What is there now? There is the power of hope, the power of community, of solidarity, of neighborly commitment.
By Ed Simon
Otto Wels’ name is not commonly recognized in the United States; there are no streets or schools named after him, no statues or memorials in America. Chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, a party of workers and assorted unionists that drew from the socialist left, Wels was a figure of occasionally some power and influence who nonetheless made any number of strategic missteps in his own political career, or whose own foresight often blundered, which is to say that he’s like any stateman, like any person. During World War I, he supported the agreement between parliamentary parties to refrain from criticizing Berlin, a cowardly move that no doubt extended the bloodshed (even while Wels would be adamantly anti-war as armistice approached). The parliamentarian was perhaps not as forceful against German militarism as he could have been, nor did Wels take the initial threat of fascism as seriously as he could have. Yet on March 23, 1933, at the last multi-party session of the Reichstag convened in the Weimar Republic, this hearty, stout, dark-haired and mustachioed son of Prussian innkeepers would be the only speaker to denounce the Enabling Act that was about to cede complete power to the recently appointed Chancelor Adolf Hitler.
The members of his own party, who hadn’t yet been arrested or forced into exile, unanimously voted against the legislation that would transform Hitler into an absolute dictator while Wels’ courageously stood within the rococo resplendence of the Kroll Opera House where the legislature had met since the suspicious Reichstag fire of several month earlier, and before both his compatriots and the shortly victorious Nazis he delivered a prophetic jeremiad in front of the forces of authoritarianism then ascendant. Before hundreds wearing armbands and pins featuring the twisted cross of the swastika, Wels and his party did “solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom.” SDP members were arrested before Wels’ speech was even finished. He fled to Prague and then later to Paris, where he would die two weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the culmination of what W.H. Auden called a “low dishonest decade” when “Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth.” The Reich that was to last a thousand years ended six years after Wels’ died, though he didn’t get to see that victory. There was no happy ending to Wels’ own story, no preordained or assumed triumph. Certainly, having been completely defeated, and knowing that his own life was in danger, Wels’ speech was hardly meant to change minds, to convert reticent fascists away from the abyss that they were busily and gleefully preparing for their nation. But that’s irrelevant.
For what Wels did, in his bravery, in his commitment to principle, was worth it all the same. The speech he delivered before the Reichstag was a failure, but a necessary one. We often hear that when faced with authoritarianism, and the inevitable atrocities which it delivers, that we are to “bear witness.” So omnipresent is that declaration, so cliched, that it can scarcely seem reassuring to those facing the brunt of that authoritarianism, fascism, and totalitarianism, yet that doesn’t make it less true. Wels’ speech didn’t save his country, but it saved his soul, and when we’re otherwise powerless that can be enough – it must be enough. There Wells stood because he could do no other; he declared a truth in a place where telling that truth had become a crime, and that affirming flame was only needed more because of all of the horrors that were yet to come. “No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible,” Wels said, claiming for himself an “unbroken optimism… [that] guarantees a brighter future.”
Wels never saw it, yet it still came.
This morning, I woke up to a text from a friend of mine that read “Despair is a luxury that we can’t afford.” I’ll be honest, I didn’t really feel that in my soul at that moment, as genuinely moved as I was by the kindness in my friend in sending it. But it’s something that I must believe, that I choose to believe. No doubt many of us are placating ourselves as the unthinkable descends by telling ourselves that we were here before, but we weren’t. Whatever is coming will be far worse than those four years. For more than a decade now authoritarianism has been on the rise throughout the developed world; a victory for fascism in the United States – and the president elect’s own former military advisers, cabinet members, and staff have called him that – will only encourage the tide of nativism, bigotry, homophobia, and religious intolerance throughout the world. The presidency has been lost; the Senate has been lost; the judiciary was already lost; the House may very well yet be lost. The culture and media will capitulate in ways that we can’t imagine now. Internationally, Ukraine will be lost, Gaza will most likely be eradicated, and the future of allies from Europe to Taiwan should be in doubt. Reproductive freedom will be eliminated, LGBTQ Americans will be persecuted, mass deportations of immigrants “legal” and otherwise can be expected. The civil service will be gutted, and corruption will be rampant; the already porous wall of separation between church and state will collapse, while education, free speech and the opposition will all be challenged, if not silenced.
There are no silver-linings here – if in 2016 we could pretend that guardrails would hold, now we know that they won’t. If in 2016 the fairytale that an archaic constitutional order merely disenfranchised the popular voice, such an American psychic panacea is no longer available. That our region went red is particularly devastating, especially after legislation under the current administration had led to a return of manufacturing in the exact places carved out and depleted by the sorts of hyper-capitalist policies that the incoming administration will inevitably pursue, their populism as faux today as it was eight years ago. We can blame misogyny – racism. We can blame the fact that a third of this nation hates another third more than they care about themselves, about their own children. We can blame Americans. An irony of this result is that many of those who enabled it will suffer, but then of course all of us will. When the tariffs cripple middle class Americans – when the price of eggs and milk doesn’t magically go down – will all of this has been worth it? The majority of voting Americans elected a 34-count convicted felon investigated for stealing state secrets who led an attempted coup against the democratically elected U.S. government. This time he didn’t even need the coup. Most Americans wanted this. There is no historical fantasy of American exceptionalism, of the arc of history or of the city on a hill.
This moment isn’t redeemable, but we may be yet, since again, now more than ever, what my friend said is true – despite that litany, despair is a luxury that we simply can’t afford. And so, I tell myself that, and I try and believe it, and I think that maybe I can, at least some of the time, and perhaps that will be good enough. Perhaps we need not be of nations, but for our children, our families, our communities. What is there now? There is the power of hope, the power of community, of solidarity, of neighborly commitment. Not of magnanimity towards those who’d want us destroyed, but empowerment towards those of us who must be protected. These sorts of things remain radical, they remain a form of resistance where, like Wels’, even if you don’t save your country, you can preserve your soul. This isn’t defeatism, this isn’t telling you to tend to your own garden. I’ve no idea what protest, or policy, rectifies this disaster, but I don’t need to. As the Talmud tells us, none of us are required to be those that finish the work, but nor does that mean that we’re allowed to abandon it.
“Practice corporeal politics,” writes the historian Tim Snyder in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.” Snyder’s call isn’t about “self-care” or “self-help,” it’s not a naval-gazing plea to touch grass, but a deeply human, humane, empathetic, and revolutionary understanding of how we fight fascism within ourselves, where it must be conquered before we can hope to defeat it in the wider society. Again, that means the power of hope, of community, of solidarity, of neighborly commitment. It means trying to build a paradise, no matter how small within the depths of hell, as Rebecca Solnit describes in Hope in the Dark: The Untold Story of People Power, for in this moment the “future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.” There is no solution today, but I know that there will be solutions. They do not come from individuals, but they come from all of us. To prepare yourself with kindness to those who will suffer, to the ever-expanding marginalized and the ever-increasing oppressed, is itself a form of resistance. Do not let what is kind in you wither, what is empathetic go silent, what is human disappear.
Today I read some poetry, because why not? Dennis Nurske in a poem entitled “Marbles and a Dead Bee,” written in 2016 and compiled in the Amit Majmudar anthology Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now writes with Auden’s same sense of horror that “Imago was elected this morning/in the gray hour before dawn/the last firewall crumbled… As a dropped bulb shatters/so my country.” Despite the dusk, despite the darkness, there are means of keeping your humanity, which may be small for sure, but that exist all the same. “The poet will defend herself with poetry,” writes Nurske, “the child with marbles.” There is, it would seem, little room for hope. There is suicide of the nation and of the soul, but “if you choose to kill yourself/find a quiet room in the past,” writes Nurske, in a place that is gone, since right now both the present and the future have need of you, of all of you. Because “Tonight your life is required for a task.” And so that task continues.
Ed Simon is a writer from Pittsburgh.
