I am not generally a person who likes labels. Labels oversimplify a world of precious and wonderful variety. Thus, my unease in the summer of 2024, when partisans of one political party started publicly labeling the presidential candidate of the other party a fascist. To be sure, he was an authoritarian, but a fascist — the sort of person who intentionally tramples on individual rights and threatens people’s lives and livelihoods in their own misguided pursuit of power and control? For me, who believes in the moderating virtues of dialogue over the simplicity of polarizing labels, that was a bridge too far.

In the subsequent 18 months, I have come to understand that fascism is a pathway, not a destination, and that by the actions of the current administration, the U.S. is now well down its path. How else can we explain the explicit use of the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute and potentially imprison one person’s political opponents? Or the creation of a Gestapo-like organization whose modus operandi is to inspire terror among law-abiding people who have come to the U.S. in pursuit of the American dream of freedom and a better life for their families? Or what happened three weeks ago in Minneapolis, when an upstanding member of her community was shot and killed in cold blood, and even before her body was cold, she was falsely labeled a domestic terrorist by the heads of our government.

Last summer, my wife and I visited Poland and the Baltics, and while walking the fields of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the backstreets of Warsaw and Vilnius, which, not so long ago, were the sites of extermination ghettos, we, like every other American visitor, asked two questions. First, how could this have happened in a modern and civilized society, and second, could it now happen here in America? My answer to the first question was to acknowledge what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”: The fact that evil gains its initial foothold when it masquerades as “us,” expressing our manufactured grievances against groups we choose to label as “them.” My answer to the second question of whether there is a pathway to fascism in America is that we have already taken the first steps down it.

Fortunately, we have something law-abiding Germans in the 1930s did not: a First Amendment right to speak out and disagree with our government, without worrying unduly about our personal safety or that of our families and loved ones. So speak up. If you have young children, remind them daily that might does not make right. If you are a religious person, remember that your faith is founded in compassion and forgiveness, not retribution. If you are a public official or person who took an oath to the Constitution of the United States, remember that the biggest concern our founding fathers had when drafting the Constitution was to ensure that the government not become too powerful, and that those in the majority (however defined) would not be able to oppress those in the minority. If you take pride in being active in your community, remember that being part of a community means you have obligations to take care of others, just as they have obligations to look after you.

I have chosen in this letter not to use the name of the current U.S. president or anyone else lest I make this seem about being loyal to an individual rather than to our ideals. I will depart from that now by recalling the words of President Ronald Reagan, who drew from biblical scripture when he referred to America as “a shining city on a hill.” It’s not too late. We can turn back from the path of fascism, and once again make America a global beacon of hope, dignity, and justice. All it takes is for each of us to continue speaking up.

John Landis

Chestnut Hill