if you had outstanding parking tickets you couldn’t vote—the usual tricks. It didn’t work, but no one was ever known to have been caught and prosecuted or punished for it in any way. One of the participants in the Arizona program, William Rehnquist, was “punished” a quarter-century later by being confirmed as the sixteenth chief justice of the Supreme Court.

William Rehnquist, sixteenth chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Today, as we approach November and a highly anticipated anti-Trump wave at the polls, Republicans in jurisdictions they control are getting more and more brazen in their voter-suppression efforts. The most darkly comic attempt emanated from Georgia, where election officials sought to close seven out of nine polling places in one predominantly African-American county because they weren’t compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Citizens protested. County officials at first insisted that they absolutely had only the county’s disabled voters in mind, until a national outcry forced them to reverse course.7

In North Carolina, the stakes are unusually high. The state legislature, Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice told me, will be elected according to new district maps, the old ones having been tossed out by a court because of racial gerrymandering. It’s unlikely the Democrats can win enough seats to capture a majority, but they can win enough to end the Republican supermajority, which would mean the legislature could no longer override vetoes by Democratic governor Roy Cooper.

The congressional elections, however, will still be based on the districts the Republicans drew seven years ago. On August 27, a panel of three federal judges in the state found those districts to be unconstitutional due to partisan gerrymandering, but it also said that it was too late to draw new ones by November 6. Nevertheless, depending on the strength of Democratic turnout, the party could gain as many as three House seats there.

Voting-rights advocates had hoped that the Supreme Court would hear the challenge to the North Carolina districting while Anthony Kennedy was still on the bench, which could have given them a fighting chance at a decision that would ban partisan gerrymandering. A victory in that case would have had thunderous ramifications. The Court may still hear it, but with Kavanaugh now filling Kennedy’s seat, the already slim hope of success would seem to be nonexistent.

2013: Part of Voting Rights Act struck down

Beyond 2018, Democrats, liberal nonprofits, foundations, and donors simply must be more focused on these issues and put more resources into fighting Republicans. There should be a broad push, for example, for amending the Constitution to include a basic federal right to vote. Some people are surprised to learn this isn’t in the Constitution, but it is the sort of thing the founders left to the states. A federal right would make all these state voter-suppression laws eminently more challengeable.

Right now, however, the general posture of these groups is that they don’t want to tinker with the Constitution; doing that is “their” issue (i.e., the right’s). This is astonishingly shortsighted. One day, given the way polarization is testing the limits of our system of checks and balances, a public consensus might well emerge acknowledging that some changes to the Constitution are needed. The right has its list; it is topped by a federal balanced budget amendment, which would decimate domestic spending or entitlements or both. Is the left just to remain silent when the time for that debate arrives?

If the current third wave of voter-suppression techniques is halted, history suggests that there will be a fourth and a fifth. Today’s Republican Party is not simply trying to win elections. It is simultaneously trying to rewrite the rules—gerrymandering and voter suppression are crucial to this effort—so that it never loses a federal election again. Too many liberals can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this. I hope that on this issue, as has happened on some others, the age of Trump will finally cause the scales to fall from their eyes.

—October 11, 2018

1. 1
   See Michael Wines, “Wisconsin Strict ID Law Discouraged Voters, Study Finds,” The New York Times, September 25, 2017. ↩
2. 2
   See my “Ratfucked Again,” The New York Review, June 7, 2018. ↩
3. 3
   See Justin Levitt, “A Comprehensive Investigation of Voter Impersonation Finds 31 Credible Incidents Out of One Billion Votes Cast,” The Washington Post, August 6, 2014.  ↩
4. 4
   The Case for Impeachment (William Morrow/Dey Street, 2017); reviewed in these pages by Noah Feldman and Jacob Weisberg, September 28, 2017. ↩
5. 5
   For a discussion of these complications, see Barrett Holmes Pitner, “The Best Way to Fight Voter-ID Laws? Give Voters IDs!,” The Daily Beast, August 28, 2018. ↩
6. 6
   See Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 43. ↩
7. 7
   See Dana Milbank, “The GOP Turns to Toilets to Suppress More Black Voters,” The Washington Post, August 21, 2018.  ↩

Anti-Semitic incidents surge  in NYC and U.S. Jews 2% of U.S. population, but 50% of bias targets.

Rabbi Joshua Bolton of the University of Pennsylvania's Hillel center surveys damaged headstones at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia in 2017. (Jacqueline Larma for AP)

NY DAILY NEWS

The massacre of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue was the deadliest attack on Jews in the U.S. — but in a nation where anti-Semitic assaults have skyrocketed in the last two years, it was hardly an aberration.

And the picture was no less disturbing in New York, where more and more Jews have found themselves in the cross hairs of hate, law enforcement officials say.

As of Oct. 7, the NYPD counted 116 bias incidents against Jews this year. That’s three fewer than than the same time period in 2017 — but the Anti-Defamation League points out that the 2018 number already includes 12 anti-Semitic assaults, which is up from 11 all of last year.

Two assaults were reported in Brooklyn this month.

On Oct. 14, an Orthodox Jewish man was beaten by a livery cab driver at a traffic intersection in Borough Park.

A day later, a black teenager chased a Jewish man in Crown Heights and hit him in the back and shoulders with a stick.

Across the country, the Anti-Defamation League identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016, and also reported a major increase in anti-Semitic harassment online.

While Jews account for about 2% of the U.S. population, they make up more than half of the Americans targeted by hate crimes committed due to religious bias, according to FBI data.

I just want to kill Jews’

Officials name 11 killed; victims ages 54 to 97
After walking into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and killing 11 congregants, the authorities say, Robert Bowers turned his weapons on the police. Barricading himself on an upper floor, Mr. Bowers engaged in a desperate shootout that left him and four police officers wounded.

Bowers, armed with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle stormed the Tree of Life synagogue here Saturday and shot worshipers during Shabbat services, killing 11 and wounding six in the deadliest attack on Jews in the history of the United States.

The mass shooting targeted members of a synagogue that is an anchor of Pittsburgh’s large and close-knit Jewish community,

Why journalist Jamal Khashoggi's  murder captured the outrage and media attention that Saudi-Yemen war has not.

People take part in a candle light vigil to remember journalist Jamal Khashoggi outside the Saudi Consulate on Oct. 25 in Istanbul. (Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON POST
In the months before the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s government racked up a startling record of human rights abuses.

It has led a coalition waging a brutal war in neighboring Yemen, which has killed at least 10,000 people, though the United Nations stopped updating the toll two years ago, including 40 children whose school bus was bombed in August. Saudi officials have jailed dissidents, busi­ness ­peo­ple, clerics and journalists, as well as royal rivals to the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Repeated efforts by United Nations diplomats to broker a truce between the chief antagonists, a Saudi-led military coalition and Yemen’s Houthi insurgents, have failed.

The war has led to a staggering humanitarian catastrophe, punctuated by disease, famine and near-famine conditions in parts of the country.

Last week Mark Lowcock, the top humanitarian relief official of the United Nations, said the number of Yemenis who need emergency food to survive could soon reach 14 million, half the population.

The Saudis intervened in Yemen in March 2015 after the Houthis had occupied much of the country and expelled the Saudi-backed government in Sana, the capital. The Saudis contend that the Houthis are supported by Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional adversary.

None of the Saudi atrocities and trespasses generated sustained outrage, at least not in the West. Thanks to crafty public relations management, Mohammed until recently enjoyed an image as a progressive reformer and staunch American ally. On a recent goodwill tour of the United States, he was cordially received by the likes of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Oprah Winfrey and Rupert Murdoch.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh on October 23, 2018. (Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images) 

The murder of Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul appears to have changed all that. Mr. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was killed in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate by a team of Saudi operatives. The operatives had close ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, architect of the Yemen war and a key Trump administration ally in isolating Iran. The Saudi leadership has denied responsibility for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing in explanations that have changed several times since he disappeared on Oct. 2.

On Wednesday, in Turkey’s first official account of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi inside the consulate, the Istanbul chief prosecutor said he had been immediately strangled and his body dismembered and destroyed.

Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist, had visited the Istanbul consulate to obtain documents that would allow him to marry his fiancée.CreditMiddle East Monitor, via Reuters

Why the reaction to Khashoggi, a man few people had heard of until his murder, when so many other acts of barbarity by the Saudis have been largely overlooked?

The answer may be a combination of the time and place of Khashoggi’s murder, and the apparently gruesome circumstances of his death, which may have made his story more “relatable” to American viewers and readers. The accumulation of details has created the kind of sustained news coverage that the faceless victims of war and violence rarely receive, experts on international affairs say.

The Khashoggi story has been prominent in the American news media almost since he walked into the consulate on Oct. 2. Governments around the world, including the United States’, have called on Saudi Arabia to account for what happened. In the days since, a Saudi investment conference involving American media companies and investors has all but collapsed in reaction. 

Apart from the geopolitical implications of Khashoggi’s killing, the volume of news coverage about him is a validation of a saying attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

Though not widely known before this month, Khashoggi was well connected in Washington. A former Saudi insider himself, he lived in exile in Northern Virginia and was a familiar figure among Washington’s foreign-policy wonks, politicians and media figures. He had also worked since last year as a contributing columnist for The Post, an association that gave him an establishment perch and international cachet.

Brutal violence happens relatively frequently in Saudi Arabia, but the victims tend to be anonymous, Jamal was not anonymous.

It’s also important that Khashoggi was killed outside the kingdom. The murder of a dissident inside Saudi Arabia would very likely have been covered up. In this case, the events in question occurred in Turkey, a country with an adversarial relationship with Saudi Arabia and thus an incentive to expose what happened.

In fact, the Turkish government has been the leading source of leaks about the incident, providing such key bits of information as the identities of some men in the alleged Saudi “hit squad” and closed-circuit footage of Khashoggi entering the consulate. Each new revelation — released at strategic points over the past month — has propelled the story. (The irony is that Turkey ranks as the world’s foremost jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.)

What’s more, Turkish officials have been the source of media reports about the way Khashoggi was said to have been tortured, beheaded and dismembered inside the building.

“What’s been reported is so brazen and so gruesome that it seems like something out of a horror movie,” said Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

The allegations have turned the Khashoggi case into “one of the most craven and depraved killings of a journalist that I can recall,” said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “The brutality inflicted is the kind of thing you see from a terrorist group, not a state actor.”

The rigging of American politics

Political systems depend on legitimacy. In America, that legitimacy is failing.

American Democracy Is Malfunctioning in Tragic Fashion

EZRA KLEIN, VOX



JOHN CASSIDY, NEW YORKER

It Can Happen Here.

CASS SUNSTEIN, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

by Milton Mayer, with a new afterword by Richard J. Evans

University of Chicago Press, 378 pp., $20.00 (paper)

Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century

by Konrad H. Jarausch

Princeton University Press, 446 pp., $35.00

Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.

In such a time, we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. The problem is that Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric that for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler’s regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again.

But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them. They offer lessons for people who now live with genuine horrors, and also for those to whom horrors may never come but who live in nations where democratic practices and norms are under severe pressure.

Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. Dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch, it provides a jarring contrast with Sebastian Haffner’s devastating, unfinished 1939 memoir, Defying Hitler, which gives a moment-by-moment, you-are-there feeling to Hitler’s rise. (The manuscript was discovered by Haffner’s son after the author’s death and published in 2000 in Germany, where it became an immediate sensation.)* A much broader perspective comes from Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives, an effort to reconstruct the experience of Germans across the entire twentieth century. What distinguishes the three books is their sense of intimacy. They do not focus on historic figures making transformative decisions. They explore how ordinary people attempted to navigate their lives under terrible conditions.

Haffner’s real name was Raimund Pretzel. (He used a pseudonym so as not to endanger his family while in exile in England.) He was a journalist, not a historian or political theorist, but he interrupts his riveting narrative to tackle a broad question: “What is history, and where does it take place?” He objects that most works of history give “the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to be ‘at the helm of the ship of state’ and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history.” In his view, that’s wrong. What matters are “we anonymous others” who are not just “pawns in the chess game,” because the “most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” Haffner insists on the importance of investigating “some very peculiar, very revealing, mental processes and experiences,” involving “the private lives, emotions and thoughts of individual Germans.”

Milton Mayer

Mayer had the same aim. An American journalist of German descent, he tried to meet with Hitler in 1935. He failed, but he did travel widely in Nazi Germany. Stunned to discover a mass movement rather than a tyranny of a diabolical few, he concluded that his real interest was not in Hitler but in people like himself, to whom “something had happened that had not (or at least not yet) happened to me and my fellow-countrymen.” In 1951, he returned to Germany to find out what had made Nazism possible.

In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew.

In the late 1930s—the period that most interested Mayer—his subjects were working as a janitor, a soldier, a cabinetmaker, an office manager, a baker, a bill collector, an inspector, a high school teacher, and a police officer. One had been a high school student. All were male. None of them occupied positions of leadership or influence. All of them referred to themselves as “wir kleine Leute, we little people.” They lived in Marburg, a university town on the river Lahn, not far from Frankfurt.

Mayer talked with them over the course of a year, under informal conditions—coffee, meals, and long, relaxed evenings. He became friends with each (and throughout he refers to them as such). As he put it, with evident surprise, “I liked them. I couldn’t help it.” They could be ironic, funny, and self-deprecating. Most of them enjoyed a joke that originated in Nazi Germany: “What is an Aryan? An Aryan is a man who is tall like Hitler, blond like Goebbels, and lithe like Göring.” They also could be wise. Speaking of the views of ordinary people under Hitler, one of them asked:

Opposition? How would anybody know? How would anybody know what somebody else opposes or doesn’t oppose? That a man says he opposes or doesn’t oppose depends upon the circumstances, where, and when, and to whom, and just how he says it. And then you must still guess why he says what he says.

When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt “that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man,” and that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”

Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives.

Mayer suggests that even when tyrannical governments do horrific things, outsiders tend to exaggerate their effects on the actual experiences of most citizens, who focus on their own lives and “the sights which meet them in their daily rounds.” Nazism made things better for the people Mayer interviewed, not (as many think) because it restored some lost national pride but because it improved daily life. Germans had jobs and better housing. They were able to vacation in Norway or Spain through the “Strength Through Joy” program. Fewer people were hungry or cold, and the sick were more likely to receive treatment. The blessings of the New Order, as it was called, seemed to be enjoyed by “everybody.”
Even in retrospect Mayer’s subjects liked and admired Hitler. They saw him as someone who had “a feeling for masses of people” and spoke directly in opposition to the Versailles Treaty, to unemployment—to all aspects of the existing order. They applauded Hitler for his rejection of “the whole pack”—“all the parliamentary politicians and all the parliamentary parties”—and for his “cleanup of moral degenerates.” The bank clerk described Hitler as “a spellbinder, a natural orator. I think he was carried away from truth, even from truth, by his passion. Even so, he always believed what he said.”

Mayer did not bring up the topic of anti-Semitism with any of his subjects, but after a few meetings, each of them did so on his own, and they returned to it constantly. When the local synagogue was burned in 1938, most of the community was under only one obligation: “not to interfere.” Eventually Mayer showed his subjects the local newspaper from November 11, 1938, which contained a report: “In the interest of their own security, a number of male Jews were taken into custody yesterday. This morning they were sent away from the city.” None of them remembered seeing it, or indeed anything like it.

The killing of six million Jews? Fake news. Four of Mayer’s subjects insisted that the only Jews taken to concentration camps were traitors to Germany, and that the rest were permitted to leave with their property or its fair market value. The bill collector agreed that the killing of the Jews “was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did.” He added that “some say it happened and some say it didn’t,” and that you “can show me pictures of skulls…but that doesn’t prove it.” In any case, “Hitler had nothing to do with it.” The tailor spoke similarly: “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.”

With evident fatigue, the baker reported, “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.” His account was similar to that of one of Mayer’s colleagues, a German philologist in the country at the time, who emphasized the devastatingly incremental nature of the descent into tyranny and said that “we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.” The philologist pointed to a regime bent on diverting its people through endless dramas (often involving real or imagined enemies), and “the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise.” In his account, “each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’” that people could no more see it “developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

Sebastian Haffner

Focusing largely on 1933, in Defying Hitler Haffner offers a radically different picture, in which the true nature of Nazism was evident to many Germans from the start. Just twenty-five years old that year and studying law with the goal of becoming a judge or administrator, he describes the mounting effects of Nazism on the lives of his high-spirited friends and fellow students, who were preoccupied with fun, job prospects, and love affairs. Haffner says that as soon as the Nazis took power, he was saved by his capacity to smell the rot:

As for the Nazis, my nose left me with no doubts. It was just tiresome to talk about which of their alleged goals and intentions were still acceptable or even “historically justified” when all of it stank. How it stank! That the Nazis were enemies, my enemies and the enemies of all I held dear, was crystal clear to me from the outset.

As Haffner describes it, a form of terror began quickly, as members of the SS made their presence felt, intimidating people in public places. At the same time, citizens were distracted by an endless stream of festivities and celebrations. The intimidation, accompanied by the fervent, orchestrated pro-Nazi activity, produced an increase in fear, which led many skeptics to become Nazis. Nonetheless, people flirted, enjoyed romances, “went to the cinema, had a meal in a small wine bar, drank Chianti, and went dancing together.” Sounding here like Mayer’s subjects, Haffner writes that it was the “automatic continuation of ordinary life” that “hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror.”

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

A protest against the election of Trump outside the US embassy, London, November 2016

In Haffner’s telling, the collapse of freedom and the rule of law occurred in increments, some of which seemed to be relatively small and insignificant. In 1933, when Nazi officers stood menacingly outside Jewish shops, Jews were merely “offended. Not worried or anxious. Just offended.” But Haffner insists that Hitler’s brutality and the ongoing politicization of everyday life were clear from the outset. In the early days of the regime, a self-styled republican advised him to avoid skeptical comments, which would be of no use: “I think I know the fascists better than you. We republicans must howl with the wolves.”

Haffner catalogs the howling. Books started to disappear from bookshops and libraries. Journals and newspapers disappeared as well, and those that remained kept to the party line. Even in 1933, Germans who refused to become Nazis found themselves “in a fiendish situation: it was one of complete and unalleviated hopelessness; you were daily subjected to insults and humiliations.” Haffner sought refuge in the private domain, including with a small group of young people studying law, who had formed something like an intimate debating club. They were very good friends. One of the members, named Holz, held nationalistic views. Others disagreed, but it was all civil, the kind of energetic discussion young people often have about politics.

The group fell apart when Holz accused Haffner of “ignoring the monumental developments in the resurgence of the German people” and of being “a latent danger to the state”—and ominously threatened to denounce him to the Gestapo. Not far from its end, Haffner’s narrative provides a delicate and almost unbearably moving account of several idyllic weeks with the love of his life, who was engaged to an Englishman and who was about to leave Germany for good. (Seeing his distress after informing him of her engagement, she responded with infinite gentleness: “For now I’m still here.”) Summarizing those weeks, and something about human resilience, Haffner’s unfinished manuscript offers some words from the poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “Let us not look forward/Nor back. Be cradled, as in/A swaying boat on the sea.”

While Haffner concentrates largely on a single year, Jarausch’s topic is a century. In Broken Lives he draws on more than seventy personal memoirs produced by Germans who were mostly born in the 1920s. His aim is to produce a “vivid and personal picture of what it meant to live through the twentieth century,” rooted in the perspectives of people who were born after the carnage of World War I, and who generally enjoyed happy and even carefree childhoods in the Weimar Republic. It’s a wide-ranging, panoramic, revealing treatment, and for the most part, it’s very dark.

Jarausch offers a fact-filled account of the lives of “Nazi adolescents” a few years younger than Haffner, and of the immense social pressures that led to the rapid growth of the Nazi movement among young people. One of the Nazis’ clever strategies, which they adopted immediately after assuming power, was to increase those pressures by enforcing “an appearance of unanimous support for the Third Reich.” Many Germans were not so much pro-Hitler as anti-anti-Hitler—and their opposition to Hitler’s adversaries aided his rise. Decades afterward, memoirists referred to their “happy times” in the Hitler Youth, focusing not on ideology but on hiking trips, camaraderie, and summer camps.

In Jarausch’s account, things got much worse for Germans starting on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. A few days later, England and France declared war on Germany. One memoirist noted that with the Great War looming in the background, “no flags were flying, there was no approval, no enthusiasm.” Jarausch painstakingly describes the ensuing developments, starting with the initial triumphs of the Wehrmacht and the rapid conquest of Poland, and ending with the Normandy invasion, the relentless advance of the Red Army, and Hitler’s suicide.

After the war, defeat meant a new beginning for many, a kind of opportunity, and Jarausch shows how Germans—grim, shell-shocked, determined—returned to ordinary life and bet on a better future. Avoiding nationalism or even national pride, they succeeded in rebuilding their economy and their morale. Jarausch’s main focus is on West Germany, but he devotes considerable attention to the collapse of communism in the German Democratic Republic, suggesting that it foundered because it disappointed and disillusioned its citizens. Though his unifying theme is that the lives of countless Germans were broken in multiple ways, his conclusion is upbeat: many Germans have been transformed “into sincere democrats and pacifists who want to prevent a recurrence of earlier horrors.”

For those who seek to understand the German experience in the twentieth century, Jarausch has done a tremendous service. He paints on a much broader canvas than Mayer and Haffner, even when he explores Hitler’s rise. But precisely because of the fine-grained, intimate nature of their accounts, Mayer and Haffner speak more directly to those concerned about what makes authoritarianism possible. Of course we can’t be sure whether to believe Mayer’s subjects when they claim ignorance of what Hitler actually did. (Mayer isn’t sure either.) But they are convincing when they say that at the time they were mostly focused on their families, their friends, and their everyday lives. Haffner’s depiction of the “automatic continuation of ordinary life,” possible for so many amid their government’s step-by-step assault on freedom and dignity, is in the same vein.

All three authors are keenly aware that their narratives offer important lessons, and these should not be lost on contemporary readers. Turkey, for example, has been sliding toward authoritarianism through tactics not unlike those of the Nazis: jailing political dissidents, attacking freedom of speech, treating critics as enemies of the state, and obliterating checks and balances. Thus far, President Trump has been more bark than bite. But some of the barks have a history that is at once ugly and revealing. The Nazis applied the term Lügenpresse (lying press) to the mainstream press; President Trump refers to the “FAKE NEWS media,” which, he says, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” In significant domains (including climate change), his administration denigrates science; he has even failed to fill the position of White House science adviser. The Nazis also dismissed or politicized science (especially Einstein’s “Jewish Science”) in favor of what they claimed to be the spirit of the Volk.

If the president of the United States is constantly lying, complaining that the independent press is responsible for fake news, calling for the withdrawal of licenses from television networks, publicly demanding jail sentences for political opponents, undermining the authority of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, magnifying social divisions, delegitimizing critics as “crooked” or “failing,” and even refusing, in violation of the law, to protect young children against the risks associated with lead paint—well, it’s not fascism, but the United States has not seen anything like it before.

With our system of checks and balances, full-blown authoritarianism is unlikely to happen here, but it would be foolish to ignore the risks that Trump and his administration pose to established norms and institutions, which help preserve both order and liberty. Those risks will grow if opposition to violations of long-standing norms is limited to Democrats, and if Republicans laugh, applaud, agree with, or make excuses for Trump—if they howl with the wolf.

In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.”

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, translated by Oliver Pretzel (Picador, 2003). ↩