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Forgetfulness
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
– The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
The population was bitterly divided. The centre of politics had retreated to rhetorical and ideological extremes. Folks were struggling under economic hardship. A pair of elections the year before had produced only a political stalemate. Little was getting done. People demanded solutions and politics wasn’t providing them. Increasingly louder voices screamed at each other across a widening social chasm. In March 1933, the people chose the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to lead them out of the endless bickering. The Nazi party promised a crude, brutish and efficient government.
Though the party won just a third of the seats in 1933, it was the last time Germany would vote in a contested election until after World War II. Much would happen before then. It is cliché to suggest that those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. But does this warning mean anything if we can’t remember the past? If we didn’t learn it in the first place? If we aren’t interested? Or don’t believe it matters?
We have spent decades emphasizing applied studies in our education system while marginalizing and devaluing the humanities. If we failed to grasp that liberal democracy is a fragile thing, can we be blamed when it is taken away and smashed to bits?
Are we on the doorstep of another worldconsuming conflagration? It reads as overwrought and irrational. Yet the parallels are hard to ignore. More seem likely to appear—as cracks on a sidewalk you’ve walked a thousand times.
The first thing you need to get an authoritarian dictatorship off the ground is a scapegoat. When your leaders say that your economic plight is neither your fault nor the fault of the state, you need someone to blame. In 1933, it was the Jews and the Roma. In 2024, it is immigrants and asylum seekers who are in the crosshairs. Trump has promised to round up 12 million migrants and deport them. Will he do it? Can he do it?
Who will stop him? Congress? The Supreme Court? Among the many lessons of the 1930s was how quickly and completely the bureaucracy— up and down governmental structures— capitulated to the whip hand of the Nazi Party. Once initial resisters were expunged, the machinery of government—the clerks, engineers, architects, lawyers—all fell in line and got to work.
The wish—the hope—that the institutions of American government will withstand the coming maelstrom is all we have left. It may be all that separates the world we once knew from fascism unleashed.
‘Oh, but whatever the weight and horror Trump inflicts, it will be over in four years and will be undone.”
In his first cabinet meeting after the March election, Hitler drew up plans for the Enabling Act, which gave the new chancellor complete power. It was hastily passed by the Reichstag. Hitler was unshackled from the will of the majority of the legislature or his coalition partners. He had unchecked power.
This past year, Trump has told his supporters this would be the last time they had to vote. Why shouldn’t we believe him?
Germans were world leaders in science and technology in the ’30s. It was an era that promised humans’ failings could be rectified by science. Purifying our species to erase deficiencies long predated the Nazi Party. However the notion that technology and industrial might could transform society was not lost on them.
In February 1933, Adolf Hitler convened a meeting of 25 industrialists at Hermann Goring’s residence. The stated purpose was to raise funds for the coming election. But it underlined the eagerness and willingness of the leading business leaders to assist Hitler in establishing a dictatorial regime.
We will learn the names of David Sacks, Bill Ackman and Peter Thiel. We already know Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Many are already enamoured by their genius and demonstrated ability to do what bureaucrats cannot.
Even if we don’t believe these folks can corral this moment or manipulate the transactional buffoon that is Donald Trump—they do. They think they have been given the opportunity to remake government, media, society and our species. They have brave new plans for the rest of us.
Imagine waking up in Kyiv this week. Or Taipei? Plans are being made for a military expansion on both fronts. America isn’t coming to help.
Maybe Japan finds allies and pushes back. Perhaps Poland, France and Germany conclude they must divert more resources and troops to stop Putin. Whether in Ukraine or somewhere west, these nations will attempt to draw a new line. In a NATO without America, every new line will be tested. Over and over again.
Predictions are useless. No one knows what will happen in a second Trump presidency—one in which many guardrails have been removed. It will be a test of their institutions and constitution.
But we must do better at understanding the patterns of history—understanding the cruelty and savagery that has defined much of human existence. We have allowed ourselves to push it out of our consciousness.
Can we be condemned by history if we never bothered to understand it?
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