Holiday Season Nostalgia: Are We All on Fascism’s Side?

The re-election of Donald Trump raises a simple question: Are you willing to protest? With the new year approaching and start of the year resolutions forthcoming, the question challenges a specific generation. For Baby Boomers like me, the Age of Aquarius has not arrived, and the Age of Selfishness seems ubiquitous. We tried to let the sunshine in but all around us all we see are very dark clouds. Our generation didn’t succeed in changing the world. The Vietnam War did end and so did formal segregation, but today’s world is not what we marched and protested for when we were younger. To paraphrase Hair, an early rock musical, Peace has not guided the planets, and love has not steered the stars.

Just to show how far this world is different from what we lived through in the 1960s, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder warns about growing American fascism. “Again and again,” he wrote, “our major institutions from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences.” (italics added throughout) And then he gives the general challenge; “Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.”

What does Snyder mean by we? What does he mean “when we are on its [Fascism’s] side”? For those of a certain generation and political leaning, we certainly tried to counter what we saw as American injustices. There were those who marched on Washington and tried to levitate the Pentagon. There were those who disrupted the Democratic Convention in Chicago and fought Mayor J. Daley’s out-of-control police. There were those who went down South as Freedom Riders risking their lives, and those who were gruesomely murdered in Mississippi by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner.

There were those who protested free speech like Mark Rudd and Mario Savio at universities such as Columbia and Berkeley, and the innocent four who paid with their lives when peacefully protesting at Kent State University, brutally shot down by the Ohio National Guard.

What happened to Boomers after those years of protest is very individual. In many cases, student activism gave way to middle age conformity with all the responsibilities that entails. For some, youthful enthusiasm died on the balcony of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Lorraine Hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, or the kitchen hallway of the Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel’s ballroom where Robert Kennedy was killed. Some carried on the struggle in different ways, others changed directions.

We Boomers are now of a certain age. Among some, there is a rage against Trump and MAGA, but there is also a question of time. We do remember what it was like to be part of a Movement. Back then, we understood that we were against the Vietnam War and American imperialism. We understood that the separate but equal doctrine was grossly unjust for many citizens. We knew what we were against; the opposition was clearly defined. Richard Nixon personified all we rejected.

Snyder’s fascism is more diffuse, more complicated than what we rallied against. It’s more than just Trump and his MAGA followers. Much more than just backing Israel and dangerous U.S. neo-colonial foreign military interventions. It’s also much more than despoiling the atmosphere and growing domestic and global income equality. Snyder encompasses it all in one word, but fascism has many tentacles.

What are we to do? Our sense of injustice is still there, but we no longer have the flame of youth. Time has moved on. Some who marched in New Hampshire knocking on farmers’ doors and “Cleaned for Gene” in Senator Eugene McCarthy’s unsuccessful progressive presidential campaign will probably not understand campaigning by social media. The face-to-face has given way to algorithms, electronic messaging and streaming.

And those who are into grandparenting would probably prefer to play with their grandchildren and peacefully read Counterpunch in a comfortable chair rather than walk the streets and ring doorbells. What greater pleasure in later life than enjoying the smiles and warmth of loving family, especially during the holiday season.

Yet, there remains a nostalgia for leaders who will stoke the remaining embers. Where are the Mark Rudds and Mario Savios today? The youthful, eloquent Tom Hayden? Their names resonate even now, so many years later. Where are the dynamic students who will lead protests that will energize generations as those three did 60 years ago?

Despite all the age negatives, there is a lingering flame that needs re-lighting. There are still warm embers that need to be rekindled. There is a feeling that the gross injustices we are witnessing now need more than just an issue specific movement, but a larger Movement as well. Trump and his MAGA people have understood how to organize and put forward their larger program. They have been successful in setting the contemporary paradigm. The American Conservative Political Action Conference – the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives – is starting to be successful worldwide. It has held meetings in Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, and Argentina.

Is there no counter-movement out there? In the U.S., the Democratic Party is in shambles. Where is the answer to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation? Instead of Project 2025, where is an updated Port Huron Statement and a modern Students for a Democratic Society? Why don’t Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have legions of followers? Is there no way for someone or some group to organize and re-ignite the flame that burned so brightly in the 1960s?

For those not of the 1960s generation, the above references probably read like ancient history. And that’s the point. There was a time when things were very different from where we are today. History has become the last fifteen seconds on a Reuters news screen. The 1960s seem pre-historic, and weoften feel and are treated like dinosaurs. But there are people who lived and thrived during that period who remember when we would not accept the status quo. We may be dinosaurs, but we have a very human memory of a better era.

Where are we now? What are we doing? How to answer Snyder’s challenge? Are we all really on fascism’s side?

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