Executive VP, Chief Legal Officer & Company Secretary, Cincinnati Financial
LPTV: Lunch with Lincoln January 26, 2022 | Guest: Tom Hogan
Lunch with Lincoln is live w/ guest Tom Hogan
On this special Wednesday episode of Lunch With Lincoln host Reed Galen will be joined by former lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Santa Clara University and UC Santa Cruz, Tom Hogan.
Lunch With Lincoln is a weekly lunchtime conversation with Lincoln Project and a rotating series of LP friends and allies! Now twice a week, every Monday and Friday at 12 PM ET Lunch with Lincoln will debrief the week’s news and discuss LP’s mission ahead. Don’t forget to share and follow Ryan Goodman and The Lincoln Project on social media below.
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About Thomas Hogan
On January 26, 2022, Thomas Hogan, Executive VP, Chief Legal Officer & Company Secretary at Cincinnati Financial, appeared as a guest on the Lincoln Project's "Lunch with Lincoln" program. During the episode, which was held in advance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hogan discussed his background as a Holocaust educator and drew parallels between historical events and contemporary American politics. Hogan stated that he grew up in Germany and visited Dachau as a child, and he described being "stunned" that he lived among people who had "allowed this to happen." Hogan said that "cultured Germans" were responsible for the Holocaust and argued that "if it happened in Germany, it can certainly happen here." He compared the rise of Hitler to former President Donald Trump, stating that both were "geniuses in feeling the pulse and knowing which grievances would resonate." Hogan also said that the U.S. Constitution is "words on a piece of paper" and that when collective belief in institutions stops, "that's when we start to get into trouble." He warned that genocide is "a cancer" that must be recognized in its earliest stages, and noted that Dachau opened three months after Hitler came to power.
Transcript (48 segments)
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Reed Galen0:10
Special edition of Lunch with Lincoln.
Hey everybody, thanks for joining me. Today I'm Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and your host for Lunch with Lincoln. This is a special edition. As many of you may know, tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and because of that, we want to take a few minutes today to discuss a little bit about what the Holocaust means for our time today, what it means for those that lived through it and their families, and really a broader...
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Thomas Hogan1:10
Distinctly Irish descent is not a normal place to find yourself. So first I want to thank you for joining me, but second, tell us how you came to become an educator of one of the worst, if not the worst, tragedy in human history.
Well, thanks for having me, Reed. The question that comes up... I actually had two phases of being a Holocaust educator, introducing Holocaust into public education back in the early 80s when truly the phrase was barely known and the only thing that most of the American public knew about it at that time was that there had been a Meryl Streep, James Wood miniseries, the equivalent of Roots.
More in terms of archaeology, I'd studied the Holocaust, but a human rights organization approached me in 1980 and they said, 'You know, we need to get the Holocaust into the areas of public education and the university system, and we'd like you to strap it on, educate yourself where you need to be, and then start going around the country like Johnny Appleseed, introducing these elements into public curriculum.' And as you pointed out, Reed, it helped a lot that my name was Thomas Patrick Hogan, because at that point Holocaust was viewed as a distinctly Jewish phenomenon, and had I had a Bird or a Stein or whatever on the back of my name, I don't know that...
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Reed Galen3:10
Guest on another one of our shows earlier in the week that there's a school district in Texas that said, you know, if we're going to teach the Holocaust, we have to teach both sides of it. Right now, I know that in the world today everybody tries to find equivalency, but if there's another side of the Holocaust, I don't know what it is. This is pure evil carried out by purely evil people. When you look at that 40 years on from where you started, what does that tell you about where we are?
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Thomas Hogan3:48
Well, one thing it tells you is you're in Texas, okay. And I live in Austin, and you know everyone makes that distinction that Austin and... Even this weekend with Robert Kennedy Jr., co-opting and using the Holocaust as part of the anti-vaxxer message. The Holocaust comes up in the oddest ways. It's equated at times with critical race theory. As you pointed out, two sides of the issue. I would replace the word Holocaust with pedophilia and ask if the same school district would want to be looking at both sides of that issue. So false equivalencies. That's the weirdest one that I've heard. But yes, the Holocaust has become politicized in the last few years with the Trump movement and the mandates in a way that I don't think anyone anticipated.
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Reed Galen5:10
Six million Jews perished, another million and a half Roma, millions more if you count what Hitler's regime did before the war started. What do you think folks don't know that they need to?
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Thomas Hogan5:27
Well, I grew up in Germany as an American citizen, but I lived off base in a German community. When I went to Dachau as a young kid, I came back to my village and was just stunned that I was living among people who had allowed this to happen. The reason I bring that up is that it can... That was the most advanced...
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Reed Galen6:10
Happen here.
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Thomas Hogan6:11
Well, that's the thing, right? The idea that millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people before the war started, were put in cattle cars, taken away, many of them 90% never to be seen again. In that kind of mass deportation, mass extinction effort, you can't do the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil thing. But the other part too, as the predicate, is that it takes... Is it Burke who said all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing? Folks who...
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Reed Galen7:11
Or am I going to take the path of least resistance for me, my family, my business, and everything else? And it seems that history teaches this, that a lot of folks are willing to take that easy path despite what it might mean for hundreds of thousands or millions of others.
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Thomas Hogan7:26
Right. Well, I think it's Samantha Power who has done the best book on genocide that I've ever read. She has the distinction between upstanders and bystanders. What you're talking about, Reed, is a nation of bystanders who were either intimidated by the Nazis or were seeing benefits, for example, of getting the Jews' houses or businesses when they were shipped...
And we weren't allowed in with any kind of congress people or camera people to see that. Now, I'm obviously not equating one camp with another, but I'm just saying that even in this day of 24-hour networks, we were looking at people in Bosnia that could have been just as easily in Dachau or Auschwitz at liberation time, skin and bones looking through barbed wire. So it is a lesson to all of us that we haven't come that far in the years since 1930 to 1945.
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Reed Galen8:52
Well, and that's the interesting thing too, as far as politics were concerned, Tom. As you know...
Recently, there wasn't an equivalent thing, right? We had always had extremists in our politics. We had always had people who said things that no one else could believe. But they were always outliers, right? They were the ghouls in the woods. Those ghouls have now emerged from the woods and are part of our mainstream political dialogue, whether we like it or not. The idea that you have a Republican Party, its leaders who basically sit at the table with the guy who wore the camp Auschwitz sweatshirt a year ago. These are the kinds of things we talk about. Right-wing media...
Right a week. So to say that they're somehow outside the mainstream, I think, is whistling past the graveyard on this stuff. It is front and center. We saw the former speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich, who I've known since I was probably 13 years old, say we're going to put people in jail. We now see today there were just a few more of the right-wing commentariat saying there will be trials, there will be the Nuremberg trials, there will be purges. We've seen this stuff before. What does it take for folks to start to wake up?
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Thomas Hogan10:43
It's a great question, and it's one that you and I and the Lincoln team have discussed offline as well. There seems to be a cavalier sense that we're not those...
Holocaust and Hitler, you don't make equivalents. You don't refer to abortion as the Holocaust of the unborn. You don't refer to a political leader as another Hitler. But I think, to get to the Hitler analogy of what is it taking... I think without equating Hitler and Trump in any meaningful way, I would say both of them were geniuses in terms of feeling the pulse and knowing what the affected minorities would respond to. In Germany, they wanted the days of...
Many people are actually just... They want their jobs back at $30 an hour. They want their white schools. They want their... It's not coming back, but politicians have been able to convince them that that's possible if you just focus on the people to blame. And then accordingly, the laws...
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Reed Galen12:32
Well, and let's be clear. There's this whole 'Make America Great Again' thing, this gauzy rewriting of history, of how it was better then. Those days... Again, as you're looking in the rearview mirror, 'Oh, the good old days.' I don't know if the good old days were that good...
This sort of fictionalized remembrance that things were better. But democracy is weak. They are coming for you. Milosevic and Serbia, we've seen this all before. So that's the thing, none of this is... This is all in the playbook. What's interesting to me is that when you look at the people I've just named and you look at a guy like Trump, there's an innate ability to do this stuff. But what we're seeing in this country is that you had Trump who sort of opened the door for this, and now you have all these other cynical people like Greg Abbott there in Texas, Dan Patrick in Texas, Ken Paxton in Texas, all of them who believe, again, if you have to take two...
It's sort of mystifying. Greg Abbott's been in office since the last millennia. He has been in office forever. He was always conservative. He was a Supreme Court justice, he was attorney general, now he's been governor for eight years and wants to be governor for four more. But this was not a guy who, pre-Trump, was going out of his way to pass this crazy stuff, SB1, SB8, whatever other craziness, placing vigilantism in the state. So that's another part too: how many people are just willing to say, 'Well, if this is the way to power, I'm all for it.'
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Thomas Hogan14:49
I think when you go back to 2016, when I think everyone was stunned...
Branches of government, and we're in good shape. And again, if you go back to the 30s, that was certainly the feeling as well among the German politicians. Hitler never got more than 30% of the vote, and yet he became chancellor and then dictator, because people very much like the political cognoscenti today thought that they could control him and use him to their benefit. Trump jiu-jitsu'd those people beautifully, and all of a sudden there were three equal branches of government? There was one, and he co-opted the first and then...
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Reed Galen16:10
That we're in the before times, which is we all play chess and Donald Trump eats the pieces. We forget that the Constitution is one of the greatest documents ever created by man. It's also words on a piece of paper. It's rooted ultimately in belief. We all have to believe that these things matter. Just because we say we have a Supreme Court doesn't mean that nature cares whether or not there's a Supreme Court, that there's a Congress. They are fictional institutions that we create in order to govern ourselves. The idea that they're somehow immortal is a fallacy, no matter how much we want to believe it. But when that belief stops collectively, that's when we start to get into trouble. And so that's what...
The rest of the members of the Reichstag, he co-opts the military. He's got IG Farben and Krupp, the big industrialists go along with this because they see militarism as a way to make more money. This stuff happens incredibly fast once they take power through electoral means. That's it. And just like what we've seen in places like Georgia, Tom, you have these elections boards that the legislature has set up. It's undemocratic, but in the context of the law, it's not necessarily illegal. That's where we see people twist a democratic form of government for their own purposes.
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Thomas Hogan17:53
No, and I think you raised a good point...
Away from high tech for five years to go back to teaching. But at this point, I'm teaching only graduate level seminars for history majors. Still, I would always start the first class off with a six-point quiz. You'd be surprised what you don't know. The first question was: what percentage of Germany's population in 1933, when Hitler came to power, was Jewish? And the answer is less than half of one percent. 350,000 people out of 60 million. That's the people who drove Germany into...
Job of picking an 'other.' You asked about how quickly things happen. The other question I had for very advanced scholars: when did the first concentration camp open in Germany? Hitler came to power end of January 1933. Dachau opened April 1st, 1933. Three months. And all of a sudden, we're in concentration camps. That's how prepared his team was to move if and when they gained power. I don't know if the same...
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Reed Galen20:10
Too. And it's also something that we've seen. Lots of people have written about this, scholars of authoritarianism and tyranny. A lot of the people that come to power in these types of electoral coups are people who would never have had these sorts of jobs at this level but for this movement. Looking back on Trump, we could probably say that Jared and Ivanka Kushner would be perfect examples of that. Stephen Miller has no business being anywhere near any sort of authority. You have these people who are, at least initially, willing to be around because they're the only types of people...
And say, 'You got to make a decision. What side of the river are you going to be on if this guy decides not to accept the election?' And they all cross the river with him. And we're like, 'What the hell happened?' And then we saw what happened in 2021 post-January 6th, which was not the end of something but the beginning of something. We sort of pride ourselves, Tom, on having a lack of imagination about these sorts of things. We always like to say we're sick of being right, but even our vivid and sometimes scary imaginations weren't up to the task of seeing where we would be 365 days hence from January 6th. Now we're staring down the barrel of people saying, Republican senators and members of...
Well, what does that sound like? That does not sound like free market capitalism. That sounds like authoritarianism. It sounds like state control of the means of production. These are not liberal democratic capitalist values, but here we are. And it gets twisted up with folks who ultimately it becomes down to power, money, self-aggrandizement, which is what a gang does. That's not what a political party does. That's not what a group of public servants does.
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Thomas Hogan22:43
No, and we've talked about this. There was always this phrase, 'the good Germans.' Where were the good Germans in the early 30s? By the time...
Four, where the trains are running and the camps are functioning fully and the ovens are running, it's too late. By 1936, it was too late for Germany. Once Kristallnacht happened, the good Germans were under their desks and under their tables. But they could have stepped out during the early days in the 30s without the same retribution that they would have experienced once the Gestapo was running things. In Trump's case, it's a little bit more insidious only in the fact that you have so many what we would call good Republicans or good people who have...
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Reed Galen24:10
Person. So you're watching a bunch of good people, and we've talked about this, get a pass. We need to hold up to the Republicans that still might see something in the way of what's going on and say, 'Where is your...' To quote John F. Kennedy from 1960, 'This is your profile in courage moment. What are you going to do about it?' You said, 'What rivers? What side of the river?' In my mind, how is history going to view you when they write about this period in time? Even the people who are exiting office, who maybe they want to get a nice board seat so they don't want to cross Trump, but the people who are resigning, where the hell are they? The Portmans or...
In Pennsylvania. He may want board seats and he doesn't want to rock the boat. Someone the other day, because Portman I've known for a long time, always thought of him as a very honorable man. Someone said it could be as easy as he goes back to Cincinnati, he's a wealthy guy, he doesn't really need to work anymore. But does he want to go to the country club and have to deal with his buddies just banging on him? 'I can't believe you voted for that crazy voting rights bill. I can't believe you voted for the socialist Build Back Better bill.' Sometimes I think we overcomplicate the reasoning. He just doesn't want the trouble when he gets home. But I think, Tom, this is the difference: there's bystanders, as you said, and there's upstanders, there's leaders and there's followers. Portman is leaving office not because...
Josh Mandel, you get someone who is ultimately cynical and probably crazy, who's willing to say and do anything to get Trump's support. You've got JD Vance, who I think is frankly more dangerous because he's a chameleon. He knows... He was happy yesterday to take Marjorie Taylor Greene's endorsement. I'd be interested to see what deal was cut there because she would not normally be somebody he'd be with. But if you study this long enough, he's trying to leave himself enough wiggle room to be able to come back to the, and I put this in quotations, 'same side of the tracks' if he needs to, which makes him, I think, more dangerous, not less. Especially when you go back and see what he said last April to the Claremont Institute, which is...
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Thomas Hogan27:10
We've heard this before. This is not the first rodeo for this kind of language. You raise a good point there, Reed, in terms of... You're far more connected to the Washington world than I am. Trump was able to do, and I'm not saying Trump, I'm saying Trumpism, they were all able to do what they've done over the last five years with an existing core of rational people. Hitler just kind of swept that group out and put in his followers. He didn't really have to deal with the jiu-jitsu that the Republican Party had to do. But now, as you talk about Vance...
Stage which was dealing with people who had to jiu-jitsu themselves conscientiously to come to his side. Now he's building on people who are Trump from the beginning straight through. That's a difficult age.
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Reed Galen28:28
And look, this is the other part too that we see, and we're going to run a video folks that... Tom, this is the other part too which we saw in 1934 in Germany, the Night of the Long Knives. Now I don't think it'll come to that here, but there were people, vestiges of the old Nazi party that weren't getting in line with Hitler. He got them out of the way, and in that case he killed them. I don't think Trump has that in him, but I don't...
Said Trump wins 50. He's already got 50% of the Republican electorate locked up and he hasn't run yet. If he announces, that goes to 75. And to your point about control, he controls the local party apparatus in a lot of these states and counties. They could very well just say, 'If Donald Trump decides to run for president, he has our delegates. There will be no primary,' which they did in 2020. South Carolina and Florida and everybody else just by acclamation. So to your point about control, he's got a lot of the levers of control. And the truth is, Tom, he never said, 'Go make sure the chair of the Republican Party of Ohio is my guy.' It just people assumed that that's what...
In October of 2020, but we didn't release it because we thought it was too extreme. We thought that if we put this out, people would be like, 'You guys have gone way over the edge.' Unfortunately, nowadays it looks a heck of a lot more familiar than any of us could have ever thought 14 months ago. So let's go ahead and run that. And we'll say thanks to Tom.
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Narrator30:33
At first, they seem ridiculous. The big egos, the bad ideas. Some of them seem almost comical. Not here, the people say. Yet men like these find their following because they know how to use hate and fear.
Lives and brighter futures, if they could only be rid of the obstacles to that power. Eventually, enough people buy it. They hand the fate of their nations over to mad men. But then suddenly, it's not so funny. The military deploys on the streets to protect the leader. Names appear on enemy lists. Opposition voices are silenced or imprisoned. The leader promises the right bloodlines will survive and the wrong ones will be purged. It's an old story. One that could never happen here.
Fix our problems if only the obstacles to power are removed. No one singling out the other, telling us what should become of them. No enemy lists, no threats of imprisonment, no one lashing out when their ego is threatened, demanding absolute loyalty and using the military to control the streets. No. It can't happen. Not here. We know too well how it begins. And it's always been up to us how it ends.
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Reed Galen32:51
So Tom, a little uplifting.
Well listen, Tom, I want to thank you for joining me today. Everybody, Tom Hogan, supporter of the Lincoln Project. Thank you so much for all you do for us. Thank you for all of the work you do in Holocaust education. Everyone remember, tomorrow, Thursday the 27th, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. I want to thank everybody for spending a few extra minutes with us on a special edition here on Wednesday. I want to thank B and the whole team backstage for making this stuff happen. Everybody, we'll see you Friday. Take care.