How many novels about fascism do you have to read to see what is happening in U.S.?

I taught European and Russian history for 35 years, with cautionary lectures on totalitarianism as regular fare in my Western Civilization courses. Sometimes I assigned my college students “They Thought They Were Free” (Milton Meyer) on the dangers of conformism and the herd instinct as contributors to Germany’s descent from democracy to Nazism. Sometimes I had students read “Darkness at Noon” (Arthur Koestler) on police-state tactics of intimidation and violence as instruments of Soviet terror and repression.

On numerous occasions over the years I lectured on the curse of 20th-century fascist and Nazi ethnocentrism which seduced millions of Italians and Germans into believing in their racial superiority. The attendant warped patriotism and grievous perversion of national pride contributed to the untold suffering of World War II.

On a brighter note I also lectured admiringly on Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who refused to succumb to the Big Lie of communist propaganda and who ended up in jail for his insistence upon upholding the truth. With the end of Moscow’s control of its East European satellites in 1989, Havel’s unimpeachable moral stature catapulted him from a prison cell to the Czech presidential palace in 15 months.

On a recent morning walk I was listening to an early chapter of Ken Follett’s novel, “Winter World,” this part an account of Hitler’s 1933 destruction of German democracy through violence and threats of violence against dissenters in general and members of the country’s Reichstag in particular. Not long ago I also listened to Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), the nightmare tale of an American president who subverts Congress, the courts, and the media as prelude to a successful fascist coup.

Whatever our problems, I have never believed such could happen here in the U.S.— that is until Donald Trump became president. My hope for almost four years has centered on the corrective of voting America’s most dangerous president out of office. And that is still my hope. But it has been shaken of late by an action and an interview by the ever-bombastic, ever-bellicose Trump. On his behest, protesters in Portland, Oregon, are being arrested by unidentified federal agents in unmarked vans, astoundingly including border patrolmen hundreds of miles from any U.S. border. And a July 20 Herald-Leader headline read “Trump won’t commit to accepting election results if he loses.” Needless to say, the unwarranted arrests and Trump’s threat not to abide by the outcome of a presidential election remind any student of 20th century history of previous subversions of democracy in myriad European states, leading to lost freedoms and a world of woe and loss of life.

What possesses an American president to repeatedly attack its allies and cozy up to authoritarians and dictators like Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim Yong Il, and Turkey’s Erdogen? The answer is, from what Trump says and does, he is a wannabe dictator himself. Did Trump get the idea to deploy incognito feds to arrest dissidents in Portland from Putin’s deployment of unidentified troops in Crimea at an early point in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, claiming they were not Russian troops?

The first time I ever participated in a political protest was in 1970 in my first year of graduate studies as part of a University of Kentucky student demonstration following the death of Kent State Vietnam War protesters. Almost half a century later it took our nation’s worst president to spur me to renewed action. I have been glad I could voice my opposition to Trump when this sorry excuse for a leader came to speak at Eastern Kentucky University in 2018 and at Rupp Arena in 2019. If we do not dump our “divider-in-chief” in November I fear four more years of this clueless, arrogant, self-proclaimed “stable genius” will be the death knell of American democracy.

Mark R. Elliott, Wilmore, KY, is editor emeritus of the East-West Church and Ministry Report (www.eastwestreport.org).