I came across this passage in Miller’s 2017 book, The Passage of Love. Two friends are talking about the French Revolution and politics in Australia mid 20th Century and Martin says something that could well be a reference to the rise of Trump in the US. “All that is true. But in 1933, not much more than a hundred years after your wonderful French civil code was introduced, when I was a young man and still believed the Nazis could be defeated, Joseph Goebbels was cheered like a modern pop star in the Berlin Sportpalast by a vast crowd of ordinary people from the suburbs when he declared the rights of man to have been abolished. So, it was all words. Goebbels had judged the mood of the people correctly. It was now a time for evil, a time for demagogues and dictators. The people didn’t care about the rights of man and had long forgotten the enthusiasms of the French Revolution.”
I spend far too much time as a Canadian reading and watching US news. I am both drawn and repulsed. I don’t want to care this much about it on the one hand and on the other I know that it has an enormous impact on Canada and the rest of the world. When Martin talks about Joseph Goebbels and the rise of Nazism he is also talking about a crowd that would have been predominantly German Lutherans. Miller could well be writing about Trump and Evangelicals. To explore this further read the frightening, and I hope not prophetic words of New York Times writer David Brooks in his article What Will You Do if Trump Doesn't Leave?"