The Trust-Fund Brats of American Democracy

Our fathers crossed oceans to defeat fascism and protect the rule of law. The modern Republican Party inherited that legacy—and squandered it out of fear.

I thought about my father on Father’s Day.

Like so many men of his generation, he rarely spoke about the war. He was an FBI agent when the war broke out, chasing possible German spies around New York City, going to Broadway theaters at night, and having the time of his life. He resigned from the FBI, joined the Navy, and spent three years fighting in the South Pacific, 28 island landings.

He came home and raised a family, built a career, paid his taxes, coached Little League, and lived his life with the quiet assumption that duty was simply what grown men did. His brother was grievously wounded after D-Day, injuries from which he never fully recovered. He devoted his life to Civil Rights law, believing that the freedoms he had nearly died defending abroad were worth defending at home, as well.

Neither man considered himself extraordinary. They were like hundreds of thousands of other fathers who came home from the war and went about their lives. Few considered themselves heroes, but each in his own way was.

They built neighborhoods, businesses, churches, schools, and families. They disagreed politically. They were imperfect fathers, imperfect husbands, imperfect citizens. But collectively they possessed something that seems increasingly rare today: an instinctive understanding that some things mattered more than themselves.

The dangers of accommodating evil were not an abstraction for the Greatest Generation. It was the demon that killed and maimed so many of their friends and changed their lives forever. The Vichy French and Norwegian Quislings were not monsters, but their collective weakness allowed monsters to torture, rape and murder the innocents betrayed by their fear.

Cowardice is the curse that arises disguised as prudence.