American fascism, American Hitlers
Nazi memory might be distorting our view of the present
Let’s begin this week’s newsletter by consulting a book.
The Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism, and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives, of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. That is why the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history. — Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 764
I’ve thought about the final sentences in Richard Evans’ magisterial three-volume study of Nazi Germany countless times since reading them about seventeen years ago. Succinctly and powerfully, he explains why we can’t get rid of Hitler and his horrendous legacy. We must learn from them — not necessarily as “lessons” but as warnings to help us endure our own troubled times. Yet it is possible to take these warnings too far, yes? If only there were some agreement on where the boundary lies separating sound analogizing from hysteria and hyperbole.
Historian Gavriel Rosenfeld navigates this historical minefield every day. He teaches at Fairfield University and is the president of the Center for Jewish History, the author or editor of eight books to help us cross the intersection of past and present without crashing head-on into cheap comparisons.
As Rosenfeld argued in 2019 during President Trump’s first term: “Although scholars of German history have been able to highlight the lessons of the Nazi past for the American present, they also run the risk of viewing the latter too much through the prism of the former… Determining how to balance these two competing insights—about the relative perils of ‘too little’ and ‘too much’ memory—has never been more important. Major questions remain to be answered: To what degree might US-American historians of Germany not only be deepening, but also distorting, our understanding of present-day political trends through Nazi analogies?”
If you’re wondering what Rosenfeld thinks of the historian’s quandary during Trump 2.0, listen to our conversation in today’s episode of History As It Happens.
The pressure to analogize has only intensified because of the Trump administration’s lawless authoritarianism and utter cruelty toward American citizens. In a recent newsletter, I referred to ICE as “American Brownshirts” even though I once promised myself never to overdraw any parallels to the uniquely malevolent Third Reich. American democracy is in a crisis, but we’re not living in Nazi Germany. There will be midterm elections in November. How often did the Führer have to worry about an opposition party gaining a majority in the Reichstag?
Still — and this is where Rosenfeld’s expertise is appreciated — we can see in America today the dangers of democratic erosion and tyrannical conduct without having to live under an actual dictator or monarch. Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy may be the right place to look for historical lessons — or we can read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for his lacerating criticism of monarchy. We can consult the Founders, whose insistence on the separation of powers in government was designed to prevent one branch from becoming too powerful. And rather than compare ICE to Hitler’s rampaging paramilitary, we can reckon with the fact that presidents and legislators of both major parties poured billions into militarizing immigration enforcement over a quarter century.
“There’s a built-in contradiction between rhetoric and analysis. In present-day media discourse, oftentimes it’s the rhetoric that prevails over the analysis. I’ve seen this in any number of contexts. If you want to get attention for whatever cause you’re advocating or opposing, you need to invoke the most alarmist rhetoric possible. The analysis may not bear out the rhetoric… It pays, based on the attention economy on the internet and beyond, to invoke the worst-case scenario and the worst-possible precedent, which is Nazism,” said Rosenfeld.
“I agree with you,” Rosenfeld went on, “to make sense of American trends. You don’t have to go across the ocean to Europe or Germany in the 1930s for comparative analogies. There’s a longstanding nativist streak in American history that was recently seen by Pat Buchanan’s run for the presidency in the ‘90s, George Wallace in the ‘60s and ‘70s. You can go all the way back to the John Birch Society, not to mention the Know-Nothings in the 1840s and really vicious efforts to expel immigrants that oftentimes involved physical violence against Irish Catholics, for example.”
In most public discourse, fascism has become synonymous with Nazism, even though Nazism was an unusual form of fascism. Or, as historian Roger Griffin tells me, “Every fascism is unique and unusual. But Nazism was a fatal combination of components that made it uniquely powerful and radically exterminatory, and thus more destructive than any other could have been in power.”
It is therefore obvious why Trump is compared more often to Hitler than Mussolini, Franco, or Oswald Mosley. Who’s Oswald Mosley? Doing so not only distorts the present but also cheapens the past. On the other hand, we can learn something from Hitler’s rise as a political agitator and demagogue, a purveyor of outrageous lies and conspiracies. As hard as it is to fathom how the Nazis could have believed that all Jews were out to destroy them, I cannot understand how anyone can accept President Trump’s ceaseless smears of immigrants. Commonalities in the human condition, such as susceptibility to wild conspiracy theories, can transcend time and different societies.
Discussed in the podcast with Gavriel Rosenfeld: defining American fascism; differences between Italian fascism vs. Nazi Germany; origins of Brownshirts; Griffin’s emphasis on ideology; overlap with populism; and much else.
Edward Luce on Zbigniew Brzezinski
In Tuesday’s episode, the Financial Times’ Edward Luce appeared on the podcast to talk about his biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. We covered many more subjects than I had been able to fit in my book review for Responsible Startecraft, although I still somehow neglected to adequately address with the author Brzezinski’s role at Camp David in 1978 and his support for Palestinian autonomy.
Such is the nature of good conversations in that they wind and weave in any number of directions, and before you know it, 45 minutes have zipped by. At least this is my excuse for not asking about everything I had on my list. So, please enjoy the podcast episode, but there is no substitute for actually reading the book! Luce’s treatment of the Cold War and Carter’s eventful, scarring presidency is excellent.
What’s next?
In next Tuesday’s show, historian Kate Carté will return for the next installment of my occasional series on America250. We’ll talk about the many ideas and ideals of the American Revolution. Carté is the author of Religion and the American Revolution.
Next Friday’s episode will cover the history of the Nuremberg trials with Harvard Law School’s Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the Hague. We’ve both watched the new Nuremberg movie. I found the film pretty convincing, although I will ask Whiting about its accuracy. Its message could not be more timely, as the rules-based order created after 1945 is being violently dismantled.
