In the face of fascism, he wrote, it was not enough to simply “bandage the victims
under the wheels of injustice, but jam a spoke into the wheel itself.”
If we are in a Bonhoeffer moment, then aggressive nonviolent action makes sense: marching in the
streets, blocking traffic, disrupting town halls, vehement rhetoric to mobilize mass opposition.
In this scenario, the Trump administration doesn’t create an authoritarian regime,
but national politics turns into a vicious muck of tweet and countertweet, scandal and pseudoscandal, partisan attack and counterattack.
The model for the resistance is Gerald Ford, a decent, modest, experienced public servant who believed in the institutions of government,
who restored faith in government, who had a plan to bind the nation’s wounds and restored normalcy and competence.
It is hard to imagine America turning into full fascism, but it is possible to see it sliding into the sort of “repressive kleptocracy”
that David Frum describes in the current Atlantic — like the regimes that now run Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela and Poland.
Trump could flake out in the midst of some foreign policy crisis and the national security apparatus could have to flat out disobey him.
Personally, I don’t think we’re at a Bonhoeffer moment or a Benedict moment.
The third possibility is that the primary threat in the Trump era is a combination of incompetence and anarchy.
If we are in a Benedict moment, the smart thing to do is to ignore the degradation in Washington
and make your contribution at the state and local levels.
