There’s a scene about halfway through the 1972 film musical Cabaret that never fails to give me chills. The film’s hero Brian Roberts (Michael York) and his lover Max von Heune (Helmut Griem) are enjoying a glass of lager at a biergarten in the German countryside in the early 1930s. A blonde youth with apple cheeks begins to sing a song in a clear tenor about a bright summer day. Brian, Max, and the other patrons turn to listen, and the camera pans to reveal that the young singer is wearing the brown shirt and swastika arm band of the Hitler Jugend.
In ones and twos, the assembled patrons rise to their feet and add their voices to the song. The words of become more militant, and voices more aggressive. An old man, possibly Jewish, fidgets uncomfortably as virtually the entire company in the biergarten sing lustily:
Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come
When the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me
The Hitler Youth raises his arm in a Nazi salute to his enthusiastic audience as Brian and Max get into their car to return to Berlin. “Do you still think you can control them?” Brian asks as they depart. Max, the scion of an old aristocratic German family, simply shrugs.
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” marks a turning point in the film, where the narrative turns from a racy bedroom comedy set in the decadent cabaret scene of Weimar Berlin to a dark commentary on racism, hate and the rise of Nazi totalitarianism. It becomes bleaker until, in the final scene, after Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles sings the show-stopping title song, the camera turns to the members of the cabaret audience, revealing that they are all in Nazi uniform.
The song has been a persistent earworm all month, burrowing deep into my consciousness as I followed the news, finally reaching a crescendo on Friday when a Wisconsin court acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse in the murder of two people at a demonstration against police brutality in Kenosha, WI last year. The soundtrack is apt; this moment seems to mark a turning point in the American narrative, as we descend into what seems an inevitably bleak future of Magaist totalitarianism.
There had been a reprieve from the darkness following the inauguration of President Joe Biden last January. Those of us in the United States still committed to democracy and justice took in a deep breath of relief that the January 6 putsch had failed and that there was no assassination attempt on the new president. The future looked brighter, if not exactly bright, with disgraced former-President Trump exiled to his palace in Florida and silenced in social media. There was even much to look forward to, as President Biden outlined plans to deal decisively with the Pandemic, and promoted domestic policy agenda modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Looking back, it is like the scene in Cabaret when Max and Brian drive through Germany’s alpine countryside without a care in the world before finding a table at that charming biergarten… The uprisings against police brutality were last summer, and we forgot – or conveniently ignored – that almost half of all American voters had approved Magaism and endorsed President Trump’s disastrous misrule.
And then, the blue-eyed Aryan boy breaks into song.
One thing has followed upon another to remind us that our sunlit reverie was a mirage. The Pandemic ground on, killing a half-million Americans by the end of February; by spring, the MAGA movement had, by some ideological alchemy, pushed its Critical Race Theory paranoia to the top of the national agenda, while antisemitic anti-maskers mocked the horrors of the Holocaust. Summer began with a white nationalist terrorist attack just north of liberal Boston, and ended with the Supreme Court, packed by the Trump regime to ensure reactionary decisions for a generation, ratified Christofascist rule in Texas.
In all this time, President Biden’s much vaunted Newer Deal foundered on the shoals of neoliberal resistance within his own Democratic Party. Dino* Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema used their corporate-funded influence to see both the Infrastructure and Build Back Better bills whittled down to near-inconsequence, and President Biden, desperate for anything remotely resembling a legislative victory, let them get away with it.
By the time the off-cycle gubernatorial elections came around earlier this month in New Jersey and Virginia, the Democratic Party that promised so much ten months earlier looked flaccid and impotent. It offered a near-beer of policies that excited progressive voters not at all, and in their indifference, resurgent Magaism, now buoyed by white rage and Christofascist court victories, scored an unexpected win in Virginia and a frighteningly near-miss in “safe” New Jersey.
The neototalitarian legions never disappeared, of course. No amount of pious declarations about unity and the “true spirit of America” can alter the fact that almost half of all Americans, and a significant majority of white Americans, endorsed the MAGA message last year, or that their rhetoric has become increasingly toxic and demented, and their devotion to the cause more zealous. We cannot delude ourselves that the fight is over, or even turning in favor of the forces of justice and decency.
On the contrary, all the evidence points to a mobilized and armed MAGA movement, devoted to the defeat of pluralist democracy and the final victory of white supremacy, and they have the commitment and the firepower to achieve it. The Democratic Party is weak and disoriented, and the only thing standing between totalitarianism is, as Stefan Zweig wrote in The World of Yesterday, “a state where the law was firmly established… and every citizen was assured of his liberty and equal rights by the solemn wording of the constitution.”
Yet, as Friday’s verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial demonstrates so alarmingly, that law is not firmly established, and the solemn words are empty formula. The verdict was never really in doubt; Judge Bruce Schroeder, whose MAGA ringtone signaled his political allegiance, made certain from the start that the blubbering pubescent murderer would have every possible advantage. The incompetent prosecution and the nearly-all-white jury simply confirmed it.
The family of Anthony Huber, one of Rittenhouse’s victims – who, Judge Schroeder ordered, could not be called a “victim” in the trial – put the inevitable result both succinctly and eloquently: “It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.” The verdict, we must all recognize, is the white nationalist terrorists’ license to kill… And they know it. It is the sign they have waited to see.
“Your pain delights me,” the white nationalist wannabe-celebrity Kurt Schlichter gloated in reply to a tweet by journalist Mehdi Hasan. “Kyle Rittenhouse killed two leftist catspaws and bisected the bicep of another and there’s nothing you can do about it.” It is hard not to imagine those comments delivered in the cadences of the third-rate Hollywood Nazi that Schlichter really is.
On Telegram, an instant-messaging social media platform favored by white nationalists and neo-Nazis, members of the Proud Boys, recently classified as a terrorist organization by the Canadian government, welcomed the verdict with threats of violence. “The left wont stop until their bodied [sic] get stacked up like cord wood,” one user wrote. It was a particularly chilling choice of words, since the phrase “bodies stacked like cordwood” originated in journalist Edward R. Murrow’s description of the horrific revelations of the US Army’s liberation of Buchenwald in 1945.
The rhetoric is no accident: The Magaists are promising a holocaust.
Whether it can be averted will depend on how we meet the threat in the coming months and years. The prospects do not look good, as the Biden Administration that we once welcomed (albeit with reservations) has shown little evidence of a backbone, and the Democratic Party has skipped and hopped from one humiliating defeat to the next. If we are going to beat Magaist neototalitarianism, we are going to have to find new ways to fight, and new strength.
For now, the dark legions are on the move, with marching orders handed down by Judge Schroeder’s court, and they are certain of this: Tomorrow belongs to them.
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* “Democrat in name only” or dinosaur: your pick.