To the Hitler Station

        Last Friday's Republican debacle as their health care strategy collapsed was momentarily delicious but all the familiar pieces are still on the chess board: a Wall Street cabinet, a divided Congress, a Supreme Court turning to the Right for years to come and a president with no loyalty to truth or moral principle. Our danger continues unabated and in some ways is worse.

        David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has been one of the sharpest conservative critics of President Trump and recently noted in a national conference call on March 11 that we have a number of station stops before we get to the Hitler station,” but in the March Atlantic he described how that train could travel on down the line:

“Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency…Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it…conservative outrage…will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing anti-police slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see…. nobody in the history of American politics has deployed it as aggressively, as repeatedly, or with such success as Donald Trump.”

And the shift to autocracy, in many instances, won’t be that obvious: elections will still be held, just not quite as fairly; the press will remain free, but its standing will be undermined; life will go on as normal for most, but the economy and culture will slowly bend toward corruption.

       If you follow the news from North Carolina you know that no one can vote there without a photo ID.  News stories over last weekend described pro Trump parades violently attacked by Trump opponents. Last November (2016) CBS anchor Scott Peley observed that “The quickest, most direct way to ruin a democracy is to poison the information.”  

       Corruption abounds.  The New Yorker reported on March 7^th that their business reporter Adam Davidson spent months investigating the Trump Hotel deal in Baku where “Trump did business with corrupt partners who also did business with Iran's Revolutionary Guard. This would be in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

        The money-making schemes of Paul Manaford, today a senior Trump aide, range from managing the abrupt rise of the pro-Russian oligarch, Viktor Yanukovich, to the presidency of Ukraine (subsequently forced to flee from office by outraged Ukrainians) and selling his services to Putin during the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine two years ago. 

        This is without mentioning that the concentration of wealth in the U. S. and the weakening of regulatory controls and leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission create the easy means for big money to buy the loyalty of legislators and judges at both state and national levels.

       There’s one big  thing that could slow the Hitler train. It’s the churches and their interfaith colleagues who could pick up the mantel of Moses who defied Pharoah, of Jeremiah who opposed state corruption, of John the Baptist who called the chief priests and scribes of the Temple a “brood of vipers,” of Jesus who drove the money changers out of the Temple, of Paul who got tangled up with the Roman Empire.  If modern history is any teacher we know that great religious leaders have emerged to combat racism, the Vietnam War and globalization’s inequality; BUT we also know that the rank and file believers resisted losing their comfortable religion and its walled enclosures and so they withdrew, stranding their leaders and leaving society to make war, practice racism and accept unjust economic life as an act of nature.

        If good people----clergy and congregations----do nothing now, bowing to their local church or synagogue board, it is these nice people of faith who will be responsible for the triumph of evil as the Hitler train moves on to the next station.