The Fourth Reich

“So we march on, following our leaders, toward an ‘Armageddon of our own making.’”
― Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

When the war in Vietnam was shredding the American polity, there still remained a sense of recourse, a hope of change. The youth of that generation, almost without organization, made their way to Washington to express outrage and protest. We thought gathering in the streets of the American capitol city was the best approach to getting the attention of the president and congress, which was enabling an unjust war. The draft was also a great motivator. Turning eighteen meant you must register for the Selective Service and, unless you had a doctor’s letter certifying your bone spurs, the day would come when you would be staring at a black and white TV as graying white men in suits pulled birthdates out of a tumbler, determining your fate and, often, concluding your future. The draft was the source of much of the political resistance to the country’s Southeast Asian adventure. If you were a congressman’s son like George W. Bush, however, there was no need to fret about stomping through rice paddies toward enemy guns.

My draft number was 32, which meant when my student deferment for college expired, I was bound to join the U.S. Army, head to boot camp at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and then likely a transport to Vietnam. I figured I’d be dead within a few weeks, and began making plans, instead, for a life in Canada, my mother’s homeland. Fortunately, a few months before I was due to report for an induction physical, the Paris Peace Talks began and the draft was halted. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State who had extended the war to serve the political aspirations of Richard Nixon, was negotiating his version of peace. In 1968, Kissinger had passed information to the Nixon campaign to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations with North Vietnam, consequently improving Nixon’s election chances. Working for Nixon, Kissinger authorized and helped conceal a massive, covert bombing campaign in Cambodia and Laos, neutral nations, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, and the genocidal Khmer Rouge was born.

An estimated 1.5 to 3 million people, North and South Vietnamese, soldiers and civilians, including 58,220 American service members, died, largely as a political outcome of LBJ’s, Kissinger’s, and Nixon’s intrigues. I grew up around several of those lost. One was a teenaged quarter miler who had recorded the fastest time ever for a high schooler track athlete over 440 yards. He would have been the first Olympian, everyone was certain, from our hometown up in Michigan. Instead, the draft lottery pulled his number and he was scheduled for Vietnam in the second year of Nixon’s term. The superstar athlete lasted less than two months in-country, and was found dead behind the .50 caliber machine gun he had been manning on a half-track that had been sent on a search and destroy mission. No one who knew him back home had ever heard him talk of drugs, nor was he ever suspected of using, but there was a needle in his arm that day in the jungle when he was slumped over his gun. The Army listed his death as “self-inflicted, ground casualty.” Everyone who knew him seemed to understand he was frightened of the prospects of combat.

Lying and deception have always been a central facet of U.S. politics and policy. What we assumed separated us from the rest of the planet was this false notion that our governmental mechanics outed the bad actors. We put our faith in process, and we were fools. Democracy worked, some times, but increasingly, the rivulets of money and deception leaked into campaigns and lawmaking and what came out for us to behold was confounding and fraudulent and was not an expression of the majority’s sentiments. Just because Congress approved a few hundred billion for George W’s invasion of Iraq does not mean they were responding to their constituents' demands. Instead, they had fallen for the administration’s cascade of lies regarding weapons of mass destruction and allegations that the Iraqi dictator had been involved in funding and planning the 9/11 attack on New York City. The evidence to make the case was cooked, history and reportage have shown, and the real cause of the war was American imperialism determined to provide business access to the sea of oil, upon which the country floated. More lives and money were wasted on greed and power. Nobody tried to count the schools and clinics that might have been built and wells that could have been dug and diseases cured for children had there been a wiser use of all that cash.

Lying has, finally, become the currency of American politics, and even our government. When Bush’s political advisor derided a reporter’s question by suggesting that it was born from a “fact-based reality,” there was a cue that the truth had been sent to hospice. Another “reality” apparently existed and the public needed to learn to live within its false confines. There was a time when a politician or a public servant, caught out in a lie, would see their careers and campaigns come crashing down. During the Bush administration, lying became a tactic, and denial an endless strategy even when confronted with facts. The decline of honesty is traceable to the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan who convinced his voters that the government was the enemy, and not the organizing principle of our long and hopeful democracy. When he ended the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcast media using public airwaves to provide a balance of political information, he had fertilized the culture for outlanders like Rupert Murdoch to make a profitable business out of using broadcasting to disseminate lies for political purpose.

Reagan and his political heirs wanted to “shrink the government to a size that could be drowned in a bathtub.” Trump got the memo and handed it to Musk. Blunt force instruments are being used by the current administration to destroy institutions that have added to the quality of American education, culture, and history, protected us from disease and corruption, helped us recover from tragedy. Tens of thousands of people with decades of institutional memory are being lopped off employment payrolls and escorted out the door. There may be no way to recover that loss should we ever choose to try to rebuild our democracy. The swamp is not being drained; political napalm is falling on Washington, and the smoldering remnants of government are being weaponized. The Department of Justice is acting as the arm of a dictator and has been charged with prosecuting his political opponents and refusing to investigate the many and manifest corruptions of Trump and his consorts. Where once there stood a “nation of laws, not men,” cowards and flunkies flourish, unwilling and afraid to exercise principles, if they can even remember what they were.

Freedom of speech is being criminalized. Immigrants in the U.S. legally, studying at great universities, are being arrested for expressing resistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Protesting against Israel’s unjustified horrors and the slaughter of more than 45,000 Palestinians has been repositioned by conservative political advisors as anti-Semitism. Being sympathetic or supportive of the Palestinian people is becoming illegal on American soil, in part, because AIPAC spent an estimated $100 million dollars backing congressional candidates that supported Israel’s every military move to bomb schools and hospitals. Biden and Trump never stopped sending billions in bombs and planes to kill indiscriminately and Netanyahu makes claims that he controls the American presidents as he spreads terror further across the Mideast. Trump wants to turn Gaza into a seaside resort where tourists can have cocktails and watch oceanic sunsets with the ghosts of dead children. Netanyahu just wants Palestinians to disappear, either by their choice to leave or his decision to continue having them killed.

What voters want became irrelevant when the U.S. Supreme Court gave citizenship to corporations in the Citizens United decision. The multi-national businesses cast their ballots with cash, bought influence in the open, or set up dark money funds, sent fat stacks of dollars to any politician who was willing to make profits greater with tax cuts and weakened regulations. Your vote counted, but not much. Democracy became transactional, a business where cash was king and citizens were serfs on the sideline. Crypto sits a throne, too, and anyone, arms dealers, dictators, drug smugglers, the puffed up grand poobah of North Korea or a Russian oligarch, can now buy millions in digital Trump scam coins and let the president know about their largesse, which will get an audience and then an executive order or a policy change. Congress has become a vestigial organ and the Constitution a suggestion. Trump does not wish to govern; he wants only to destabilize and to then be sought out as a hero to save the global economy that he disrupted, a form of economic and political Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

The world will find a way without America; the damage has been done, and continues, not just to our global partners but is also self-inflicted. A Handmaid’s Tale is being lived out within the State Department where embassies and diplomats and functionaries are being urged to report on one another when anti-Christian sentiments are expressed. Don’t say Yahweh. Or Mohammed. The Bible is beginning to be taught in public schools as history, not as a religion, or a fantastical story that bears no basis in fact. The way we treat the “least of these” in the U.S. is to string razor wire along our border and erect a wall in front of their dreams of prosperity in the land of the formerly free. The Army has now been authorized to take control of the U.S.-Mexico frontier. As we wall ourselves off from our largest trading partner, we add levies to the products we buy from their companies. Good fences might make good neighbors, but they also create lousy economies, and endless resentment.

What’s happening in 2025 America resonates dangerously with the developments of post-Weimar Germany. We have that book open in front of us, and refuse to read. If there were another Lincoln in our midst, he might ask us again to summon “our better angels.” I suspect, however, they are on the wing, and have flown far away in great fear and embarrassment.