Leaving the Cabaret
Presidential Immunity, The Supreme Court, Trump, the GOP, MAGA, Project 2025 and Using our Agency to Resist
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There was a cabaret, and there was a Master of Cerеmonies.
And there was a city callеd Berlin in a country called Germany.
It was the end of the world.
And I was dancing with Sally Bowles, and we were both fast asleep . . . .
Clifford Bradshaw in Cabaret
Ever since Eddie Redmayne’s memorable, polarizing and some say traumatizing Tony Awards performance as Cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies a few weeks ago, the classic musical based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin has dug itself into my consciousness.
Cabaret and Goodbye to Berlin are set in Germany’s Weimar Republic in the late twenties while Adolph Hitler rose to power. As the decadent cabaret and its characters live their lives, evil builds outside. The musical characters wither deny what’s happening, fall fully into it, accept it out of self preservation or completely ignore it.
The cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies and life within the cabaret are metaphors for Germany during Hitler’s and Nazism’s rise. The mediocre talent Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli was miscast in the 1972 Bob Fosse film) ignores and refuses to acknowledge and get involved when reality arises to the point where she and others can no longer turn their heads to it.
We have securely reached the moment that Cabaret addressed. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling regarding presidential immunity has angered and terrified many Americans. Essentially the 6-3 ruling makes the President of the United States a monarch above the rule of law. In her bold, brilliant and ominous dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote:
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
The majority’s single-minded fixation on the President’s need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing need for accountability and restraint. The Framers were not so single-minded. In the Federalist Papers, after “endeavor[ing] to show” that the Executive designed by the Constitution “combines . . . all the requisites to energy,” Alexander Hamilton asked a separate, equally important question: “Does it also combine the requisites to safety, in a republican sense, a due dependence on the people, a due responsibility?” The Federalist No. 77, p. 507 (J. Harvard Library ed. 2009). The answer then was yes, based in part upon the President’s vulnerability to “prosecution in the common course of law.” Ibid. The answer after today is no.
Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
The irony of this shivers and wails. Thursday is July 4 when the American colonists declared independence from Britain’s monarchy. The Supreme Court’s ruling expands executive power and serves as one more cog in Project 2025’s gears that would start fully moving if the United States electorate Inmate Number P01135809.
A significant character from the stage musical Frau Schneider ends her engagement to the kindly but naïve and hopeful Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz as Germany’s political and societal conditions worsen. Bob Fosse’s 1972 film adapatation made significant changes to the stage play and Frau Schneider and Herr Schultz’s characters were among them. The film made Frau Schneider a minor character and Herr Shultz was not included in the adaptation. A significant mistake.
Replacing Frau Schneider and Herr Schultz are the Jewish characters of Natalya and Fritz from the non-musical Goodbye to Berlin adaptation I Am a Camera. They marry in a Jewish ceremony toward the film’s end. The original stage musical though is more troubling and darker.
The audience knows Herr Schultz’s fate at the musical’s end. We also know that Frau Schneider, despite ending her engagement with Herr Schultz to save herself and her livelihood, will also face negative and horrific impacts on her business, psyche and soul.
Sally Bowles too will suffer in one way or another. Though she clings to remain in her deluded bubble and doesn’t care about politics, we know she too will face a reckoning with devastating consequences. Only the American writer Clifford Bradshaw, Isherwood’s avatar, has the foresight, awareness and privilege to leave Berlin and return to the United States where he resists with his words. His words at the stage play’s end serve as the opening for the novel he has tried to work on during the play as an expatriate novelist.
Right now we all need to revisit Cabaret. While watching the Fosse musical still remains true to the horror of rising fascism and the hell that results when we ignore it and don’t dissent and resist, the more impactful version to watch is the 1993 West End production directed by Sam Mendes. The full performance starring Alan Cumming as the Master of Ceremonies and Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles can be watched in full on YouTube. It is definitely worth your time.
To traumatic events, the sympathetic nervous system’s reaction is either flight, fight, or freeze. As a survivor of complex trauma, my first reaction is always fight. When I am under attack or feel under attack, I resist and fight back. For others, I know the other two responses are valid realities.
Nonetheless, this reality calls us to take a deep breath and engage in self-care to process this horror. Today watch cartoons or mindless television and movies. Take advantage of a spa day or a bubble bath. Eat some comfort food. Tomorrow though, like Justice Sonya Sotomayor and President Biden, dissent.
It’s overwhelming, but we can dissent and resist in our own ways despite how little they may seem. All those little ways add up when everyone uses their agency. Here are some things we can do along with voting for ourselves, civil rights, human rights and our Constitution this November 5:
Contact our U.S. Senators and U.S. Congressional Representatives. Flood their office with calls, digital communication and, gasp, handwritten or typed letters through snail mail. Also read and utilize this guide and this guide and this guide of best practices from Indivisible over and over and back and forth. Put the handbooks’ recommendations into practice today and up to and after November 5.
Contact and flood The White House with phone calls, digital communication and letters through snail mail. President Biden also receives texts, and one will receive his text number when you send comments digitally through the contact portion on The White House web site.
Even better, contact and flood The Supreme Court with phone calls, digital communication and letters through snail mail. You can find SCOTUS’s contact information here. Enjoy!
Use our skills and talents to resist and dissent and inform. Whether one is a parent who works inside the home to care for children, a truck driver, a farmer, a writer, an artist, an organizer, a fiduciary, we all have unique abilities we can put to use creatively to course correct this train that’s derailing.
We need to stop falling into defeatism, panic and arguments with each other. Abraham Lincoln used a quote from The Bible in his House Divided speech when Jesus told his followers in Matthew, 12:25, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” We must work together and keep our eyes on the prize.
Fight back by standing behind not only our Constitutional democratic republic by President Biden and Vice President Harris. Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson gave his view recently on our reality, pragmatism and what we must do. Like Inmate Number P01135809, Biden is old, but colds go away and cold medication no longer needs to be used. But as Wilson notes, Inmate Number P01135809 always remains evil and dangerous.
Take to the streets and protest. If you are an organizer, organize a march or a rally in your town or city. There needs to be a significant protest organized especially in Washington D.C. on the steps of the Supreme Court and Congress and nationally. Western and Eastern Europe protest without hesitation when their rights and needs are violated and restricted.
Social justice groups and activists need to work in solidarity and not just in their individual communities. The disability theorist and activist Eli Claire has said instead of women’s rights groups, Black civil rights groups, LGBTQIA+ groups, and disability groups must form a coalition and be in solidarity to achieve civil rights protections for everyone.
Volunteer and work behind the scenes as we move toward the Tuesday November 5 election. Whether volunteering as a poll worker, grassroots campaigning or writing and sending postcards in late October to vital swing states like I’m doing, we are fighting for democracy no matter how small it may seem.
It’s game on, folks. Benjamin Franklin told a woman we have a republic if we can keep it. Radio host and author Thom Hartmann ends his radio show with “Democracy is not a spectator sport. Tag. You’re It.” Everyone has to work and fight to keep our Constitutional democratic republic.
Marginalized communities that include the Black, Indigenous, Latinx, disabled, LGBTQIA+ communities and women don’t have the privilege or safety to not fight and not take a stand. Whatever privilege you have, use it to resist and dissent and save others as well as yourself.
For way too long, Americans have taken the United States for granted and focused only on themselves instead of others and the larger American community. This must end now.
Silence is complicity. Take a stand. Organize and take to the streets and talk truth to power. Be on the right side of history. The Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner and writer Elie Weisel said in his Nobel acceptance speech, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.
We have more power than the Supreme Court, MAGA the GOP and Project 2025 think we do. Be a Stacey Abrams and not a Sally Bowles. Use your agency in any way. Resist. Dissent. Fight. Reflect and consume Cabaret’s lessons.
You hit the mark here.
Definitely agree on the need for self and community care and consideration for marginalised communities.
Respectfully - it feels strange to reference nazi germany and it’s outcome whilst a genocide is being perpetrated by than man you want folks to rally around. And Biden has overseen 700,000 covid deaths and millions disabled 😔 It is not a proud legacy and I really hope another Democrat can keep trump at bay for the safety of so many. It’s not a cold that stopped his mind from working. People can see the reality themselves and have done for months/years.