As a descendant of German immigrants, from college on I devoured histories of the rise of fascism to grasp how the cultured and educated democracy of my great grandparents could succumb so tragically. I never got it; I had an American\u2019s complacency that made Germans\u2019 complicity incomprehensible. Decades later, I do understand. Because it is happening here.<\/p>\n
Comparing Hitler and the Nazis to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement is of course fraught. Trump\u2019s world war is a bloodless one over trade; his lawless roundups of migrants and domestic enemies aim to deport, not exterminate.<\/p>\n
And yet the parallels are undeniable. That was dramatically clear this week when I participated in a preview and discussion<\/a> of a documentary on the life of German American Hannah Arendt, the Jewish survivor and chronicler of Nazi totalitarianism. (The film, \u201cHannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny,\u201d will air on PBS on June 27.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe beginnings of her thinking run in direct parallel to the rise of Adolph Hitler,\u201d historian Lyndsey Stonebridge says in the film. Arendt\u2019s writings after she fled Germany in 1933 stand as a warning to her adopted country. At the end of her life, in President Nixon\u2019s time, she argued that in the United States \u201cthe greatest danger of tyranny is of course from the executive.\u201d<\/p>\n But her legacy is also a positive call to individual action and personal responsibility. She\u2019d have applauded last weekend\u2019s anti-Trump protests by millions nationwide.<\/p>\n Her accounts of the factors behind Hitler\u2019s takeover are chillingly resonant. After World War I, a defeated Germany\u2019s populace felt economically cheated, alienated, distrustful of institutions \u2014 government, media, academia, business, political parties. Many Americans have similar, long-simmering grievances in the wake of globalization, Mideast wars, a worldwide financial collapse, pandemic and political polarization.<\/p>\n Along comes an amoral self-styled strongman who harnesses that unrest by employing lies and conspiracy theories. For Hitler, the enemies of the state were actual communists and Jews; Trump\u2019s targets are purported communists \u2014 Democrats \u2014 and (in echoes of Hitler) \u201cvermin<\/a>\u201d immigrants \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country.\u201d<\/a> In Arendt\u2019s account, totalitarianism arises when a political party, which typically restrains extremists in its midst, is replaced by a mass movement beholden to such a leader.<\/p>\n In the film, Roger Berkowitz, founder and director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, notes that Hitler claimed to represent a majority but he did not. Sound familiar? Still, as Berkowitz explains, his coherent narrative of past grievance and future greatness persuaded many. He especially drew support from Germany\u2019s less educated and previously apathetic working class. Arendt theorized that Hitler gave people \u201cthe impression that they\u2019re not alone anymore,\u201d that \u201cthey are part of something really big,\u201d as German studies professor Barbara Hahn puts it in the film.<\/p>\n We know the phenomenon.<\/p>\n In Arendt\u2019s first major book, \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism,\u201d she wrote, \u201cThe ideal subject was not the convinced Nazi but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed. A most cherished virtue is loyalty to the leader.\u201d<\/p>\n Just like this country\u2019s Republican Old Guard, Germany\u2019s conservative establishment initially thought it could control Hitler, so politicians and business leaders didn\u2019t ostracize or condemn him. But he played them, just as Trump has mastered Republican \u201cleaders,\u201d parlaying his popular appeal and political ruthlessness into total power.<\/p>\n Unchecked, Hitler quickly broke laws and the institutions he\u2019d long attacked. Too familiar. Trump wrote<\/a> on X last month: \u201cHe who saves his Country does not violate any Law.\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cOrigins,\u201d Arendt held that \u201ctotalitarianism replaces all first-rate talent with crackpots and fools, whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.\u201d The seasoned advisors who acted as guardrails in Trump 1.0 are gone, replaced in Trump 2.0 with inexperienced suck-ups, conspiracists and fellow avengers<\/a> and economic dopes<\/a>: a whole Cabinet of crackpots. So it is that his national security team would get caught last month discussing military plans<\/a> on an unsecure commercial channel (a violation of federal law), with a journalist inadvertently included.<\/p>\n With the connivance of the crackpots, Trump seeks to replace the rule of law with rule by man. Less than three months in, we are seeing<\/a> abductions<\/a> of legal residents by unidentified, masked agents and deportations <\/a>without due process. \u201cWe don\u2019t give our names,\u201d a plainclothes man told the very-pregnant wife of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil during his March 8 arrest. The administration is revoking visas without notice or legal cause, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio boasting, \u201cWe\u2019re looking every day for these lunatics\u201d \u2014 meaning those whose speech and political thought don\u2019t align with Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n Congress, with a Republican majority, is ceding its constitutional power, especially over federal spending and tariffs. Trump is curtailing media access to the White House. He has targeted universities, law firms and cultural institutions with punitive executive orders, and many have caved.<\/p>\n Federal judges are providing some<\/a> pushback<\/a> but coming under attack from the president and obeisant party leaders. \u201cWe can eliminate an entire district court,\u201d House Speaker Mike Johnson told<\/a> reporters last month. Meanwhile, the administration has disregarded some judicial orders<\/a>, and the conservative Supreme Court so far has mostly shied away from a showdown<\/a>.<\/p>\n What to do? That\u2019s the question Arendt posed in her time.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of her main intellectual contributions was to renew the category of political action in response,\u201d said Arendt scholar Ian Rhoad, who also participated in the documentary preview at American University.<\/p>\n After Hitler\u2019s 1933 power grab, \u201cI felt responsibility,\u201d Arendt later told an interviewer. \u201cI was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.\u201d She harbored targeted Germans in her Berlin apartment and cataloged antisemitic acts for the record \u2014 until her own arrest and, ultimately, escape.<\/p>\n In a last speech before her death in 1975, Arendt warned that totalitarian governments try to rewrite or bury history to suit them. Americans must resist, she said, \u201cfor it was the greatness of this republic to give due account, for the sake of freedom, to the best in man and to the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n Now that\u2019s how to make America great again.<\/p>\n