Not only do we have to do the right thing, in little and big ways, regardless of the consequences, visibly and invisibly, but we all have to do it at the same time, alone, yet together in solidarity with people we do not know.
In order for it to be safe for me to stand up, you have to stand up, and in order for you to stand up, I have to stand up, and both of us want to stand up, but we fear retaliation, and neither of us knows if we will be standing alone or not until we do it. I believe I was fired in retaliation in 2022, leading to only a shred of peripheral news coverage and one scathing editorial about the hiding of documents pertaining to it. I had been working for a school district in a town that I think of as a horrifying prototype for Trump’s “Great America” where at least one notorious civil rights violation happened, and they named their court The Donald J. Trump Justice Complex. I have been trying to resist and warn people about Fascism’s rise ever since. People need to know that we are in a real life version of the prisoner’s dilemma now.
In the prisoner’s dilemma, two prisoners are in separate interrogation rooms, and the police have no evidence. If one prisoner tattles on the other, the one who tattles goes free, but they both go free if both of them refuse to betray each other. Like the prisoners, we need not to sell each other out for our own safety, or we will sell ourselves and our country out too.
There is an obscure book about Fascism called They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer who interviewed ordinary Germans in the 1950s to learn about their experiences of Fascism, and their reflections after the fact. Mayer befriended one German who was truly aware of the threat Hitler and Fascism posed, but he did not follow his conscience at a crucial moment. When Mayer asked him, “Tell me now—how was the world lost?” He replied:
“The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of ‘total conscription.’ Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to ‘think it over.’ In those twenty-four hours I lost the world…”
Mayer was confused, and his friend explained that he had not wanted to sign the oath, but that he reasoned that he would be unable to find another job if he was fired, and he would be of no use to his friends, some of whom were Jews who would need help later on, if he was unemployed. He committed the immediate evil of signing the oath on the hope of greater good later, and he regretted it even though he did save lives later when his apartment became a safe house. He explained his regret to Mayer this way:
“There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”
I am not recommending a course of action, but it is easy to see that the position federal employees have been put in is one of many that will be exactly like it in parallel across the country. I had expected Trump to demand a loyalty oath before mass firings, but I think that will come later. Trump’s preliminary equivalent was asking people to quit with supposed pay which appears to be a common strategy used against whistleblowers and victims of civil rights violations at work, especially at local and state levels. It is more palatable, avoids much of a fight, and ensures no liability for the state. Trump’s recent offer comes with a promise of paid leave, but I do not expect payment will ever materialize.
I do not want to resist: I want not to have to resist, but I cannot imagine doing anything besides resistance if Fascism is the alternative. I woke up crying from a nightmare not long ago because I am afraid that not enough of us will refuse to betray each other, and that it may already be too late. Fighting Fascism can be very lonely, but I reassure myself that, across the generations and human history, I am in good company. Every time we are standing up to cruelty, hatred, and evil, we are standing alongside everyone who ever stood up and sacrificed for kindness, love, and good in the world from Jesus Christ, to Frederick Douglass, to ancestors we have never heard of because their heroism was lost to history. We may be alone in that moment, or in that room, but we are not alone in the world.