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