Last May, my book club read Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng in recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Ng’s powerful novel is set in a post-depression era United States where the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT) is law. 

This legislation purportedly saved the country from greater economic fallout by practicing economic and cultural isolationism, mainly from China. The result is a society highly suspicious of all things Asian, where neighbors tell on neighbors for committing real or perceived “un-American” acts. These acts are often, ostensibly, committed by people who appear to be Asian.

I asked my book club participants if they thought violence against and the marginalization of a single group of people could happen today in America. While not a single other reader thought it was possible, I was the sole exception. I read this book and thought, “Ah, desperation during a massive economic depression leads to propaganda targeting an easy scapegoat, and the people support discrimination against and, eventually, the elimination of the targeted group. It’s Nazi Germany!”

While studying European fascism in college, I learned about a short period after World War I where like-minded individuals with a modicum of power from Italy, Russia, and Germany were able to create fascist governments amid a dismal economy and a desperate citizenry. The result was totalitarian or authoritarian regimes that severely restricted individual freedoms. In disgust, I thought, “What did German citizens do to stop the horror of fascism?”

Throughout that school year, I read that some German citizens hated the regime. Some reported on their neighbors, lest they or their loved ones become someone worth reporting on. Some secretly defied the Nazis and led little, hidden rebellions like Oskar Schindler.  While others ignored what was happening to their neighbors to save themselves. And then, there was a minority of Germans who found the Nazi propaganda so seductive, they became brainwashed. As a result, they wanted to eliminate the “wrong” kind of German by dehumanizing and demonizing specific groups of people to justify the gruesome disposal of fellow human beings.

Another consequence of Germany’s authoritarian government was a massive loss of freedom. Every German lost rights, including the freedom of speech, a right to a fair trial, privacy and personal freedom, freedom of the press, the right to an education, religious freedom, property rights, and protection from discrimination.  

What happened in Europe in the 1930s was real life. The possibility of a fascist government in today’s American? It’s there.

I would argue that it’s here, it’s now. And that’s not hysteria, that’s history.

How is this possible when we have not fought a war on our soil that involved our soldiers and our citizens in decades. Unlike post-WW1 Germany, we have not suffered the macabre stresses associated with living in a war-torn nation.  We haven’t suffered a catastrophic economic collapse that displaced families, caused more people to die and created an environment where fascism invisibly seeped into the lives of everyday Germans.

Maybe living through a pandemic destabilized our American way of life and temporarily messed up our economy, but we’ve supposedly bounced back. Sure, our dollar doesn’t seem to go as far anymore, but I don’t think that’s the reason many in our nation are cheering for the precursors of an authoritarian regime.

So then, how did the nasty political rhetoric that stresses out Americans come into being? How is the insidious danger of fascism slowly creeping into our lives? Honestly, does it really matter?

No. It doesn’t matter.

Even if we never discover the truth behind how we got here as a country, the fact is – this is where we are. Somehow, we are unstable and looking for a victim to blame, even though our ideologies are not very different. There is a sense that affiliation with or an appreciation for one of the two political parties is what now makes Americans fundamentally different from each other.

It’s important that American citizens take the threats to our democracy seriously and listen carefully when there is a possibility that the wrong person could lead us to lose freedoms, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted is possible now.

The consequences of fighting an insane battle to recover an America that is not “lost” and that does not need to be “taken back” may result in the loss of our right to be a collective of free individuals. People losing their freedoms is a worldwide, modern problem that we, in the United States, are facing today.

We are a community of Americans. We have a lot of differences. There are so many of us from diverse types of geographies and backgrounds. We have different immigration statuses, races, ethnicities, genders, ages, socioeconomic statuses, educations, religions, sexual orientations, and more, but we’re all Americans.

America belongs to me and every other American — there is no one to take it back from because it’s still ours. This is still the country where you can be yourself, where your individualism doesn’t negatively change your Americanness or make a fellow citizen less of an American.

So, let’s not pick a scapegoat and lose our right to be free. Let’s allow each other to be American in the most American way possible by living our lives our way and respectfully allowing others to do the same.

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