Will The Fever Break This Time?

I thought that because I had listened to Rachel Maddow’s ultra-amazing, ultra-compelling, ultra-relevant podcast — recommended here several times — I could skip Prequel.

Well, I was wrong.

Whether you read it or listen (at 1.4x), you may agree with the New York Times that it is a “ripping read [whose] parallels to the present day are strong, even startling.”

(Have I ever mentioned that today’s Republican frontrunner kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside?)

It’s not unlike another book I urged on you last month, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. Did you find time to read it?  That fever was not some tiny fringe thing.  Forty percent of the white men in Indiana were Klan members. Nearly a hundred United States Senators and Representatives were Klansmen.

The two books tell totally different stories — but raise the same question.  Will the fever break this time?  Or will the pro-Hitler (see Prequel), pro-Klan (see Fever), kinda-pro-Putin (CNN for yourself), pro-strongman, “America Firsters” win this time?

I love white Christian men as much as the next guy — I shared my life with two of them.  (Catholics, but I checked: Catholics are Christian, and the Klan no longer hates them.)

And I love America.

But I also love democracy and civility and honesty and compassion and problem-solving and multiculturalism and the rule of law.

And I would point out that blame for the border crisis now rests squarely on the shoulders of the Republican Congress and the strongman from whom they take their orders.

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