The Soft Guardrails

I spent my summer reading about Nazis and Donald Trump. Not exactly the beach reading I had in mind, especially when you consider I have yet to make it to the beach.

It started innocently enough when a friend recommended a book. That book led to another, and eventually I found myself comparing two governments separated by nearly a century and an ocean, wondering how people recognize the erosion of political restraints when they are standing in the middle of it.

The first book was In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, which follows William Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930s as Hitler consolidates power. Dodd starts out thinking Hitler is a novice loudmouth and that Germany’s traditional institutional systems will ultimately constrain him.

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan do something remarkably similar in Regime Change, which put me inside Trump’s second White House and illustrates how he blows through boundaries to get what he wants. Their argument is that Trump 2.0 is not just another administration but a transformation of the presidency itself. In Larson’s book, we know the end game. The Germans in 1930s Berlin do not. They see Hitler’s authoritarianism, political violence and white supremacy, but don’t know if he’s just an aberration.

Haberman and Swan are not writing with the complete benefit of historical hindsight because the Trump presidency is happening now. But they can see the cumulative pattern of hundreds of decisions, conversations, personnel changes and exercises of presidential power in a way that any one person inside the administration probably cannot.

The reader can connect the dots while the people inside the story are still looking at the individual dots.

 My most important takeaway from each book is that the warning signs don’t arrive with flashing lights and sirens. The unsettling thing is not one event, it’s an accumulation of norm-smashing. A president or a Reich chancellor doesn’t have to change the law to fundamentally change executive power.

They do it by demonstrating that the unwritten norms, what have been described as the “soft guardrails of democracy,” are not really restraints at all. Why bother repealing norms when you can simply ignore them to get what you want?

Neither book is a biography of the man in power but both thoroughly examine the people in the room. We learn about the loyalists, opportunists and sycophant hangers-on, which raises the same uncomfortable question: What happens when those who understand the danger choose accommodation over confrontation?

Those living through political upheaval don’t necessarily recognize it while it’s happening. They have jobs, kids to raise, lawns to mow, dry cleaning to fetch. The scary part is how ordinary political life can look while extraordinary things are happening.

The more useful question is not “Is Trump Hitler?” That comparison is both too easy and beside the point. The more important question – the second thought – is this: How do we recognize institutional deterioration before we know the final destination?

The common lesson is not that history repeats itself, or even rhymes. It’s that history rarely announces itself as history.

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Manhattan Mercury, and he seeks the second thought as host of ‘Within Reason,’ Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.