The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
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’s complacency that made Germans’ complicity incomprehensible. Decades later, I do understand. Because it is happening here.
Comparing Hitler and the Nazis to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement is of course fraught. Trump’s world war is a bloodless one over trade; his lawless roundups of migrants and domestic enemies aim to deport, not exterminate.
And yet the parallels are undeniable. That was dramatically clear this week when I participated in a preview and discussion of a documentary on the life of German-American Hannah Arendt, a Jewish survivor and chronicler of Nazi totalitarianism. (The film, “Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny,” will air on PBS on June 27.)
Arendt’s writings after she fled Germany in 1933 stand as a warning to her adopted country. At the end of her life, in President Richard Nixon’s time, she argued that in the United States “the greatest danger of tyranny is of course from the executive.”
But her legacy is also a positive call to individual action and personal responsibility. She’d have applauded last weekend’s anti-Trump protests by millions nationwide.
Her accounts of the factors behind Hitler’s takeover are chillingly resonant. After World War I, a defeated Germany’s populace felt economically cheated, alienated, distrustful of institutions — 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.
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’s targets are purported communists — Democrats — and (in echoes of Hitler) “vermin” immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” In Arendt’s 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.
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? The coherent narrative of past grievance and future greatness persuaded many. He especially drew support from Germany’s less educated and previously apathetic working class. Arendt theorized that Hitler gave people “the impression that they’re not alone anymore,” that “they are part of something really big,” as German studies professor Barbara Hahn puts it in the film.
Just like this country’s Republican Old Guard, Germany’s conservative establishment thought it could control Hitler, so politicians and business leaders didn’t ostracize or condemn him. But he played them, just as Trump has parlayed his popular appeal into total power.
Unchecked, Hitler quickly broke laws and the institutions he’d long attacked. Too familiar. Trump wrote on X last month: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
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.
What to do? That’s the question Arendt posed in her time.
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, “for 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.”
Now that’s how to make America great again.
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