“Peace.”

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To which I replied:

“Internment camps? Yes. Concentration camps? No.

“As long as we still have the avenue of free elections available to us it is not time to hit the streets. Support an alternative candidate. That’s what we do in a functioning democracy. If and when that avenue closes down, then it’ll be time to hit the streets.”

My friend wasn’t quite willing to concede and called in reinforcements:

“Not to belabor a semantic point . . . but as Andrea Pitzer, author of ‘One Long Night,’ one of the most comprehensive books on concentration camps, recently noted: ‘Every country has said their camps are humane and will be different. Trump is instinctively an authoritarian. He’ll take them as far as he’s allowed to.’ ”

We had arrived at an interesting intersection.

My friend, who was raised as a fundamentalist Christian, was about to be reassured by me, the child of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, that things were not, perhaps, as bad as he perceived them to be:

“It is true that there have been some terrible internment camps — British in South Africa as one example — where people died. There is, nevertheless, a sharp distinction between a facility in which people die because proper oversight is lacking and a concentration camp which is designed to serve only two purposes: slave labor and extermination of the unwanted. Even when we, as a nation, have engaged in shameful behavior — see our internment of Japanese-Americans — that never approached the horrors of a concentration camp. In the wake of World War II, that term should never be used to describe what is currently happening on our southern border.”

Which is where this particular exchange essentially ended. My friend graciously conceded the point. The United States is not running concentration camps on its border with Mexico. But the language marking our increasingly heated national dialogue, the facile analogies to fascism and Nazi Germany — those persist; indeed, multiply. They are, I am convinced, rash and overheated. The roots of American democracy are much deeper and far more firmly attached than those of the Weimar Republic.

Still, I cannot help but wonder how long my father, who served four years in the German army more than 100 years ago, during World War I, sustained and nurtured his confidence in the fundamental decency of his fellow Germans. I can imagine him, after the Nazis gained electoral power in 1933, reassuring Jewish friends that his Germany, the Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Heinrich Heine, would inevitably come to its senses and reject the racist ravings of Hitler and his followers. He did not emigrate to England until 1937; and there, in the winter of 1940, he was arrested and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. After a year, the British, convinced that he was not, after all, an enemy alien, released him. Our family is keenly aware of the distinction between a concentration camp and an internment camp.

My father was wrong about Germany. I remain certain, however, that I am right about America.

Regardless of our tribal loyalty, we are all kept in a constant state of irritability and confusion by the hyperventilated and partisan lamentations of talk radio and cable television. Social media drive us, incessantly, into opposing corners. There truly are foreign adversaries who encourage, contrive and take comfort in the unraveling of our institutions. The threats to our democracy are not imagined, they are real. But there is a fundamental decency to the vast majority of Americans; an acknowledgment that our differences are a source of strength. When we scream at one another, we instinctively recoil. When we talk to one another, we’re still inclined to listen; not necessarily agree, but at least listen.

We remain a long way from concentration camps. But the sentiment attributed to Edmund Burke is right. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”