What happened at Madison Square Garden

The tawdry spectacle at Madison Square Garden on the night of Oct. 27, 2024, was not just a political campaign miscue, it was a moment of historical reckoning.

Speakers hoping to help a vitriolic former president regain control of the White House attacked and dehumanized Latinos, African Americans and anyone else who, for the energized throng, represented an intolerable “other.” The attacks were profane, inflammatory and often vulgar. Even by the deteriorating standards of decency in America today, it was a shocking and blatant exercise.

How each of us responds to these sorts of things matters in terms of both our own moral calibration and our role in the longer narrative of American history. The fact that Madison Square Gardens was also the venue for an infamous gathering of pro-Nazis in 1939 is material. Though comparing the rise of MAGA to the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany can seem reactionary or counterproductive, we ignore historical patterns at our own peril. What was showcased at Madison Square Garden, at both events, was an effort to dehumanize people and suspend all semblance of decency toward them. Invariably, it goes downhill from there.

The pro-Nazi rally was billed as a patriotic event, in support of “Americanism,” and opened with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It included speakers who claimed that if George Washington were alive he would support Hitler and argued that it was time to return U.S. political and cultural control to “true Americans.” Though the latter words were echoed during the MAGA rally, the reaction to the previous gathering differed in two important ways: The public was by then increasingly hostile to Nazism and it was cognizant of the threat that any form of fascism posed. The pro-Nazi group imploded soon after the rally.

What is happening today, with MAGA’s dalliance with fascism, its intolerance and its occasional calls for violence, has many such antecedents. I can look to my own upbringing in Mississippi during the 1960s, when the powers-that-be, along with complicit churchgoing, law-abiding people, either directly participated in or quietly tolerated the systematic brutalization of others whom they deemed a threat to their way of life. I grew up thinking it was normal to pass the smoldering ruins of a burning church as my family made its way to my grandmother’s house in our station wagon.

When a friend recently asked how I would raise a child to prepare for life under an authoritarian regime, I pointed out that I had grown up under such a regime, though it was only authoritarian for African Americans or anyone who expressed sympathy with their plight. I was insulated because of the color of my skin, but my parents knew the lay of the land and taught me one steadfast rule: Treat everyone with respect and never allow others to disrespect you. It’s a pretty simple rule of thumb. It also helps to be mindful of how things have gone wrong throughout human history when otherwise good people allow evil forces to take control. The descent always begins with indecency and disrespect.

In Aleksandra Kroh’s memoir, Lucien’s Story, the narrator, as a Jewish child in France, is turned over to the Nazis by neighbors whom she knew and trusted, and for the rest of her life apprises everyone differently, thinking that when someone strikes her as prone to such a betrayal, “I’ll clink glasses with those people, I’ll laugh at their jokes, I’ll shake their hand if they extend it to me, all the while thinking: you would write anonymous letters, you would sell your neighbor for fifty francs.” The line of demarcation is obvious, drawn between those who are willing to subjugate their sense of decency and empathy for other human beings in the service of a mass movement, and those who are not.

I once took a group of privileged, teenaged New England students on a literary tour of the Mississippi Delta, and when we stopped in the community of Money, where Emmett Till was murdered, I told them the sad tale and mentioned that I sometimes wondered how I might have reacted had I been a white person there at the time. I could not imagine supporting a lynching, but would I have stuck my neck out and tried to intervene, or simply looked the other way? We are all a product of our place and time. How might I have navigated the overpowering peer pressure when it conflicted with my own deeply held sensibilities?

The students looked at me aghast. They could not imagine ever contemplating such questions. Yet we all make difficult choices in the face of momentous, challenging events, and it is instructive to consider what might have guided our behavior during previous historical scenarios, in the context of what we are or are not doing now.

Who were the bad people back then? Who were the good people who stood by and watched human decency evaporate into the air? During the civil rights area, people of both of those groups were doubtless members of my childhood church, and looking back, I wonder who was who. What motivated some of them to breech human norms, or to simply accommodate or tolerate humanity’s darker urgings? Many were no doubt otherwise decent people, yet they let it happen.

Ultimately, what is happening in the United States is not about political disagreement. Regardless of whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat or an outlier supporting a third-party candidate, it comes down to more fundamental personal choices. People disagree. What matters is respect and decency, and how we respond to aggression and indecency toward other, often innocent people, whether due to ignorance, fear, hatred or some misguided need to join a like-minded mob.

All those tendencies were on parade in Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27. In one way or another, we were all up there on stage, in the audience, or watching on TV. We are a part of the larger scene, called upon to make crucial choices about what is decent and what we can, in good conscience, tolerate or embrace.

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Image: 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden (via Bettman Archive)