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The truth can’t destroy a democracy but lies can. At age thirteen my father was awoken by machine gun fire in the streets of Madrid. It was 1936, and a coalition of progressive groups had just swept the national elections, infuriating the Spanish right-wing. Soldiers in the Montana barracks, under Colonel Francisco Serra, begun trading fire with pro-government civilians that had massed in the surrounding streets. Holed up with the insurrectionists were civilian fascists called Falangists as well as a general who falsely claimed the national election had been stolen. (“The rebellion? We planned it the day we lost the election,” another fascist leader later admitted to the American consul in Madrid.) Once that lie was accepted, everything else in Spain—life, death, truth, reality itself—seemed to be up for grabs.
Even longtime democracies like America are vulnerable to fascist takeovers because fascists tend to threaten civil war when they lose elections, and democracies will do almost anything to avoid civil war. Fascists rely on a tight coterie of corrupt loyalists to take over the government and impose control. Fascists promote a mythology of both victimhood and invincibility to justify their excesses. Fascists demonize their enemies, arrest or kill their critics, glorify their supporters and often use religious figures to legitimize their power. Groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are just as fascistic as dictators like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet. Despite the fascist obsession with power and control, such regimes rarely last long. “Dictators look good until their last five minutes,” Czech president Tomas Masyrk observed during the build-up to World War Two.
The rise of fascism in Spain followed a classic trajectory that can serve as a blueprint for how to destroy a democracy. After the liberal victory in 1936, an army officer named Francisco Franco declared himself to be the only person who could save the country from dishonor and ruin. He announced a “national campaign in defense of Western Civilization and against Communist barbarism”—a broad array of enemies that included Jews and Freemasons. In a dizzying inversion, Francoist courts found that it was the liberal government, not the insurrectionists, who had betrayed Spain, and that supporting the government was illegal. The penalty for such treason, of course, was death.
Ellen JungerMiguel Chapiro Junger in Truro, Mass., circa 1972.
My father’s name was Miguel Chapiro Junger. His mother was an Austrian socialite from Salzburg and his father was a left-wing journalist of Jewish ancestry. (Though Franco was rumored to be Jewish, his willingness to do business with Hitler apparently put him beyond recrimination by his fellow fascists.) It was widely assumed that if Germany won the war, they would invade Spain and round up all the Jews. Shortly after the attack on the Montana barracks, my father’s family tied a horsehair mattress to the roof of their car to protect themselves from shrapnel and fled to France.
Whenever I asked my father why they left Spain, he simply said, “Because of the fascists.” He always spat out the word as if he didn’t want it in his mouth any longer than necessary. According to him, fascists don’t want freedom, they want power. They don’t want knowledge, they want faith. They don’t want loyalty, they want obedience. They are the exact opposite of everything that is good and noble about America, which was the country that eventually took my father in and gave him a home, a family and a career.
Things unraveled quickly after my father escaped. A lighting offensive by fascist rebels in the south failed to reach Madrid in time, and the Montana barracks was overrun by troops loyal to the elected government. Most of the insurrectionists were lined up and machine gunned, though one group of right-wing officers managed to retreat to a back room and ceremonially shoot themselves while seated around a table. But almost everywhere else, Franco’s forces proved hard to stop. Combat troops stationed in Morocco were airlifted back to the mainland in transport planes provided by Hitler and Mussolini, and they quickly routed loyalist troops and rural militias armed with shotguns and farm implements.
ullstein bild/Getty ImagesRepublican troops standing in the recently seized Montana Barracks in Madrid, on July 19, 1936.
And in an odd historical twist, special units of Rif tribesmen from Morocco were unleashed on Andalucia and told to rape, plunder and kill as much as they pleased. Almost 500 years after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, Franco managed to arrange for a reconquista of his own country by an estimated 60,000 Moroccan irregulars who were so feared, civilians sometimes committed suicide rather than face them.
Regular Spanish units that joined Franco’s army were little better. Traumatized by a decades-long war in Morocco—they once lost 8,000 men in a single battle—combat veterans saw themselves as the last bastion of Spanish honor, which made them feel entitled to decide what kind of country Spain would become. In their eyes, the leftwing Popular Front could be slaughtered with impunity because they had rejected both the Catholic church and the feudal hierarchy that had long dominated Spain. In fact, the Popular Front had won the election handily, and their platform was consistent with broad economic reforms that were sweeping the world after a global depression. Among other things they sought the emancipation of women and the right to civil divorce; land reform; wage increases; and the separation of Church and State.
“Because the election results represented an unequivocal statement of the popular will, they were taken by many on the right as proving the futility of legalism,” writes historian Paul Preston. “The destruction of the republic by armed violence was justified by the claim that it was illegitimate, based on electoral falsification, and that its political leaders were thieving parasites who had brought only anarchy and crime.”
Mondadori/Getty ImagesGeneral Francisco Franco swearing allegiance to Spain in Oct. 1936.
But Franco’s coalition was unstoppable. It was comprised of some of the most powerful sectors of society and enjoyed the loyalty of most of the army and police. Industrialists and large landowners were terrified of economic reforms and allied themselves with Franco because they thought—correctly—that he would keep Spain in its semi-feudal state. (Wealthy people saw themselves as so far above the law, in fact, that during the first days of the insurrection, a landowner outside Salamanca lined up the workers of his estate and shot six of them just to make sure they knew their place.) The Catholic Church was also deeply threatened by the secular goals of the Popular Front and offered a kind of blanket dispensation for the use of violence in exchange for maintaining their moral monopoly over society. And regular frontline soldiers were so contemptuous of civilians that many rejected the very idea of an elected government. “Those who don’t wear uniforms should wear skirts,” they were fond of declaring.
Once your opponent has been classified as not just wrong but evil, a kind of moral inversion occurs where the worse you act, the more noble you are. An American journalist in Badajoz named Jay Allen saw 1,800 men herded into a bullring and machinegunned at dawn. South of Madrid, twenty pregnant women were taken from a maternity ward, driven to a cemetery and shot. In Toledo, an American journalist named John Whitaker watched a pair of belt-fed machine guns dispatch 600 men in minutes. He also saw two teenage girls pushed into a schoolhouse where 40 Moroccan troops awaited them. “Oh, they’ll not live more than four hours,” the commander assured Whitaker as the troops began ululating in excitement.
Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesNationalist troops advance through the debris of houses wrecked in air raids in Madrid, on April 2, 1937.
Rather than make the clergy rethink its commitment to the fascist cause, the carnage just seemed to confirm their view that civilization itself was under threat. If it weren’t, why were so many people dying? In Navarre, a Capuchin monk delivered a mass confession to a crowd of men standing in their own grave. In the Sierra Guadarrama, a Jesuit priest personally led an infantry charge while waving a crucifix. In Murchante, a deputy parish priest carried a pistol so that he could dispatch the wounded at mass executions. The wife of a falangist officer in Talavera had a similar predilection, though she also shouted “Viva Franco” as she fired.
If local priests had any reservations about the bloodlust they had sanctified, higher authorities provided guidance. German bishops issued a collective pastoral applauding Hitler’s support of Franco, and the Vatican sent an Apostolic Delegate to Spain that was soon reciprocated with a fascist ambassador to the Holy See. Once the purity of the fascist endeavor was established, a kind death cult seemed to take hold. Fascist infantry charged machineguns screaming, “Viva la muerte”— Long live death! People gathered every morning in towns across Spain to enjoy the executions and see if the condemned would cry or beg or soil themselves. A union card could get you killed, or a misidentification, or nothing at all. Some Falangists liked to kill people on their saint’s day, regardless of their politics, just to inspire terror and obedience.
There were massacres on the government side, to be sure, but they were stopped within months and did not represent government policy. Almost one percent of the Spanish population was executed for their political beliefs during the civil war and afterward. Throughout this horror, my father was safely ensconced in Paris, learning French and making his way through the French school system. The German Army invaded the Netherlands on May 10, 1940 and was standing on French soil within days. My father escaped Paris a few days before the German army entered the city and relocated to Biarritz, where he saw advance units of the German army patrolling the streets. When a German officer standing at the front of a tank column asked how to get to the city center, my father pointed the wrong way and said in German, “That direction.”
De Agostini/Getty ImagesCadets from the Francoist army swearing allegiance in the Alcazar in Toledo, Spain, after it was destroyed by bombing, in 1937.
By then the Spanish civil war was over, and Franco had won. In order to escape the Nazis, my father’s family had to exchange their old Republican passports for new Nationalist ones, which they managed to do at the Spanish consulate in Bayonne. By the time they drove across the border into Spain, the German swastika had already replaced the French tricolore. Eventually my father, now aged 18, boarded a Portuguese freighter named the Sao Tome bound for Baltimore with a hold full of cork. Several weeks later, the Sao Tome steamed into Chesapeake Bay and my father stepped shore onto American soil.
My father had come to America because he knew fascism never would. He tried to join the U.S. Navy but was turned down because of his asthma; instead, he did technical work on jet engines and submarine propellors. Much later he would work on the Apollo space program. The U.S. is not always on the right side of history—we supported Franco and ignored Hitler for far too long—but eventually, we sent hundreds of thousands of men overseas to defeat fascism. After the war my father never went home; he married an American woman and spent the rest of his life in this country.
The first time that fascistically minded people tried to attack the U.S. Capitol, on September 11, a few brave souls forced their own plane down into a Pennsylvania field. The second time, on January 6, more brave souls stood firm in the building’s marble hallways and saved our government yet again. We are blessed with an abundance of courage in this country, it seems. Over and over, people risk their lives for the rights of others. That may be the ultimate reason my father never left.
May that always be true.
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On April 27, 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)easedits guidelines on wearing masks outside, saying fully vaccinated people did not need masks outdoors unless they were in a crowd of strangers. Public health experts largely supported the new guidance. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is mostly transmitted through the air in the form ofdroplets or aerosolsand fresh air disperses these. While outdoor transmissioncanoccur, especially duringcontact-sports, studies suggest indoor transmission is around19 timesmore common than outdoor transmission. The CDC was signaling where we ought to be focusing our efforts at preventative measures: indoor settings, especially poorly ventilated spaces with lots of unmasked, unvaccinated people.
Yet, just 16 days later, on May 13, the CDC made a sudden about-turn. Without giving any warning, it abruptly changed itsguidanceon indoor masking, released mere days before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency that oversees workplace safety, was tomeetto review COVID-19 guidance for workplaces. CDC’s latest guidance seems to have given OSHA the ammunition it needed to ignore the science pointing to the risk of indoor aerosol transmission, as itswebsiteencourages employers to follow the CDC’s mask guidance. Employees in particular are now going to be in prolonged indoor contact with unmasked people, and in some areas of the country as many as 60% of people remain unvaccinated—and there’s no way to know for sure that all of those going maskless have, in fact, gotten their shots.
When an indoor mask mandate was in place, employers were forced to protect their employees and customers. That protection has now gone. The CDC’s baffling, whiplash-inducing decision has caused immensefrustrationamong those on the frontline working on U.S. pandemic control.
In theory, the CDC’s new guidance was aimed only at those who are fully vaccinated, who arehighly unlikelyto catch or transmit the virus. While it makes scientific sense for vaccinated people to stop masking indoors, the guidance gave states the green light to drop indoor mask mandates for everyone. That’s the wrong approach at this stage.
Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Michiganimmediately endedtheir indoor mask mandates in the wake of the new CDC guidance, as didmajor chain storeslike Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and Costco. These states and companies are ceding their power to implement population- and business-wide policies that protect the health of all, and instead are just hoping for the best: that the unvaccinated will still wear masks indoors to protect themselves and others from illness, long COVID, and death. But hope is a weak public health strategy.
The Biden Administration and the CDC have adopted a new rhetoric of personal responsibility that does not match the reality of the pandemic today. The government is abandoning its responsibility to keep the population healthy. It has eliminated guidance meant to protect the public’s health and placed the onus on individuals to protect themselves. Vaccination is being promoted as the only nationwide approach to prevent COVID-19. Instead of adopting a population-based strategy, in which we as a community would work together in solidarity to drive down transmission by universal masking indoors, Biden and the CDC are telling individuals that it is up to them to lower their risk. The CDC director nowsays“your health is in your hands” and President Bidensays“The choice is yours.”
It is hard to understand the CDC’s sudden, unexpected shift towards an individualized, vaccination-only stance. The implication is that vaccines are now available to all and its up to people to get them, but the reality of the U.S. vaccination efforts is that justone thirdof Americans are fully vaccinated. Coming only four weeks sinceeligibilityfor vaccination was extended to all aged 16 years and older, it makes one wonder if the CDC has forgotten that it takes two to six weeks (depending on which vaccine is used) for a person to become fully vaccinated.
It is simply not the case that anyone who wants the vaccine can easily get their shots. For example, a recentsurveyby the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Latinx adults in the U.S. are around twice as likely as white adults to say they want to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Yet a high proportion of Latinx adults face an array of access barriers, including fear of jeopardizing their jobs by taking time off to get vaccinated, concerns they may be challenged over their immigration status, or worries that they will have to pay for the doses because they’re not sure if it’s free for everyone (it is) or not. Fewer resources have been targeted towards offering vaccination to the most vulnerable counties, thosecharacterizedby “high poverty rates, crowded housing and poor access to transportation, among other factors,” according to Amy Harmon and Josh Holder at the New YorkTimes. As a result, there isa widening gapin the vaccination rate between the most and least vulnerable counties.
What is particularly frustrating is that some states had established sensible roadmaps that tied the future easing of masking and social-distancing rules with specific indicators of progress in curbing the pandemic. And some of those have abandoned these careful plans given the new CDC advice. For example, North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, and the state’s director of Health and Human Services, Mandy Cohen, hadassuredNorth Carolinians that the indoor mask mandate would remain in place until two thirds of residents had received at least one dose. But on May 14 Governor Cooper tore up this roadmap andendedthe mandate (only40%of people in the state have had at least one shot).
In addition, there has been almost no time for the childhood vaccination campaign to get going. On May 12, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practicesapprovedthe use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents aged 12-15 years old. It is difficult to understand why just one day later the CDC changed its mask guidance.
Given that most of the U.S. population still remains at risk, why was the CDC in such a rush to change its stance on masks? It is confusing and contradictory for the CDC to simultaneously acknowledge aerosol spread (which it belatedly and finally did on May 7) while also loosening protections against such spread.
The new guidance is also confusing when it states that fully vaccinated people must still wear masks in homeless shelters, prisons, airports and bus stations. If the agency believes that fully vaccinated people are now safe around others indoors, why do they still need masks in these settings but not inside offices, workplaces, gyms, churches, stores or other indoor settings?
The CDC clearly jumped the gun with its new guidance. It will leave vulnerable people—especially essential workers—unprotected and could increase their risk of infection.
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You probably don’t think of 2020 as a generational change election. It resulted in the presidency of Joe Biden, the oldest man ever to take the oath of office. The dramatic week of vote counting, and the subsequent attempts by a sitting President of the United States to subvert the outcome, mean that the election of 2020 will be remembered more as a test for American democracy than one that marked the rising power of a new wave of voters.
But 2020 was a breakthrough moment for the youngest American voters. Last year, I covered how the rise in Millennial political engagement would shape the country in my book, The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, which is out in paperback this week. Voting data from the election shows that young voters are already reshaping the contours of American politics.
For starters, there are simply more of them. According to new data from the Democratic data firm Catalist, Millennials and members of Gen Z—which together make up the American adults born since 1981— now represent 31% of the electorate, up from 23% in 2016 and just 14% in 2008. Meanwhile, the voting blocs that have long maintained an iron grip on American political power are receding. In 2008, Baby Boomers and older generations (American adults born before 1964) made up 61% of the electorate; by 2020, they were only 44%. “That’s a permanent change,” says Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist. “And it’s only going to grow from there.”
Biden won roughly 60% of voters under 30, which helped power his wins in key states. According to CIRCLE, the net youth votes in Biden’s favor exceeded his margin of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, four battlegrounds he flipped.
In the same way that Millennials were shaped by their experiences at the dawn of the 21st century, from 9/11 to the election of Obama and the economic recession, it’s clear that the last five years have dramatically shaped how young voters see their role in American politics. Gen Z in particular is stepping into the political arena after being antagonized by Trump, radicalized by the reckoning over racial justice, and demoralized by a year of virtual schooling due to Covid-19.
“I think there’s an urgency, specifically to Gen Z,” says John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. “Millennials are the tip of a spear: their values are significantly different than the values that preceded them in Gen X. Millennials have opened up important conversations around inequality, around climate, around BLM, but now Gen Z is seizing that opportunity, expanding it, and calling it their own.”
It’s not yet clear exactly how the events of the last several years will permanently shape this generation. It took a few years for Millennial political attitudes to come into focus, and much of Gen Z isn’t eligible to vote yet. But it’s clear that this is a generation that has been deeply affected by recent events, and one that understands how to bring those concerns into the political process.
“I have a hard time envisioning a Democratic House, a Democratic President and now a Democratic Senate without the generational shift that we’ve been witnessing and talking about now for a decade,” says Della Volpe.
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(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — Tennessee will become the first state in the United States to require businesses and government facilities open to the public to post a sign if they let transgender people use multiperson bathrooms, locker rooms or changing rooms associated with their gender identity.
Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill Monday that represents a first-of-its-kind law, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group that decried the bill as discriminatory and said the required signs are “offensive and humiliating.” The law will go into effect July 1.
Lee, who is up for reelection next year, had previously been mum on whether he would sign the bill. Instead, he told reporters earlier this month that he always had “concerns about business mandates” but was still reviewing the bill.
Lee’s approval came just a few days after he signed legislation that puts public schools and their districts at risk of losing civil lawsuits if they let transgender students or employees use multiperson bathrooms or locker rooms that do not reflect their sex at birth. It was the first bill restricting bathroom use by transgender people signed in any state in about five years, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Lee also signed a different proposal this year that bars transgender athletes from playing girls public high school or middle school sports.
Republican statehouses have been awash in culture war legislation across the country this year, particularly focusing on the LGBT community. Tennessee has been the front lines on that fight, with civil rights advocates pointing out that only Texas has filed more anti-LGBT bills in the country.
Yet, to date, there has been no big, tangible repercussion where bills have passed targeting transgender people, unlike the swift backlash from the business community to North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill.” In Tennessee, the bills are becoming law despite letters of opposition from prominent business interests.
According to the bill signed Monday, the required sign outside the public bathroom or other facility would say: “This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom.” However, questions remain about how the law will be enforced and what, if any, consequences will stem from ignoring it. The law doesn’t spell out fines, penalties or any other mechanism to ensure the signs are put up when required.
Republican Rep. Tim Rudd, the bill’s sponsor, said no state department will oversee compliance with the law. Instead, Rudd said, local district attorneys could seek a court order to require a facility to post the sign. If an entity refused to comply, “it would open the door for whatever judicial remedies the court deems appropriate,” Rudd said.
Additionally, it’s possible that noncompliance could lead to civil liability, Rudd said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee has said the legislation is “impermissible compelled speech, in violation of the First Amendment, and raises substantial due process and equal protection concerns.”
While the measure is likely to face constitutional challenges, no lawsuit had been filed as of Tuesday morning.
Additionally this year, Lee has signed legislation to require school districts to alert parents 30 days in advance before students are taught about sexual orientation or gender identity. Parents could also opt their student out of the lesson. The requirement would not apply when a teacher is responding to a student’s question or referring to a historic figure or group.
He has one more bill awaiting his action that LGBTQ advocates have opposed—a ban on gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender minors, including the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Arkansas approved a similar version earlier this year over a veto from Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
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