When I met Dr Leon Bass

I first met Dr. Leon Bass in the late 1990s while working for professional development organization Facing History and Ourselves.   

I listened to his riveting tale of growing up in Philadelphia as the son of a Pullman porter, enlisting in our country’s segregated army after graduating from high school, and fighting for freedoms he didn’t enjoy at home because of his race. His anger subsided somewhat when he witnessed the atrocities of the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he arrived shortly after its liberation.  After returning home, Bass completed his education before launching a more than 30-year career that culminated in his serving as principal at one of his hometown’s toughest high schools.   

His past and present collided one day when he observed students displaying indifference to the wrenching story told by Nina Kaleska, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp.  Speaking publicly for the first time of his wartime experience, he told the students she was telling the truth.  You’ve got something to say, Kaleska told him. He heeded the survivor’s call and spoke in schools, prisons and religious institutions for more than 35 years.

In the closing of his speeches, Dr. Bass would often pose the question to the audience about the cost of doing right:  So you answer the question, “Is the price too high?” I don’t think so. But I can’t speak for you.  I can only speak for me. You must answer the question, “Is the price too high?”

His words have stayed with me in the close to 30 years since I first heard them, and have struck a particularly resonant chord in the month since Donald Trump took the oath of office and resumed his position as president of the United States. 

I attended Trump’s first inauguration on a rainy Friday in January 2017.  I went because I wanted to see for myself the transition from our nation’s first black president to what Trump was ushering into our nation. I left his “American carnage” address deeply unsettled about what would follow.  Here is what I wrote for the Daily Maverick, a South African publication: 

If there was any doubt before Donald Trump’s searing, angry inaugural address and initial actions as President of the United States, let that be permanently gone.

Everything is on the table:

America’s role as a leader engaged in transnational alliances;

A national commitment to fight climate change;

The right of Americans to healthcare that has been under assault from Republicans since the passage of the landmark Affordable Care Act in 2010;

Government agencies that have supported the arts and public for decades;

The belief that our country’s diversity is an asset to be appreciated and embraced;

And, according to some, the core and soul of our democratic nation.

Eight years later, all of these and more are on the line-but with a different and more dangerous set of circumstances. I want to be clear that I understand and am not saying that Trump is Adolf Hitler or that we are Germany in the early 1930s.  There are many profound differences between the two countries.  Weimar Germany was a fledgling democracy formed in the aftermath of World War I while we have nearly 250 years of entrenched democratic systems.  Hitler rose to power on a platform of what some have described as eliminationist antisemitism.  While anti-immigrant hatred was a core message of Trump’s successful election campaign, he was not advocating for the murder of an entire people.   More generally, I have written before about the all too easy tendency to label figures ranging from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to former President Barack Obama as a Nazi for the actions political opponents deem overly heavy handed or antidemocratic. 

At the same time, there are some significant disturbing parallels between the two countries.  Like all democracies, they are living entities with laws, practices and norms that require upholding to remain robust and that cannot sustain indefinite blows.  On a fundamental level, they depend on trust, faith and support of a majority of the governed.  Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, close to 10 years after the “Beer Hall putsch,” the failed coup that he and other Nazis recast as a heroic effort to save the nation.  His ascent came at a time, as historian and friend Steve Cohen noted, when more than half of the German public voted for parties on the far left and the far right that opposed democracy.   

Trump’s inauguration last month followed nearly a decade of assaulting our country’s most basic democratic fabric, the legitimacy of elections and the peaceful transfer of power.  Starting with his first run in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge election results unless he won.  In 2020, he perpetuated against all evidence and dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits the Big Lie that he beat Joe Biden-a falsehood that has enduring support among about two thirds of Republicans.   

He continued the charade on his first day in office, pardoning close to 1,600 supporters who attempted their own coup on January 6, 2021 by storming the Capitol the day Biden’s victory was certified.  Trump had called this group, which included people convicted of violently assaulting police officers, hostages. As he has done throughout this phase of his public life, he has issued a relentless stream of attacks on the media, immigrants and the government that, like body blows on a fighter, have taken an inexorable toll.   In a chilling similarity to the weakening of democracy in Weimar Germany, Trump won the popular vote and all of the swing states. 

Already present during his first administration, these currents, like the antisemitism in the early days of Hitler’s reign, have been codified in rapid fashion.  Trump has issued a barrage of executive orders that have included blatantly unconstitutional measures like banning birthright citizenship, supported Elon Musk and DOGE’s mass firings or layoffs of government workers, and advanced blatantly imperialist aspirations. In many cases he has drawn on the personnel, specific planks and general approach toward government articulated in Project 2025-the tome coordinated by the Heritage Foundation that he disavowed during the campaign.

But in a critical difference from his first term, Trump has no meaningful restraints this time. Operating with a razor-thin majority, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have conceded the constitutionally-enshrined power of the purse to the executive branch. The Democrats have continued to struggle to formulate a coherent message beyond being unnerved by their powerless status.  The Senate has confirmed all of Trump’s cabinet appointees thus far, including the spectacularly unqualified Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.   Corporate media owners like Jeff Bezos and the bosses at ABC, apparently eager to curry favor with Trump, have engaged in a craven capitulation by killing editorials, spiking cartoons and settling a defamation lawsuit for $15 million.  For his part, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg parroted Trump’s language about censorship and political bias in announcing the platform’s decision to eliminate fact checking. 

Federal courts have put a check on some of Trump’s actions, but the Supreme Court gave him an astounding level of immunity during last year’s Trump v. United States decision.  Aided by Musk, Trump seems to be advancing a strategy of making change on the ground, seeing how he fares in the courts, and, like the elections, defying them if he doesn’t get the result that he likes.  Vice President J.D. Vance has already advanced the idea that judges don’t get to control the executive branch’s power. 

Perhaps most troubling of all, though, for the future prospects of our democracy, is the reaction of the public.  Thus far they have been met with strong approval from supporters and a more subdued response from opponents than during the first Trump administration. 

On one level, the muted protest response is understandable.  The first Trump term engendered a stomach-churning, teeth-gnashing feeling, a sense of unpredictability that the bottom has not arrived and may never get here.  The second term has brought for many a sense of bewilderment at the speed of the measures, dismay at the lack of power at the federal level until the next election cycle and the knowledge that the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency.  

The magnitude of the task ahead is daunting, but the stakes could not be higher.  I understand the desire to avoid reading the latest distressing development.  I get the weariness and the despair, and we must not give into it.  Rather we must gird ourselves to ask ourselves if the price is too high to stop the movement of our country not into the genocide of the Nazi era, but into what scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called competitive authoritarianism-a hollowed out form of government  in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair.   That unhappy destination is not inevitable, but will not be avoided without sustained and strategic action on a large scale by those of us who see the need for a different way. 

The Trump Administration marked one month on February 20.  I last saw Dr. Bass at his 90th birthday party in January, 2015, shortly before his death.  He stayed seated most of the time and his mind wasn’t as clear as it had been.  But he knew who he was and he understood the love enveloping him from the family and friends who were celebrating his remarkable life.  On the centenary of his birth, I am proceeding with deep concern about our country’s present and future and the fervent hope that I, like he, will find within myself the fortitude to do what I believe is right. 

By Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

The author is the founder and executive director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and an associate professor teaching journalism at Grand Valley State University. 

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