Martin Niemoller spoke the “First they came” words in post WWII Germany as an explanation of how the horrors of Nazism could take hold in a democratic and largely religious country. He used the frog in the pot argument to explain how bad things happen in small increments until the bad thing is large and uncontrollable.
I’m combining the Andrew Sullivan and Thousand Cuts threads here.
The founding fathers bequeathed us a system of governance and a resulting economic and social structure that was largely based on distrust of power and authority. Our federal government had a robust system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. The federal government was based on federalism where the states, using their own unique and processes ran their own affairs, selected their own leaders and their own representatives to congress. Education, business, media, entertainment, religion, and more were sources of independent and maybe even competing roles in various functions. The Europeans gave us an entrenched system of slavery and servitude that was almost exclusively race based. We also were faced with conflict and questions about native people caused by the inevitable and unstoppable rush of settlement and development.
With this background, we built the most vibrant, free, and open society on earth. The proof is in the pudding. Peoples of all beliefs, ethnicities, and goals have decided this is the place to be.
But we are metamorphosing at a rapidly increasing pace. Gone is a functioning congress as we see thousand-page bills passed on party-line votes with little to no public process, little to no debate, and little to no amendments. Secret negotiations by staff and lobbyists take the place of openness among our representatives. Gone is the strong emphasis on federalism as we see more and more efforts to subject state authority to federal rules. The feds coming for control of state elections is scary. Gone is an independent and observant media as it blatantly chooses sides in the great issues of the day instead of holding all to account. Gone is the independent power centers of business, entertainment, and even religion as all prostrate themselves to ideology.
Getting back to Niemoller‘s time. He witnessed the onslaught of government, business, media, finance, education, and law combining to a single force. His warming pot boiled over. We are seeing government, business, media, tech, entertainment, coalescing in a similar fashion. COVID provided the opportunity to turn up the heat in the pot while telling us that was in our best interest. We still might distrust power and authority, but power and authority seems to be winning.
They came for our history.
They came for our arts.
They came for our business.
They came for our speech.
What do they want?
Our obedience.