Last weekend, my husband and I joined a group of supporters and staff of Indianapolis’ Cabaret Theater on a weekend trip to New York. It was the first time we’d participated in these annual outings to Broadway to enjoy musical theater. This year, the entire group had tickets to the revival of “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.” Participants could choose from a wide variety of other shows as well, but the Cabaret revival was the common denominator.
Most Americans are familiar with previous iterations of Cabaret, but I will readily admit that this particular production had a new and concerning resonance for me.
It had been at least eight years since my husband and I had been in Manhattan, and several things seemed different on this particular trip. On a personal note, I was struck–and impressed–by how much cleaner Midtown was, and how kind and helpful people were. My husband has mobility issues that require the use of a mobility scooter, and doormen, restaurant personnel, theater ushers–even people on the streets– were unfailingly solicitous and helpful. These are not, I will note, adjectives I might have used to describe such folks on past visits.
As we braved the crowds on the streets in the theater district, it also occurred to me that the faces I encountered were the faces that upset and enrage the predominantly rural folks who make up the bulk of the MAGA movement. Native or tourist, the people we passed reflected a cosmopolitan universe: young people with purple hair on bikes or scooters, Black, brown and White men and women talking on their phones, women with hijabs, Hasidic men with fur hats… the wildly diverse America that MAGA does not want to recognize.
What really made an impression on me, however, was the performance of Cabaret. The music and staging of this particular revival were exceptional, but what really gave me chills were the similarities between Germany just before the Nazis assumed power and the United States poised on the brink of November’s election.
Let me be clear: I’m not referring to the cruelty of the Nazi assault on Jewish Germans, although it was heartbreaking to see the naiveté of the Jewish character, Herr Schultz, who insisted that “this will all blow over. After all, I am as German as they are.” Those of us who know what came later are aware of the prevalence of the sad belief of so many German Jews that it “couldn’t happen” in such a civilized, culturally-advanced country.
No, the character who summed up the nature of the real threat–then and now–was Sally Bowles, who insisted to her lover Cliff that “politics has nothing to do with us.”
Sally wasn’t the only character to dismiss so-called “political differences” as irrelevant to the lives people live. The young operative who had befriended Sally’s lover was astonished when the swastika on his armband made Cliff recoil (after all, that’s just politics, and we’re friends). But it was Sally’s utter incomprehension about why national politics should matter to her at all–why the events consuming Berlin should cause her to rethink a return to performing at the Kit Kat Club–that forced me to consider the millions of Americans who simply go about their daily lives without paying any attention to the national news or the daily revelations about the plans being made for a second Trump term.
It’s a political truth that most Americans pay little or no attention to national political campaigns until after Labor Day. (Until the expenditure of truly obscene amounts of money on electronic ads in the primaries, primary elections were low-key events interesting mostly to party insiders.)
That disengagement from politics may have been harmless when America’s two major political parties shared a basic understanding of their responsibilities–when their disputes were primarily about how to go about achieving broadly agreed-upon goals. But–just as in the Germany of Cabaret’s time–that is no longer the case. MAGA Republicans, aka Christian Nationalists, want to utterly transform what it means to be an American, just as Hitler’s Nazis wanted to redefine what it meant to be a German.
We’ve seen this play before. We know how it comes out–and how many innocent people were sacrificed to its madness.
I have repeatedly posted about the importance of turnout in the upcoming election. Unless the millions of Americans who are America’s version of Sally Bowles wake up to the fact that their lives and the lives of their children will be irreparably altered if Trump and his ilk win, America in 2024 will repeat the tragedy of 1929-30 Germany.
It could happen here.
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