Tag: fascism

Bitter Crop: A Conversation with Michael Meeropol

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Interviews used to be a mainstay of this blog, but it’s been a while since I’ve done one. So it’s fitting that the practice returns with the estimable Michael Meeropol.

Michael was ten years old in 1953 when his parents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death by the US government. While the case was already outrageously controversial at the time, subsequent scholarship has exposed even more howling misconduct by the government, particularly with regard to efforts to implicate Ethel and send her to the electric chair along with her husband, despite her innocence.

During their parents’ incarceration and following their executions, Michael and his younger brother Robert were at the harrowing center of the Red Scare hysteria, including being covertly surveilled by the FBI while they were still small children. They spent a number of years living with family friends and in a children’s shelter until they were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, who raised them. In a great irony, Abel was the composer of “Strange Fruit,” maybe the most haunting anthem ever written not only about lynching, but as an indictment of the entire history of racist terror in America.

Michael went on to become an accomplished professor of economics (now retired), writer, and progressive activist. He and his brother have also waged a brave, fifty-year crusade to discover and make public the truth about their parents’ persecution, no matter where that inquiry led and what it revealed. On that front, his daughter Ivy is also the director of a remarkable documentary about her grandparents called Heir to an Execution.

In short, few living Americans have the visceral first person experience of state terror as Michael, a perspective that he brings to the current political crisis. We spoke by Zoom. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

A LETHAL BLUFF

THE KING’S NECKTIE: For those young people who may not know the story, what do you think was the driving factor in the US government’s pursuit of your parents?

MICHAEL MEEROPOL: The government wanted my father to roll. They knew that he had organized a bunch of people to help the Soviet Union during World War II and after, and he wouldn’t rat them out, I think—not because he was an ideologue, but because they were his friends. My father violated all the rules of espionage and spycraft by recruiting his friends. So he wasn’t about to rat them out, period.

The other thing is that the government wanted to get the death penalty, and the only way to get that was to make believe that he had—through his brother-in-law—stolen the secret of the atom bomb. With 20/20 hindsight, it wasn’t the secret of the atom bomb. It probably had almost no positive impact on the Soviets. Then they arrest my mother to use as a lever against him; they basically took her as a hostage. And there’s this chilling statement by a former Justice Department official, William Rogers, who went on to be Secretary of State under Nixon. Just before he died Rogers told a reporter, “We didn’t want to kill them. We wanted them to talk.” And the reporter said, “What went wrong?” And Rogers said, “She called our bluff.”

Notice the word “our.” It was a team effort. The idea to get my father a death sentence was agreed upon by members of Congress, by members of the Justice Department, by the judge, Irving Kaufman, who was primed to give my father the death sentence. What was uncertain was whether they would give it to my mother too. And when the judge learned that there was disagreement about that, he said, “Okay, I’ll make the decision on my own.” My guess is that, as an immigrant Jew who had “made it” in America, Kaufman hated my parents as immigrant Jews who became communists. And I think he took it upon himself to sentence my mother to death.

TKN: But to ask a really dumb question, when Rogers said “we wanted them to talk,” what did he and the government want your father to say, given that he really had no secrets to spill about the Soviets?

MM: They wanted him to say, “Here are five other people who worked with me and I’ll testify against them.” The problem is, he would’ve had to admit to being an atomic spy, which he wasn’t. Because we now know from Soviet-era documents that in the crucial period when the so-called “secret of the atom bomb” sketch was delivered, he was out of contact with the Soviets and he remained out of contact for two years. And that’s in Soviet-era documents, in black-and- white.

We now know that the atomic spying was done by David Greenglass, my mother’s brother, who was a machinist at Los Alamos, who drew a crude diagram, and his wife, who was his courier, and was never even indicted. That was the deal Washington made with David Greenglass.

TKN: I always think of the joke in Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, where his character says about Alan Alda’s character, who is a real jerk: “I love him like a brother—David Greenglass.”

MM: When David Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years, his family and his lawyer said that he’d gotten a raw deal after all that he had done for the US government. He was mad when he was in prison that Washington sort of went back on their deal. His lawyer felt that he should have gotten five years at the most, not fifteen. He served ten; he ended up getting out in 1960.

TKN: And for people who are gonna read this interview and who don’t know, there is a direct connection, of course, between your parents’ case and the current moment in the person of one guy.

MM: Thank you for bringing it up. I’m gonna be a proud papa. My daughter Ivy made a film called Bully Coward Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn.

When Roy Cohn graduated from law school, he was so young that he had to wait two years before he could be admitted to the bar. And in 1950 he was a lawyer in the US Attorney’s office in New York, and was one of the prosecutors of my parents. Cohn was the man who examined David Greenglass at the trial, and he didn’t like the fact that, early in the investigation, David Greenglass kept saying, “I never even talked to my sister about this. I never even talked to Ethel Rosenberg about this.” And they had very little evidence on her.

So they’re arrested in August. Greenglass testifies before the grand jury that same month. He’s adamant that Ethel had nothing to do with it. In February, Roy Cohn goes to Greenglass and says, “You know, your wife just remembered that your sister Ethel did all the typing. Are you gonna call your wife a liar?” And he changed his testimony. And at the trial, he and his wife say, “Ethel Rosenberg was the typist.” And then on summation, the prosecutor said she “struck the keys, blow after blow, against her country in the interest of the Soviets”—all a complete fabrication. In 2003, David Greenglass, with a fake beard, is on 60 Minutes. He admits to having committed perjury about the typing, but it’s too late.

TKN: Way too late. And of course, that same Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s mentor: the one who taught him how to be ruthless and how to use the media and how to attack attack attack, and to lie, and to never admit guilt or failure.

MM: That’s right. And that’s the beauty of Ivy’s film about Roy Cohn. Because you’ve got Cohn saying, “There’s this young man, Donald Trump, and we’re gonna see more of him in the future.”

TKN: More than we wanted to, in fact. Much more.

(NB: Roy Cohn will also be the subject of a new, forthcoming biography by Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus.)

THE RULES OF THE GAME

TKN: I’d love hear the lessons that you believe your parents’ terrible experience holds for our contemporary moment.

MM: In the 1950s, the left were very much afraid of fascism. My mother, I think a week before their deaths, specifically said, “We are the first victims of American fascism.” But she was wrong. The Red Scare did not go all the way to fascism the way she expected. So why not, and why is there a move towards fascism now? I’ve thought about it a lot, and over the previous year, before the election, I gave a bunch of talks on that topic where I tried to compare the threat in the ‘50s to the threat today, using Project 2025 as my blueprint.

I think the reason is that back then, the opposition wasn’t strong enough for the other side to need to resort to fascism. In Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, you had very strong communist and socialist parties and a very strong socialist movement. Most people don’t realize that in the 1932 elections in Germany, the Nazis’ share of the vote went down and the communists’ share went up. The ruling class wanted to use the Nazis to counter the communists, and thought they could control Hitler in doing so.

Compare that to today, when you have all these billionaires kissing Trump’s ass. Why do they do that? Because they think that they will be the ones who profit from it. Whereas Trump himself is not a theorist. He doesn’t understand anything; he goes with his gut. He’s like a criminal who will only reward his friends. When he’s tired of Elon Musk, he’ll throw him on the trash heap. So I think that it’s an entirely different situation today.

It wasn’t this bad in the 1950s, even though, yes, my family, suffered terribly. But we weren’t the only ones. Black folks were lynched regularly in the 1950s. So I think my mother was being hyperbolic. As one of the speakers at the American Historical Association in January of 2025 said, Black folks in the South lived under American fascism during Jim Crow. That was not some sort of parlor game; that was real fascism.

TKN: That is such an interesting theory. But if that’s true, why do we now see fascism rising in the United States? Because the opposition from the left is weaker than ever.

MM: Agreed. But the Republican majority in the  Congress is slim. The Democrats—the old fashioned liberals represented by the Biden Administration—are pretty strong, and they had control of both houses Congress for part of the previous four years, and the Senate for all four. They could retake control of the House in two years, and that worries the Republicans. So it seems to me that the fascists want to preclude the chance for a comeback such as occurred in 2018 and 2020.

The right is also trying to smash the economic order that was created at the end of World War II. They have come to believe—at least some of them have come to believe—that they don’t benefit from it, but they have opposition within what I call the ruling class. I use the term “ruling class” the way G. William Domhoff uses it. He’s my guru. Back in 1967, he wrote a book called Who Rules America?, which I highly recommend. He discusses how the very, very rich intermarry, they go to the same schools, they go to the same playgrounds—you know, Bohemian Grove and places like that. They constitute a ruling elite and every once in a while, they have to accommodate the rest of us, but mostly they set policy.

Between World War II and very recently that elite were internationalists. But Trump’s decided that internationalism doesn’t work anymore, which is not surprising. Think of Great Britain, which was the superpower that ruled the world throughout most of the 19th century, and was led by internationalists. But by the end of that century, they had moved to imperial preference. The United States, meanwhile was the new kid on the block. We were in favor of, quote, unquote “free trade,” because we had the productivity advantages that allowed us to conquer the world economically, which happened between World War I and the end of World War II. But now you’ve got the rise of the EU, you’ve got the rise of China, and all of a sudden it ain’t so easy to be top dog. And if there is any rationality to Trumpism it’s in that. And I say “Trumpism,” because Trump himself is irrational, he doesn’t know a thing, and sometimes his advisors can convince him to do what is in the interest of that wing of the American ruling class, but sometimes not. So Trumpism is a revitalization of mercantilism, the old system, so that when you’re threatened by other rising powers you have to introduce all sorts of rules to give yourself a leg up. And that’s what they’re in the process of doing.

TKN: But once again you’ve got the elites deluding themselves that they can control a demagogue. Anybody who thinks, “Oh, I can make a deal with Trump and then maneuver around him, I can survive collaborating with him”—they all end up getting trampled. And that’s happening with Wall Street and the others who backed Trump.

Even McConnell. And no tears for him, because he is horrible and did terrible things to the country. But I do find it ironic that the guy whose whole reputation was this steely-eyed master manipulator ended up getting steamrolled by a two-bit con man from Queens.

MM: Oh, Mitch McConnell! He wanted to go down as the man who remade the Supreme Court, but everybody will remember him as the guy who could have stopped this thing by voting to convict Trump in the second impeachment, but he didn’t. That will be his obituary.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE DESCENT OF POSTWAR AMERICA

TKN: Since we’re on the topic of mercantilism, as an economist, what do you make of this tariff debacle?

MM: Well, the good news for the world is that Trump is so mercurial (laughs), and changes what he does so often, that it will be a flop. It didn’t necessarily have to be a flop. You know, if Trump died tomorrow and Vance took over and his advisors gave him a lot of good advice, there’s a whole mess of stuff that a well-run mercantilist America could develop as a way of fighting for hegemony with China, and trying to keep the EU in its place, and keeping Canada and Mexico as junior partners in the Western Hemisphere. But Trump is destroying all of that, and actually making the idea of the United States coming out on top less and less likely. And when he screws things up, even his supporters are gonna get mad. If the economy is in rough shape at the midterms, I think the Democrats get the House, for sure, and who knows, they might even get the Senate.

TKN: Boy, I hope so. But like all of us. I’ve been burned so many times thinking this is the moment America will turn on Trump. But I do think that, for Americans, the pocketbook is really the only place that matters in that regard.

MM: No question. You know the old joke about the stock market, right? That it’s predicted nine of the last three recessions. In other words, sometimes the market will move around and it won’t mean a thing. But when the market goes down, and there’s a danger of recession, people then dump stocks and buy bonds. But after quote “Liberation Day,” the bond market went down, and that scared the bejesus out of everybody, because that meant that people lost faith in the United States as a safe haven.

That’s why many people think Trump “paused” the tariffs for 90 days, because someone went to him and said, “This is a disaster. We cannot experience a sell-off of bonds at the same time that the stock market is selling off,” because that threatens the centrality of the United States dollar as the international reserve currency. And there’s been a slight recovery, but of course it’s such a short term thing. You know the old Yogi Berra line, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” It’s particularly hard when things are changing like this, and we haven’t got a clue really what’s going on.

TKN: But it’s logical that the world should be losing faith in the United States—not just in economics, but in foreign policy, on the environmental issues, on public health. On everything. For obvious reasons.

MM: Yeah. You’ve got a madman in control. Then there’s the idea of Elon Musk, the bull in the china shop of governmental activities. The hidden agenda, of course, is that they start to screw it up so thoroughly that they’ll end up privatizing it. We’ll have private companies collecting taxes instead of the IRS doing it. We’ll have Medicare Advantage policies, which is in effect the partial privatization of Medicare.

TKN: Privatize the Post Office.

MM: Right. There’s a whole host of possible privatizations that could be in play once they screw up the way the government works. And what better way to screw it up than to reduce their workforce by half?

TKN: It’s always driven me crazy that the Republicans have made a hobby horse of saying “government is bad” when they are the ones who are actively working to make it bad! So they create the conditions that become that self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I want to ask you to step back just a little bit. What is your feeling about how we got to this place as a country?

MM: It’s very interesting. In 1980, I was in Great Britain on a sabbatical and Margaret Thatcher had just come into power there, and when I came back in 1981, Reagan had just won here. So I was very interested in the arguments used by right-wing economists, what they call neoliberalism, which was a rediscovery of the “magic of the market,” reducing the role of government in the economy other than defense and law and order. And I threw myself into studying it and made it my area of expertise and started to write about it.

And the result is very clear. Neoliberalism didn’t work. The system that started with the end of World War II and went up to maybe 1978 was a phenomenal success. The Great American Middle class was basically built in those years. But it ran out of steam in the Seventies, and Reagan powered to victory in 1980 because of it. And he introduces the “Reagan Revolution,” which was tax cuts and regulatory relief, and yes, we had a recovery that allowed him to get reelected in 1984. But if you take the entire decade, all the way up through the Bush Number One administration, it didn’t improve things. All it succeeded in doing was increasing inequality. And the Democrats joined in, and that’s why my book is called Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution, which was published in 1998.

So neoliberalism founders on the financial crisis of 2008, and it founders so badly in terms of inequality and the fact that quote unquote “free trade” is sapping the lifeblood of the American working class, that Trump has an opening in 2016, and he sneaks in. Neoliberalism had failed to deliver the goods. That’s why we got Barack Obama in 2008. But Barack Obama turned out to be an unbelievable centrist: he didn’t do anything remotely reformist that he should have done. The result was that Trump could complain bitterly about the working class being hollowed out and manufacturing jobs being lost. I mean, there’s so many reasons that Trump won in ‘16, not all of them related to his complaining about trade deals, but certainly that was some of it.

But then he comes in and he doesn’t succeed, which is why Biden wins. And Biden did good stuff, but for a variety of reasons, the Democrats don’t win reelection. Biden tried, and I think some of the things Biden did were good, but he only had four years—really he only had three years. And so now we’re in it, and we’re in it because of the failure of neoliberalism from the Reagan administration up into the financial crisis of 2008, the failure of Obama to do anything big about it, the partial success of Biden that was not publicized well, and now we have Trump making believe it’s an incredible crisis, promising he would get prices down the day after he was inaugurated. And now we are in it. Trump and company are introducing Project 2025, they don’t have any of the guardrails that existed in the first Trump administration. And our side has just got to fight back with every tool we have.

STRATEGIC OBSTRUCTION (OR, THE DOWNSIDE OF ADULTHOOD)

TKN: What do you foresee for the future? Where do you think we’re headed?

MM: Viktor Orban is kind of a playbook. On paper, Hungary is a democracy, they have elections, and there’s an opposition party. But that opposition party is irrelevant; they do not have any power. Orban has taken control of the media, he’s taken control of the universities, and he‘s turned Hungary into a Third World country. It is the poorest country in the EU. All sorts of very competent, skilled people are leaving to go somewhere else to make their fortune, because Hungary has no future for them. He and his cronies are sucking it dry.

And Hungary has a system that is self-perpetuating. The way Orban achieved that was by changing election laws to perpetuate his rule. And that same kind of voter suppression is one of the key things that is going on in the US right now, state by state.  

TKN: Chris Murphy was talking about that same thing with David Remnick a couple weeks ago, this Hungarian model where they have farcical, Potemkin elections. It’s not jackbooted suppression, but the effect is the same, because the opposition is just unable to raise money, doesn’t control the media, there are de facto poll taxes in the form of voter ID requirements, and so on. This SAVE Act that could prevent women from voting if they don’t have documentation, like birth certificates and wedding licenses showing their name changes? It’s crazy.

MM: And by the way, when the next census is done in 2030, a whole bunch of red states are gonna increase their share of the Electoral College and the US House of Representatives, and a whole bunch of blue states are gonna lose votes in the Electoral College and the House. That will turn a state like Georgia from purple to red. So that’s the loss of a seat. Now, I think our side could win North Carolina, but we gotta net three seats, and I don’t know where those three seats are. That’s why I’m more optimistic about the House. And I hope that if the Democrats take the House, they will immediately interfere with the Trump agenda: that they’ll impeach him and as many members of the Cabinet as they can, just keep sending impeachments over to the Senate, make the Republicans in the Senate go on record supporting the dictatorship.

TKN: Yeah, I think that would be a huge difference to where we’re at right now, where the GOP has control of all three branches. If we had the House back, we could at least gum up the works—not just for the sake of gumming up as an end in itself, but strategically, to stop the march of Trumpism. Now, by the time those midterms roll around, about 18 months from now, we may be so far down the authoritarian path that control of one house of a bicameral legislature will be meaningless. But maybe not.

MM: I live in New York State, and I just called both of my US Senators, who are Democrats, and I said, “You should get up on the floor of the Senate and say there will be no business as usual until Mr. Garcia is back home.” And then demand that every Republican go on record answering the question: “Are you in favor of sending this legal resident of the United States, who has committed no crime, to a foreign country, and then making believe you can’t get him back, when in fact, the United States is paying El Salvador all the costs of imprisonment?” They can do all sorts of things. They got two guys out of a Romanian prison relatively recently. You know, just make a phone call. So it’s absurd. So the Democrats should be making the Republicans own this, because then that becomes a campaign issue.

TKN: I’ve written about this very issue, that the Democrats are making a huge mistake in acting as if it’s business as usual. A few Senators like Bernie and Murphy and Booker have said, “No, we’re gonna just dig in our heels and nothing goes forward until this stops.” But we need more of that.

MM: The problem is, as you pointed out, too many Democrats wanna say, “Oh no, let’s be the adults in the room.” No. This is a five alarm fire. You’ve gotta get everybody out of the house. And it doesn’t really matter how you do it. You don’t have to necessarily convince your teenager that she has to get out of the house, or he has to get outta the house. Grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him out. I applaud Bernie and AOC, I think it’s just fabulous that they’re doing what they’re doing. I guess the question is, what will the Democratic primaries look like?

TKN: That is a good question. We have a habit of eating our own, so, I don’t know. But given the questionable efficacy of the Democratic Party, let’s call it, how much of the change has to come from outside the system, from “regular” people?

MM: Well, I think that’s where what happened on April 5th was so interesting. That to me, is a bottom-up activity. I went to a very small and lovely demonstration, right opposite West Point: maybe 150 people with signs, standing in a drizzle, with the wind blowing, and the cars driving by were either neutral or they would honk and gave the thumb’s up. The whole time we were there only two people yelled epithets out of car windows. I think that was pretty indicative. And it was West Point: I don’t think that’s a particularly liberal section of the state.

It was good to do something. Now, there, there are a whole bunch of things that people still want to do. People are talking about a one-day general strike, a tax refusal. But people want to do something. And I think that is what will ultimately force at least some Democrats to come along.

Here’s an analogy. During the American War in Vietnam, for the first two or three years after LBJ began increasing the bombing, Democrats were united with Republicans in excoriating the antiwar demonstrators for being pro-communist, et cetera, et cetera. But year after year after year it declined, and by 1970 there were a lot of Democrats who were opposed to the war. And by 1975 Congress cut off the funds. Now that’s a long war, and a lot of people died because it took so long. But the opposition started at the grassroots: it was bottom-up. The official Democrats gave the antiwar movement the back of their hand initially, except for a handful of people like George McGovern, God bless him. It took a long time, but ultimately, it won.

I am also hoping that there are people in the government who will throw sand into the gears to stop Musk & Co. Like Miles Taylor, at a higher level, but I’m talking about ordinary people just working in offices who see the injustice of what’s going on, and they want to do as much as they can to screw up Trump. It would be the patriotic thing to do. And afterwards people can write books and say, “I was an anti-Trump worm in the Department of Agriculture, or wherever, where the Trump and Musk were trying to screw things up. I did my best to stop them.”

TKN: I absolutely believe they can wage a—peaceful—guerilla war from inside the bureaucracy. And that’s why Trump and Musk wanna purge them.

MM: Yeah. But they don’t know who to purge. And you can’t purge everybody. It’s a huge bureaucracy.

TKN: It’s funny you bring up Miles Taylor: no coincidence that he’s been singled out along with Chris Krebs as the first targets of potential criminal prosecution of Trump’s political opponents by his weaponized and partisan DOJ.

So, to that point, from your unique personal experience, and a lifetime of activism and study, what do you think is the way forward for the pro-democracy movement?

MM: First you’ve gotta get the Democrats to be a real opposition. And there’s a real question as to whether you do that by threatening to go outside—in others words, with AOC and Bernie, and form a third party, which puts the Democrats on notice that they will go the way of the Whigs. In the 1850s you had the Whigs and the Democrats and the Whigs destroyed themselves over slavery, and into that vacuum came the Free Soil Party, which morphed into the Republican Party. So that’s possible. I don’t think it is likely. But the threat of it could be useful. You know, the Oscar Wilde quote: “Nothing will concentrate a man’s mind more than the thought that he surely will be hanged” (laughs). And nothing will concentrate the Democratic Party’s mind more than the thought that it will be relegated to irrelevance. So Schumer maybe needs to be replaced. They need to be dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of AOC and Bernie and Chris Murphy.

I thought that Cory Booker’s speech in the Senate was a very interesting indicator. No business as usual. Let’s do something unusual. Chris Van Hollen going down to El Salvador to camp out at that prison. These are the kinds of things the Democratic Party has got to do. But it depends on people at the grassroots level, who may not even be Democrats, who may have voted for third party candidates, who may be supporting insurgent primary campaigns against incumbents to apply pressure from the bottom up. The opposition has got to just be as loud and as angry and as persistent as possible. And it can’t give up. You absolutely cannot give up. Because if you give up, you are basically condemning your grandchildren to a horrible future.

TKN: I couldn’t agree with you more.

THE SONG OF THE CENTURY

TKN: Can I ask you one last weird, off-topic question? I can’t resist, so I hope you don’t mind. Can you talk a little bit about your adoptive father, Abel, who wrote one of the most beautiful and stirring songs in our country’s history?

MM: Time Magazine called it The Song of the Century in 1999. Bruce Springsteen put it at the top of his 2020 playlist for the Trump era. I mean, there’s no question. It was made famous by Billie Holiday—there’s actually a film about it by this wonderful filmmaker named Joel Katz from maybe 20 years ago. Cassandra Wilson has done it, Audre McDonald has done it—she made it one of the centerpieces of her one-woman show. And my daughter Ivy bought Annie and me tickets to it. We got to meet Audre. Oh my God.

TKN: PhD dissertations have been written about it, but the lyrical imagery of it, the poignancy of it. I can’t think of another song that says so much about America.

MM: And originally Columbia wouldn’t let Billie Holiday record it, so she took it to Commodore Records, which was owned by Milt Gaber, who, by the way, is Billy Crystal’s uncle. It’s short, you know—it’s a relatively short poem, so short that when it was first recorded on Commodore, Milt Gabler had Sonny White, the pianist, improvise a long introduction to build out the space. And it works because at first it’s very dirge-like. So by the time Billie comes in with the first line, “Southern trees bear strange fruit,” it’s just unbelievable.

TKN: It’s crazy that you’re at the confluence of these two epic pieces of American history: the terrible execution of your parents, which was the low point of the entire McCarthy era, and by sheer coincidence, the composition of this song that haunts all of the American experience, written over a decade before, by the man who went on to adopt you.

MM: And my father didn’t live to see it become the giant hit that it is. The fact that it gets covered all the time, and it gets referred to all the time—it’s just a wonderful thing. (My brother) Rob and I have been interviewed about that song a lot, and actually, in  one of my radio commentaries, I said that “Strange Fruit” is gonna be relevant until racism is a thing of the past.

TKN: So, forever.

MM: Yeah, my father was so proud of that song.

TKN: He should be.

*********

Photo: Michael Meeropol outside Sing Sing State Prison in upstate New York, where his parents were executed by the government of the United States on June 19, 1953—Juneteenth.

Further reading and viewing:

“Judge Irving Kaufman, the Liberal Establishment, and the Rosenberg Case,” by Michael Meeropol, Monthly Review, January 2024

The Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case by Walter Schneir, Melville House, 2010

Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff, UC Santa Cruz Press, 1967

Bully Coward Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, documentary film by Ivy Meeropol, HBO, 2020

Heir to an Execution, documentary film by Ivy Meeropol, HBO, 2004

The Apprentice, narrative film by Ali Abbasi, 2024

“Could Trump’s tariff war reshape global capitalism? An interview with Marxist economist Sam Gindin,” Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, April 2025

“Damage and Dissent,” The King’s Necktie, April 9, 2025

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, by Gary Gerstle, Oxford University Press, 2022

Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, Penguin Random House, 2024

Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution, by Michael Meeropol, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998

“We Are Sleepwalking into Autocracy,” Sen,. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) interviewed by David Remnick for The New Yorker and The New Yorker Radio Hour, March 2025

“Murphy’s Law,” The King’s Necktie, April 12, 2025

“‘Strange Fruit’: The Timely Return of One of America’s Most Powerful Protest Songs,” by David Browne, Rolling Stone, August 2020

How Far Would He Go?

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

As many observers have noted, Donald Trump is seeming extra unhinged of late, which is really saying something. He is slurring his words at rallies, going off on pointless, incoherent tangents (#theweave), slandering Kamala Harris as “mentally disabled” (every accusation is a confession, innit, Donny?), and claiming that Joe Biden is withholding hurricane aid even as Republican governors bluntly report the opposite. He has called for a day-long Purge in which cops can run riot, suggested that critics of the Supreme Court be summarily imprisoned, brought a 9/11 truther to a memorial at Ground Zero, and stood by a gubernatorial candidate who called himself a “Black Nazi,” all the while painting a totally false portrait of America as a crime-ridden hellscape in economic freefall (quick factcheck: crime is down and the economy is booming). And of course, as we noted two weeks ago, he continues to insist that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating housepets.

And that is but a small sample of Don’s oeuvre. A full accounting would require a David Foster Wallace-length tome.

And yet, if the polls are to be believed, this hideous excuse for a human being remains within a froghair of becoming President of the United States for a second time.

We shall reckon with what that says about America another time. For now, this state of affairs has prompted me to ponder where all this could possibly lead.

Think of how far the Overton window for acceptable behavior by a national politician has moved—or perhaps more precisely, how low we have sunk—when Donald Trump can both promise to “terminate” the Constitution and retweet a meme about his opponent giving a blowjob and still have seventy-some million Americans supporting him. (I cite those two examples because they so neatly embody his twin vices of authoritarianism and personal hideousness.) Some of Trump’s craziness is, admittedly, straight outta the theater of the absurd, beggaring satire. But ultimately it is not funny at all—it is terrifying. We have the candidate of one of our two major parties who is not only openly fascist, but also clearly out of his fucking gourd. And millions of our countrymen are fine with both those pieces.

Now hang on a minute, I hear you saying. So much of Trump is just bluster, right? He’s just owning the libs, and you King’s Necktie, are taking the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Am I?

I don’t have the stomach for another tiresome iteration of the take-him-literally-but-not-figuratively debate. (Or is it the other way round?) True, Trump’s word isn’t worth the sulfurous fumes on which it rides out of his piehole. He has promised myriad things that never had—and never will have—a prayer of materializing: the border wall, Infrastructure Week, a replacement for Obamacare, and so forth. But by the same token, he has in fact carried through with a great many travesties: the Muslim ban, a tax cut for the richest Americans, US withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the JCPOA, Dobbs. I could go on.

So what I want to ask, dear reader, is simply this: What do you think would constitute something so horrible, so over the line, so unconscionable and morally objectionable that Donald Trump would not go there, if there were some benefit to him in it?

I’ll wait.

AMERICAN WANNSEE

I think you may have guessed where this thought experiment is heading.

In conventional discourse it is commonplace to consider Adolf Hitler a monster unique in human history, which is how much of popular memory has duly recorded him. But read Volker Ullrich: Hitler was an ordinary politician of his era, one who hit upon a winning formula with his anti-Semitic rants, who saw that the crowd thrilled to them, and then built his persona and his program from there. The vision of him as something much more than that, as possessed by some supernatural evil, conveniently relieves us of the possibility that we too, like the Germans of the 1930s, could fall prey to such a demagogue, or even rally eagerly to his side.

But at the risk of shocking American exceptionalists, there is nothing special about our national character than makes us morally superior to the people of Germany. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think Donald Trump possesses some magic moral backbone that Hitler was lacking, some steel core of integrity or principle that would keep him from going as far as the Fuhrer once did. And if you think the American people are more innately resistant to that sort of thing than our German friends, I’ll be happy to sell you a bridge that I keep down near Jane’s Carousel and the Shake Shack in Dumbo.

I can hear the howling and scoffing and sense the eye-rolling from Fox Nation already. We’ll get to Godwin’s Law in a moment. Just indulge me for a moment.

I do not mean to suggest that an American version of the Final Solution is imminent; I propose it only as an exercise in imagination. Admittedly, it is almost impossible to think that any US president would order the mass murder of American citizens (though a US president—one of our best ever, in fact—once ordered their mass internment), or even of non-citizen resident aliens. But if you’ve ever been to a Trump rally—and I have not—or even watched one on TV, it certainly feels conceivable, or at least not inconceivable. Does anyone honestly believe that, were the circumstances right, upon some favorable emergency, when presented with a plan to massacre undocumented immigrants in industrialized slaughter (by Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon, for instance), Trump would say, “No—I can’t do that. It’s simply immoral.”

Of course not.

Sure, Trump might balk at such a proposal for other, non-ethical reasons. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Donald is—occasionally—more sensible and pragmatic than others in his party, if only out of his innate, transactional sense of animal cunning for what the people want. For instance, he seems to know that outlawing abortion is an electoral loser, which is why he vacillates between baldly lying that he does not favor such a policy, when addressing the MSM, and his narcissist’s urge to brag—correctly—that he is responsible for overturning Roe, when talking to anti-abortion groups. The man loves the sound of applause.

But once you accept that Trump has no moral boundary that would stop him from committing genocide, either abroad or at home, we find ourselves staring into a very very dark abyss. Obsidian, in fact. Black as night, black as coal, in the words of Jagger & Richards. None more black, in the words of Nigel Tufnel.

Mass murder may yet remain way beyond the pale, even for Trump. But many many things that were once impossible to imagine have happened over the last nine years, and I have long since stopped considering anything too far-fetched. After all, he has already promised to round migrants up by the millions and place them in concentration camps—a wildly impractical proposal, with no details on offer of how that would work, with or without violent nationwide upheaval, not that practicality is the chief objection to it. But just the fact that he would suggest it! From the establishment of concentration camps it is but a hop skip and jump to the thing that so often happens inside them. For that matter, in his first term he already instituted and carried out a policy of kidnapping small children from their parents, caging them in inhuman conditions in what can only be called concentration camps, and making it impossible for thousands of them ever to be reunited with their families. Do you really doubt he could go even further in a second term, untethered from legal accountability as he would be, thanks to the right wing justices he installed on the Supreme Court?

One does not have to go so far as a second Holocaust to understand and accept the horrors that would likely accompany a second  Trump term. They have been widely reported upon, but to name just one, the likes of Mark Milley, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and even Joe Biden are bracing to be arrested, or should be.

Participatory democracy can expect abrupt cancellation as well. I have mentioned previously that a very very smart and politically sophisticated friend of mine recently scoffed when I suggested that if Trump wins in 2024, there may be no presidential election at all in 2028. Maybe my friend is right, and I’m being alarmist. But for me, that’s a slam dunk, on an eight-foot junior high school hoop. Trump already tried to overturn an election he lost. How much easier would it be for him, as a sitting president in his second term, emboldened by his victory and with nearly a decade of institutional knowledge, and with that aforementioned toadying  SCOTUS supermajority behind him, to simply gin up some “national emergency” as a Reichstag  fire-like reason to “postpone” the election, indefinitely? Is the GOP gonna rise up and stop him?

In fact, the Republican Party and the so-called conservative movement at large have consistently behaved toward Trump precisely as center-right German politicians and business leaders did toward Hitler in the ‘30s: underestimating him, believing they could control him and use him rather than the other way round, enabling him and excusing his outrages, bowing to his every whim, and rationalizing their incremental (and sometimes not so incremental) submission to his atrocities until they were wholly complicit in absolute depravity. In a second Trump term, with a wrathful Donald unbound and on a quest for retribution, no sudden emergence of courage from the GOP can be expected. Very much the contrary.

I FOUGHT THE LAW

OK, now to my critics.

I assume that by now people are familiar with Godwin’s Law—probably a lot more familiar than is healthy for a democracy, if we need to be talking about it. In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell writes:

(P)eople roll their eyes and tune out when they hear commentators or historians warn, yet again, about another big bad Great Dictator. Problem is, Donald Trump seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen.

In recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) have ramped up their baseless claims about violent invasions from impure foreigners, echoing “blood and soil”-style rhetoric deployed nearly a century ago. At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that “a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.” Chillingly, he added that migrants were already “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.” This followed earlier remarks in Arizona, in which he alleged that “young American girls” are “being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”

Of Vance’s demonizing of Haitian migrants in his own state, and the ensuing threats of violence toward them, Rampell writes:

It is hard to recall a senator in recent memory who’s done more to endanger the lives of his own constituents than Vance has.

I’m not saying he and Trump actually want to start a modern-day pogrom, but if they did, I’m not sure what they’d be doing differently.

So yeah, when people behave like Nazis (no “neo” about it), they deserve to be called out for it.

Mike Godwin, originator of the meme, himself disavowed it in a Washington Post op-ed last year, calling analogies to Hitler apropos and necessary for Trump, citing his “authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as ‘vermin’; and claiming that immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ an infamous Hitler talking point.”

Even JD Vance himself, lest we forget, compared his running mate to Hitler way back inn 2016, before he had even done a fraction of the terrible shit he would go on to do. Rampell again:

Lest Trump’s fascist echoes be too faint for Vance to hear these days, the former president occasionally cranks up the volume with antisemitic tropes. For instance, he accused American Jews of voting for “the enemy” and agreed with a radio host that Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is a “crappy Jew.” (Debates over “good” and “bad” Jews rarely end well for Jews.)

Last week, shortly after a Republican gubernatorial candidate was revealed to have expressed pro-Hitler views, Trump took things to their logical conclusion: He preemptively blamed Jews if he performs poorly this November. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said at a summit devoted to (I kid you not) combating American antisemitism, then “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

Not the most eloquent closing argument. But then, as Molly Ivins once quipped, it probably sounded better in the original German.

GOAT’S HEAD SOUP NAZI

Let’s go now to a recent essay by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, and the man whom my friend Tom Hall—himself one of the smartest political observers I know—calls the GOAT when it comes to this topic.

In a Substack piece called “Trump’s Hitlerian Month: A September to Remember,” Snyder notes the self-flattering hypocrisy of American exceptionalism: the syllogism that says no American president could be a tyrant because America is good and pure by definition. “(T)he idea that ‘comparison’ is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism.” 

A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator.  Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.” Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.

Snyder writes that ”The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere. That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers. 

‘Never again’ is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.”

He also rightly connects Trump’s Big Lie to its granddaddy, the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth of Versailles, and also the Big Lie that the Holocaust never happened.

His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.

Snyder states bluntly: “Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign,“ citing the dogs-and-cats thing in particular, and draining it of its comic value:

(Trump) found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the ‘them’ in his politics of us-and-them…..The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done.

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression.  Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people.

Now, the Hitlerian things that Trump says would be Hitlerian with or without this Hitlerian context of the last four years, the last year, or the last month. And this context would be Hitlerian with or without Trump’s recent Hitlerian utterances. It is helpful, however, to see all of this together, as a whole, because it makes it harder to excuse each individual piece of the story. 

In the second half of his piece, Snyder echoes Rampell in recounting in great detail Trump’s openly anti-Semitic remarks of late, including warning American Jews of the repercussions if he doesn’t win, ostensibly couched as an I’m-on-your-side caution about their potential fate under Democratic rule, but also functioning as a blunt threat. Of course, the scapegoat in question need not be Jews for Trump’s fascism to obtain; in the case of him and his followers, immigrants and people of color largely seem to serve that role. I invite you to read Snyder’s whole essay, but if you take away only one line, maybe it should be this one:

“In the silence about Trump’s fascism, those who care about freedom and the future will hear one more reason to act.”

THE (UN)DECIDERS

The race for the White House remains razor close, and we are told that a tiny handful of our countrymen—swing voters, who have not yet made up their minds—will determine who wins.

Hang on while I go get my US Army Arctic Warfare Extreme Cold Weather parka to warm me from the chill that just went down my spine.

Let me get this straight. The people we’re relying on to save our democracy are the people who can’t decide between Trump and Harris? For them, I offer this chestnut from David Sedaris, which remains pertinent as ever:

I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

And Sedaris wrote that in 2008, when the choice was between Barack Obama and John McCain. My literary powers do not extend to thinking of an updated metaphor that reflects the menu choice between Kamala and Trump.

But those undecideds are, apparently, not limited to low-information voters. Witness those two pompous asses who comprise the august New York Times’s dynamic duo of resident right wing apologists—er, I mean, opinion columnists—Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, both of whom have been seen recently stroking their chins in allegedly high-minded contemplation of whether Kamala is a sufficiently palatable alternative to an openly fascist twice-impeached convicted felon who has promised to install a dictatorship. The Stephenses and Douthats of the world and their fellow travelers are either neck deep in their own narcissism and denial of reality, or unwilling to admit that they are actually fine with white Christian nationalism, despite their high-minded veneer. 

On that topic, a strong candidate for the most ridiculous magazine article of 2024 is one in The Atlantic last month titled “Let Us Now Praise Undecided Voters,” by Gal Beckerman. It was one of those very-pleased-with-itself, mildly contrarian think pieces that magazines like the otherwise very fine Atlantic like to run…..and maybe the cautiousness and slow-moving decision-making that it praises does have some merit when it comes to deciding, say, what ice cream flavor to choose (an example the article employs). But when it comes to choosing between the fascist candidate for president and the non-fascist one, it was one of the most absurd pieces of journalism I’ve read in ages. But it pairs nicely with the likes of Stephens & Douthat.

But The Atlantic soon made up for it with a superb article on that same topic by the great Ronald Brownstein called “The Undecided Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are.” Its point: most undecided voters are not choosing between Trump and Harris, they are unsure whether they will vote at all.

That makes a lot more sense, even if I still find it hard to believe anyone doesn’t recognize the crisis we’re in, or the imperative of acting. Let’s hope the Democratic strategists are working to impress upon those folks the importance of this election, and get them to the polls in November. Because the stakes could not be higher or the options more stark.

The New York Times has been among the most egregious offenders when it comes to sanewashing Trump, engaging in outrageous bothsidesism, and holding Kamala to a ridiculously high standard while giving Donny a pass. That pattern continues, and it’s infuriating. But credit where it’s due: the Gray Lady’s editorial board published an endorsement of Vice President Harris that hit the bullseye:

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth—Donald Trump is not fit to be president—should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election. For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

HOME, HOME ON DERANGE

This essay is unlikely to be read by Trump’s supporters and defenders, but if it were, I am sure they would return their usual diagnosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Because they have a lot of credibility when it comes to recognizing hysteria and displacement from objective reality.

But that is their standard retort whenever anyone warns of something awful that Trump (we are told) would never do…..like mount a coup. (Looking at you again, Douthat). Yes, it is hard to imagine Final Solution on American shores. But tyrants depend on the unimaginable, and the inability of their constituents to fathom it.

So how far would he go? I don’t want to find out.

*********

Illustration by Randy Pollak; Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty, originally published in The New Republic’s issue “What American Fascism Would Look Like.”