American Fascism

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-07-23-american-fascism/



A couple of weeks ago, there was a brief dustup when Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok started spewing out antisemitic riffs and praising Hitler. Musk apologized. In the ongoing discussions about how far down the path to fascism is the U.S. under Trump, Hitler is often invoked as a dark symbol. But it is important to remember the real Hitler and the real parallels. In the Hitler timeline, he was appointed Germany’s chancellor on January 30, 1933. That’s ten days later than U.S. Inauguration Day. The Reichstag fire of February 27 gave him a pretext to consolidate absolute power. The next day, he issued a decree suspending civil liberties and allowing the arrest of parliamentary opposition deputies. There followed the Enabling Act of March 23 allowing Hitler to govern by decree. And on July 14, all parties other than the Nazis were banned, completing the dictatorship.

Trump is only slightly behind schedule. The Democrats haven’t been banned; they have just been rendered irrelevant in Washington by a cultish Republican Party spellbound by Donald Trump, and put under siege in the states. More chilling are the parallels when it comes to sheer cruelty. You wonder why Trump would take away medical care, break up immigrant families, ruin careers in the sciences, deport people to be tortured—until you realize that cruelty is the whole point.

For my light summer reading, I’ve been engrossed in a biographical novel, The Magician, that improbably combines two of my favorite writers, Thomas Mann and Colm Tóibín. In this lightly fictionalized 2021 book, Tóibín recounts the story of Mann’s life, drawing on diaries, letters, papers, and previous biographies. In 1933, Mann, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, was 57 and living comfortably in Munich when Hitler took power. Like a lot of Germans who didn’t believe this could happen, Mann didn’t see Hitler’s dictatorship coming. (“He did not think for a moment that the Nazis would ever take power. Some days, they were merely a nuisance, representing a coarseness that was entering every aspect of life.”)

The following passage literally sent chills down my spine: “The Nazis,” he belatedly realized “were street fighters who had taken power without losing their sway over the streets. They managed to be both government and opposition. They thrived on the idea of enemies, including enemies within. They did not fear bad publicity—rather, they actually wanted the worst of their actions to become widely known, all the better to make everyone, even those loyal to them, afraid.” Has anyone ever written a better description of Trump?

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