Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, Ecology, and the Idea of Democracy
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2025/03/omni-trump-authoritarian-totalitarian.html
What’s at Stake: Observers were studying currents of US authoritarianism in the 1930s as Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here illustrates, long before Trump appeared in his first term Jan. 20, 2017. Defenders of the US idea of democracy have had a long time to build its structure, yet it seems fragile under Trump’s onslaught.
CONTENTS
2008
Myerson and Roberto. “Fascism and the Crisis of Pax American.”
2016
John Broich. We Asked Sixteen Historians.
Noam Chomsky
Heather Saul. Noam Chomsky’s Assessment of Trump.
Josh Jones. Chomsky on Trump and Weimar Republic 1930s.
2017
Awareness in the 1930s.
Michael Roberto. “The Origins of American Fascism.”
Two Articles by John Bellamy Foster.
Neofascism in the White House.”
“This Is Not Populism.”
David Edwards. “Trump Uses Mein Kampf.”
John Diaz. Trump’s Authoritarian Playbook.
Ron Leighton. Study the Context of US Authoritarianism of Last 50 Years.
2018
Benjamin C. Hett: Interview and Review The Death of Democracy.
Robin Limeley. The Fate of the Weimar Republic.
Timothy Snyder. Review of Hett’s book. “How Did the Nazis Gain Power in Germany?”
Heather Gray. Intro. to Richard Frankel. “German History and Trump’s Enablers.”
Juan Cole. Trump and Erdogan.
Robert Reich. Trump and the “Deep State”: A Second Civil War?
Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Trump Orders More Arms.
2019
Christian Fuchs. On Henry Giroux’s Book The Terror of the Unforeseen.” See articles above by Frankel, Snyder, Leighton.
Ref. Henry Giroux. “Neoliberal Fascism.”
2020
David Renton.Fascism.
2025
Chris Hedges. Collapse of Universities and Suppression of Speech.
Volker Ulrich. Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939.
TEXTS
TRUMP AUTHORITARIANISM, AUTOCRACY, FASCISM, NAZISM, #2 from 2008 to 2025.
[These articles have been placed in the chronological order of their publication, beginning in 2008. The opening poem serves as a general introduction.]
2007
“PITY THE NATION” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti is the co-founder of the iconic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. He wrote this poem in 2007.
Pity The Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Forwarded by Bob Billig 6-17-18
2008
Gregory Meyerson and Michael J. Roberto. “Fascism and the Crisis of Pax Americana.” Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 2 (2008).
I was unable to copy/paste this article. Here is my typed copy of the final half of the opening paragraph: “. . .the terrorist attacks in September, 2001 and the [Bush admin.] invasion of Iraq 18 months later turned a protracted crisis into an acute stage, thereby setting into motion an intensification of fascist processes,which could, in time, become the basis for a distinct fascist trajectory” (My emphasis of their careful choice of terms. This heavily footnoted article shows how widely this tendency was already being criticized by 2008. See #3 on Naomi Wolf’s The End of America (2007) and several other publications. The authors also connect with Sinclair Lewis’ 1930s prediction that fascism would come to the United States wrapped not with swastika or in brown shirts, but in the American flag and bearing a Christian cross,)
2016
“We Asked 16 Historians If They Think Trump Is a Fascist. This Is What They Said” by John Broich. 2016.
[I conclude from this essay that labeling Trumpism as Fascism is flawed, because significant exceptions exist, but Trump and Hitler–and Mussolini, Duterte, and other dictators–resemble each other in many ways. –Dick.]
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164170
John Broich is an associate professor in the history department at Case Western Reserve University where he teaches WWII history from the British Empire perspective.
Related Link The Führer and the Donald: The Ghost of a Resemblance By Nicholas O’Shaughnessy.
. . .I raised the issue with sixteen historians of fascist-era Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, asking whether they would define Trump as a fascist and leaving them to decide how broadly they defined the term.
The vast majority did not consider Trump a fascist, with the most common specific objection that Trump does not lead a coherent movement with a specific ethos. “He has no normal political organization as distinct from a publicity team,” responded Stanley Payne, a noted authority on fascism history. “The major fascist movements certainly did, almost by definition.”
The second most common objection was that Trump is not undergirded by a paramilitary or that he does not advocate more political violence, granting his comments about “Second Amendment people.”
A few scholars said the definition of fascism is so limited that it cannot be applied outside the context of the 1920s-1940s. “As I see it,” David D. Roberts wrote, “fascism was a trajectory or process that exhausted itself.”
Most of the historians I asked named many similarities between Trump and Hitler, as Kakutani seemed to do, but almost all qualified them as particulars or matters of rhetorical style rather than sufficient proof of fascism.
About half thought a comparison with Mussolini was more apt. They cited Trump’s “I and I alone” demagoguery, his “exaggerated masculinity,” his attempt to synthesize notions of the left and right, his stress on leading a movement instead of a party, and his claim to be uniquely outside the system.
Instead of finding the similarities between Trump and Hitler convincing, many of the respondents found it far more compelling to compare the historical moments in which fascism and Trump arose. Academic historians’ focus on context should not be surprising since they are masters at analyzing the contexts for past events, trends, and people. It’s how they explain how things came to be.
Harvard historian of modern Japan, Andrew Gordon, told me that he thinks there are “overlaps” in “the contexts that in the past are understood to have generated fascism or support for it and in the context of the US today.”
“Trump has tapped into some impulses or segments of American society that resemble fascist impulses and constituencies,” wrote Michael Ebner, an expert on Mussolini’s Italy at Syracuse, like, “Xenophobia, focus on internal enemies of the nation, … protectionism.”
Professor Marla Stone, author of The Fascist Revolution in Italy, responded that she is struck by comparisons to the German and Italian contexts in which so many were “willing to support a candidate who clearly states his intention to rule outside the confines of democracy. The loss of faith in democratic institutions and the democratic process is a striking similarity. . . .” MORE
Two Articles on Noam Chomsky 2016
Heather Saul. “Noam Chomsky dismisses ‘megalomaniac’ Donald Trump.” The Independent,Thursday 01 December 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/noam-chomsky-dismisses-megalomaniac-donald-trump-a7449151.html
Noam Chomsky has branded Donald Trump an “ignorant, megalomaniac” with no clear positions whose election has energised neo-Nazis around the world.
Speaking to Al-Jazeera, the celebrated American philosopher and linguist delivered a scathing assessment of Mr Trump’s ability to lead America and gave a bleak outlook on the turbulence and instability the future will hold after his ascendency to power. . . .
But there were aspects of the US election Chomsky does feel encouraged by. Bernie Sanders has an overwhelming majority among young people which he says could be a “positive portent” for the future, he continued.
Chomsky has been a vocal critic of Mr Trump and declared the Republican party “the most dangerous organisation in world history” with him at the helm. “The party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organised human life,” he said in October. “There is no historical precedent for such a stand.”
Josh Jones. “Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany.” Open Culture. May 30. 2016.
in History, Politics| May 30th, 2016 26 Comments
. . . Comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini may have worn out their usefulness in elections past—frivolous as they often were—but the Trump campaign’s overt demagoguery, vicious misogyny, racism, violent speech, actual violence, complete disregard for truth, threats to free speech, and simplistic, macho cult of personality have prompted plausible shouts of fascism from every corner. . . .
At the top of the post, Noam Chomsky (MIT professor and author of the new book, Who Rules the World?) weighs in, with his analysis of the “generalized rage” of “mainly working class, middle class, and poor white males” and their “traditional families” coalescing around Trump. (Anyone who objects to Chomsky’s characterization of Trump as a circus clown should take a moment to revisit his reality show career and performance in the WWE ring, not to mention those debates.)
In Chomsky’s assessment, we need only look to U.S. history to find the kind of “strong” racialized nativism Trump espouses, from Benjamin Franklin’s aversion to German and Swedish immigrants, who were “not pure Anglo-Saxons like us,” to later parties like the 19th century Know Nothings. Perhaps, as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker last year, that’s what Trump represents.
The history of nativism, Chomsky goes on, “continues into the 20th century. There’s a myth of Anglo-Saxonism. We’re pure Anglo-Saxons. (If you look around, it’s a joke.)” Now, there’s “the picture of us being overwhelmed by Muslims and Mexicans and the Chinese. Somehow, they’ve taken our country away.” This notion (which people like David Duke call “white genocide”) is based on something objective. The white population is pretty soon going to become a minority (whatever ‘white’ means)…. The response to this is generalized anger at everything. So every time Trump makes a nasty comment about whoever, his popularity goes up. Because it’s based on hate, you know. Hate and fear. And it’s unfortunately kind of reminiscent of something unpleasant: Germany, not many years ago.
Chomsky discusses Germany’s plummet from its cultural and political heights in the 20s—when Hitler received 3% of the vote—to the decay of the 30s, when the Nazis rose to power. Though the situations are “not identical,” they are similar enough, he says, to warrant concern. Likewise, the economic destruction of Greece, says Chomsky may (and indeed has) lead to the rise of a fascist party, a phenomenon we’ve witnessed all over Europe.
The fall of the Weimar Republic has a complicated history whose general outlines most of us know well enough. Germany’s defeat in WWI and the punitive, post-Treaty of Versailles’ reparations that contributed to hyperinflation and total economic collapse do not parallel the current state of affairs in the U.S.—anxious and agitated as the country may be. But Hitler’s rise to power is instructive. Initially dismissed as a clown, he struggled for political power for many years, and his party barely managed to hold a majority in the Reichstag in the early 30s. The historical question of why few—in Germany or in the U.S.—took Hitler seriously as a threat has become a commonplace. (Partly answered by the amount of tacit support both there and here.)
Hitler’s struggle for dominance truly catalyzed when he allied with the country’s conservatives (and Christians), who made him Chancellor. Thus began his program of Gleichschaltung—“synchronization” or “bringing into line”—during which all former opposition was made to fully endorse his plans. In similar fashion, Trump has fought for political relevance on the right for years, using xenophobic bigotry as his primary weapon. It worked. Now that he has taken over the Republican Party—and the religious right—. . . .
TRUMP’S FIRST TERM BEGAN JAN. 20, 2017 AND ENDED Jan. 20, 2021.
2017
Roberto, Michael Joseph. “The Origins of American Fascism.” Monthly Review (June 2017). Home › 2017 › Volume 69, Issue 02 (June 2017) › Cover photo from David Renton’s Fascism: Theory and Practice.
What can a class analysis tell us about fascism’s national particularities and early forms? Why was there no mass movement for a separate fascist party in the United States? The lessons of several now-forgotten works of scholarship from the 1930s are critical to our understanding of American fascism—not only for what they tell us about its history, but also about how to fight it today.… | more… https://monthlyreview.org/2017/06/01/the-origins-of-american-fascism/
Two Essays by John Bellamy Foster
“Neofascism in the White House.” Monthly Review 68, no. 11 (April 2017).
“This Is Not Populism.” Monthly Review 69 no. 2 (June 2017).
The Process of Encroaching Fascism
“Neofascism in the White House” by John Bellamy Foster. https://monthlyreview.org/2017/04/01/neofascism-in-the-white-house/
There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position. Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907).
Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This neofascism characterizes, in my assessment, the president and his closest advisers, and some of the key figures in his cabinet.2 From a broader sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases, class constituencies and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism that brought Donald Trump into office. Neofascist discourse and political practice are now evident every day in virulent attacks on the racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists, and workers. These have been accompanied by a sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the military and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new ideology and political reality. (Continued: https://monthlyreview.org/2017/04/01/neofascism-in-the-white-house/)
“Explaining Hitler author breaks silence: Trump uses ‘Mein Kampf playbook’ to normalize tyranny” by DAVID EDWARDS 08 FEB 2017.
Historian Ron Rosenbaum spoke out this week about how President Donald Trump is using Adolf Hitler’s “playbook” from Mein Kampf for undermining democracy.
In a recent column for Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of Explaining Hitler breaks his silence about the recent U.S. election, and about how the “normalization” of Trump is strikingly similar to the Nazi Party’s march to power.
“What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought,” he writes. “It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media.”
According to Rosenbaum, Trump is using the Mein Kampf “playbook” to throw the media off balance and to normalize actions and statements that would have been unthinkable just months ago.
“It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing [Hitler] in and ‘normalizing’ him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement,” Rosenbaum notes. “Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed.”
“Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late,” the column continues. “There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.”
Rosenbaum suggests that the signs were there before Trump took office: “The way Trump’s outrageous conduct and shamelessly lying mouth seemed so ridiculous we wouldn’t have to take him seriously. Until we did.”
We had heard allegations that Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, but somehow we normalized that. We didn’t take him seriously because of all the outrageous, clownish acts and gaffes we thought would cause him to drop out of the race. Except these gaffes were designed to distract. This was his secret strategy, the essence of his success — you can’t take a stand against Trump because you don’t know where Trump is standing. You can’t find him guilty of evil, you can’t find him at all. And the tactics worked. Trump was not taken seriously, which allowed him to slip by the normal standards for an American candidate. The mountebank won. Again.
Suddenly, after the inconceivable (and, we are now beginning to realize, suspicious) Trump victory, the nation was forced to contend with what it would mean, whether the “alt-right” was a true threat or a joke to be tolerated. Did it matter that Trump had opened up a sewer pipe of racial hatred? Once again, normalization was the buzzword. . . .
Trump’s Authoritarian Methods
“Trump draws from authoritarian playbook” By John Diaz. The San Francisco Chronicle. March 10, 2017, Updated: March 11, 2017
As a candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has displayed an authoritarian streak unrivaled in American history. His dystopian description of the state of the nation and his declaration that “I, alone, can fix it” at the Republican convention in July evoked the fearmongering and narcissism of many strongmen before him. The “lock her up” chants he savored and stoked at campaign rallies raised unsettling reminders of regimes where jailing a vanquished opponent is step one in a transition of power.
Any hope that the assumption of the presidency would somehow temper Trump, and heighten his appreciation of its covenant with our democracy, vanished soon after his taking the oath of office. His most insidious tirade to date — and there is no shortage of contenders for that distinction — was his March 4 series of early morning tweets that accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of ordering the wiretapping of Trump Tower while Trump was a candidate. The seriousness of this allegation cannot be overstated. . . .
This episode cannot be separated from the larger context of Trump’s continuing attacks that undermine public confidence in the pillars of our democracy. He has challenged the notion that this nation has fair elections (warning beforehand that they would be rigged for Hillary Clinton, then complaining afterward that illegal voting gave her the popular vote), an impartial judiciary (once questioning whether an American-born judge of Mexican descent could fairly hear the lawsuit against Trump University, then disparaging a Republican-appointed judge who rejected his administration’s travel ban from seven Muslim-majority nations), an independent media (trashing respected organizations as “fake news,” belittling protesters of his inauguration and disparaging the U.S. intelligence apparatus (and then suggesting the media cooked up the controversy he clearly initiated).
Trump’s serial untruths, sowing fear and confusion, and attempts to delegitimize critical oversight — whether from the judiciary or the media — are right out of an autocrat’s starter kit. Trump is hardly the first leader to attach the words “enemy of the people” to real or perceived adversaries (Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin invoked the phrase) or refer to the press as “the opposition” (Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner and Uruguay’s Tabaré Ramón Vázquez beat the White House to the punch on that one).
Trump’s allies are quick to excuse his provably false declarations and caustic disparagement of those who are dedicated to exposing or restraining executive overreach as “Donald being Donald,” the new norm of an unorthodox presidency. But this recklessness comes at a cost. No democracy is invincible; self-governance depends on the citizenry’s faith in the probity of the systems that support it.
“Donald Trump’s whole narrative has been to foster distrust of government institutions,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election law and governance issues. His message, she said, is “you can’t trust anyone but him.” . . . .
John Diaz is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor. Email: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnDiazChron
Know US History to Answer the Question
“Trump is Not Hitler: How the Misuse of History Distorts the Present as Well as the Past” by RON LEIGHTON. Counterpunch (1-18-2017)
This essay tosses and tumbles a dozen or more reasons why Trump is not a new Hitler. And we should remember the author is assessing Trump’s first administration.
“If we want to pay attention to history, rather than merely virtue-signal that we are, why not give some attention first to the history of the United States, particularly the history, say, of the last fifty years when neoliberalism went from swear word to virtual watchword (if not explicitly)? This period tells us more about Trump and his rise than do grainy images of goose-stepping Nazis. As my historian friend, Evangelos points out, assuming for the moment Trump’s personality matches Hitler’s, “It’s more important that the U.S. in 2016 is not at all like Germany in 1932, than whether or not a particular personality type has come to power.” That is what it looks like to understand the past and the present.”
As an example he cites Obama: “Arguably, US leaders that are decidedly not considered new Hitlers have and are carrying out or implementing actual, substantively fascist-like actions and policies. For instance, the Obama Administration has repeatedly reaffirmed a law allowing for the “indefinite detention [of Americans] without charge or trial.” How might Trump use that? Additionally, the Obama Administration, when Clinton was Secretary of State, leveraged fake news about imminent massacres by the Libyan government to destroy the country, overthrow its leader, and leave it at the mercy of rightwing terrorists. Nazis were hanged for doing similar things. In general, in fact, Obama helped to expand the power of the executive in war making through actions related to Libya and Syria at the expense Congress’s prerogative and responsibility. Obama has now bequeathed this arguably Hitlerian power to Trump, too.” -Dick
2018
Benjamin Carter Hett, Interview and Review
Robin Lindley Interviews Benjamin C. Hett
Jim O’Brien via H-PAD <h-pad@lists.historiansforpeace.org> Nov 12, 2018. “The Sudden Death of a Democracy: Historian Benjamin Carter Hett on the Fall of the Weimar Republic.” Interview conducted by Robin Lindley, History News Network, posted November 2.
Benjamin Carter Hett teaches history at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center and is the author of a new book on Hitler’s rise to power, 1930-33, The Death of Democracy.
“How Did the Nazis Gain Power in Germany?” A Review by Timothy Snyder. NY Times Book Review. 2018.
THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic By Benjamin Carter Hett. Henry Holt, 2018. 280pp.
We ask about the rise of the Nazis from what we think is a great distance. We take for granted that the Germans of the 1930s were quite different from ourselves, and that our consideration of their errors will only confirm our superiority. The opposite is the case. Although Benjamin Carter Hett makes no comparisons between Germany then and the United States now in “The Death of Democracy,” his extremely fine study of the end of constitutional rule in Germany, he dissolves those comforting assumptions. He is not discussing a war in which Germans were enemies or describing atrocities that we are sure we could never commit. He presents Hitler’s rise as an element of the collapse of a republic confronting dilemmas of globalization with imperfect instruments and flawed leaders. With careful prose and fine scholarship, with fine thumbnail sketches of individuals and concise discussions of institutions and economics, he brings these events close to us.
The Nazis, in Hett’s account, were above all “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” Even before the Great Depression brought huge unemployment to Germany, the caprice of the global economy offered an opportunity to politicians who had simple answers. In their 1920 program, the Nazis proclaimed that “members of foreign nations (noncitizens) are to be expelled from Germany.” Next would come autarky: Germans would conquer the territory they needed to be self-sufficient, and then create their own economy in isolation from that of the rest of the world. As Goebbels put it, “We want to build a wall, a protective wall.” Hitler maintained that the vicissitudes of globalization were not the result of economic forces but of a Jewish international conspiracy.
Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, sensitively describes a moral crisis that preceded a moral catastrophe. If Jews were held responsible for what happened in Germany, then Germans were victims and their actions always defensive. Political irresponsibility flowed from the unfortunate example of President Paul von Hindenburg. He was famous as the victor in a battle on the Eastern Front of World War I, even though the credit was not fully deserved. Hindenburg could not face the reality of defeat on the Western Front in 1918, and so spread the lie that the German Army had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews and Socialists. This moral weakness of one man radiated outward. Once Hindenburg won the presidential elections of 1925, Germany was trapped by his oversensitivity about a reputation that would not withstand scrutiny. He believed that only he could save Germany, but would not put himself forward to do so, for fear of damaging his image. Without Hindenburg’s founding fiction and odd posturing, it is unlikely that Hitler would have come to power.
As Hett capably shows, the Nazis were the great artists of victimhood fiction. Hitler, who had served with German Jews in the war, spread the idea that Jews had been the enemy within, proposing that the German Army would have won had some of them been gassed to death. Goebbels had Nazi storm troopers attack leftists precisely so that he could claim that the Nazis were victims of Communist violence. Hitler believed in telling lies so big that their very scale left some residue of credibility. The Nazi program foresaw that newspapers would serve the “general good” rather than reporting, and promised “legal warfare” against opponents who spread information they did not like. They opposed what they called “the system” by rejecting its basis in the factual world. Germans were not rational individuals with interests, the reasoning went, but members of a tribe that wanted to follow a leader (Führer).
Much of this was familiar from Italian Fascism, but Hitler’s attempt to imitate Mussolini’s March on Rome failed. When Hitler tried a coup d’état in 1923, he and the Nazis were easily defeated and he was sentenced to prison, where he wrote “Mein Kampf.” In Hett’s account, the electoral rise of the Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s had less to do with his particular ideas and more to do with an opening on the political spectrum. The Nazis filled a void between the Catholic electorate of the Center Party and a working class that voted Socialist or Communist. Their core constituents, Hett indicates, were Protestants from the countryside or small towns who felt themselves to be the victims of globalization.
Did the Nazis come to power through democratic elections? In Germany in the 1930s, as elsewhere, elections continued even as their meaning changed. The fact that the Nazis used violence to intimidate others meant that elections were not free in the normal sense. And the system was rigged in their favor by men in power who had no use for democracy or for democrats. The Nazis were by no means the handmaidens of German industry or the German military but, as Hett argues, both businessmen and officers formed lobbies in the late 1920s that aimed to break the republic and its bastion, the Social Democrats. They tended to confuse their particular interests in lower wages and higher military spending with those of the German nation as a whole. This made it easy to see the Social Democrats as foreign and hostile.
In a similarly titled book, “How Democracies Die,” the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky have recently argued that the killers of democracy begin by using the law against itself. Constitutions break when ill-motivated leaders deliberately expose their vulnerabilities. Certainly this was the case in Germany in 1930. President Hindenburg was technically within his rights to dissolve the Reichstag, name a new chancellor and rule by decree. By turning what was meant to be an exceptional situation into the rule, however, he transformed the German government into a feuding clique disconnected from society. Governments dependent upon the president had no reason to think creatively about policy, despite the Great Depression. Voters flowed to both extremes, to the Communists and even more to the Nazis. The Nazis took advantage of an opportunity created by people who could destroy a republic while lacking the imagination to see what comes next.
When elections were called in 1932, the purpose was not to confirm democracy but to bring down the republic. Hindenburg and his advisers saw the Nazis as a group capable of creating a majority for the right. The elections were a “solution” to a fake crisis that had been, as Hett puts it, “manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half the population from political representation and refused even the mildest compromise.” It did not occur to the president’s camp that the Nazis would do as well as they did, or that their leader would escape their control. And so the feckless schemes of the conservatives realized the violent dreams of the Nazis. The Nazis won 37 percent of the vote in July, 33 percent in a November election, and Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. A few weeks later, he used the pretext of the arson of the Reichstag to pass an enabling act that in effect replaced the constitution.
Hindenburg died in 1934 believing that he had saved Germany and his own reputation. In fact, he had created the conditions for the great horror of modern times. Hett’s book is implicitly addressed to conservatives. Rather than asking how the left could have acted to stop Hitler, he closes his book by considering the German conservatives who aided Hitler’s rise, then changed their minds and plotted against him. Following the recent work of Rainer Orth, Hett says that the Night of the Long Knives, the blood purge of June 1934, was directed mainly against these right-wing opponents.
The conclusions for conservatives of today emerge clearly: Do not break the rules that hold a republic together, because one day you will need order. And do not destroy the opponents who respect those rules, because one day you will miss them.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University. His latest book is The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
Forwarded to me by Bob Billig 6-17-18
It Can Happen Here: German History and Trump’s Enablers by Heather Gray. Justice Initiative. October 6, 2018.
Note: As one who is a student of history, and of the Nazi era in Europe, I can’t help but see parallel’s with what we are now witnessing in the United States as referred to by Professor Richard Frankel in the article below. I have also noted that Trump and those around him are using tactics similar to Hitler. Hitler violently and through propaganda negated Jews and others considered non-German. Trump is also “targeting the other” and/or “blaming the other” as a rallying strategy such against immigrants, Muslims, children, and more recently, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, to give but a few examples.
As is also noted repeatedly during the Nazi era, those in the United States and in other parts of Europe did not take the early Nazi actions seriously. Nor did they take time to both understand and analyze the dynamics of it all. As Dr. Frankel notes, we do so at our peril as at the end of this article, he notes: No one can know what’s just beyond the horizon. But what we do know is that once that window of opportunity closes, it’s too late. That’s why the time to speak, the time to resist, is now. We’ve already had more time than the Germans did in 1933. Let’s not squander what remains in the misplaced hope that it can’t happen here.
“German History and Trump’s Enablers.”
One of the most important lessons that German history has to offer is less about Hitler than about those around him, many of whom were not even Nazis. The enablers also bear responsibility. Richard E. Frankel. HISTORY NEWS NETWORK. Portside October 5, 2018.
Over the next few days, millions of Americans will be anxiously watching and waiting to see whether a few undecided Republican Senators will vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as our next Supreme Court Justice. Their vote will help shape the Court for a generation. More importantly, their vote holds the potential to help Donald Trump further transform this country into an authoritarian, exclusionary democracy.
As I watch all this unfold, I’m reminded of one of the most important lessons that German history has to offer us. And interestingly enough, this lesson is much less about Hitler himself than about those around him, many of whom were not even Nazis.
Adolf Hitler did not seize power in a coup. There were no violent clashes between Storm Troopers and government forces, no storming of government buildings. He did not take the Chancellorship. It was given to him. On January 30, 1933, the German President and hero of the First World War, Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler Chancellor in a Cabinet with just two other Nazis. The rest were nationalists of various kinds, but not National Socialists.
Why is this important for us to understand today, in Donald Trump’s America? Because, among other things, it teaches us that the would-be autocrat cannot succeed alone. He needs help, and not just at the point of coming to power. Hitler–originally the most improbable candidate to lead a country like Germany–became possible because much of the ground had already been prepared by others, many of whom were not friends of Adolf Hitler.
People attacked the democratic republic from the very beginning, before it even had a chance to prove what it could do. . . .
Fortunately for him, there were people willing to provide assistance. There were those like Ernst “Putzi” von Hanfstaengel, who helped make the “Bohemian corporal” socially acceptable in elite circles. There were those like the radical nationalist media mogul Alfred Hugenberg, who legitimized Hitler by including him in a major nationalist campaign.
There were those who wore down Hindenburg’s resistance and convinced him to appoint Hitler. And there were those in parliament-all but the Social Democrats-who voted for the Enabling Act in March 1933 that gave him dictatorial powers.
What we see in America, unfortunately, is something rather similar. As was the case in Germany, there’ve been all too many people ready and willing to provide the necessary assistance to make Donald Trump-not long ago one of the most improbable candidates to lead a country like America-President of the United States.
There were those who helped make Trump’s job of destroying liberal democracy that much easier before he’d even entered the political arena. Following Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s determination to make Barack Obama a one-term president, congressional Republicans committed themselves to pure and unadulterated opposition, working to block every single initiative he put forward. This involved the use of the filibuster with unprecedented frequency and the blocking of judicial appointments up to and including the theft of a Supreme Court nomination that was rightfully Obama’s to make.
That level of obstruction-to the point where government looks increasingly ineffective, unable to deliver on its promises-helps break down people’s faith in institutions, makes people willing to consider alternatives, including perhaps a strong leader who can break through the impediments, who can get things moving again even if it’s at the expense of democracy.
Then there was the undermining of the opposition party and in particular, its leader, Barack Obama. There was the extreme rhetoric used to attack him, including of course, the whole Birther movement-cultivated within the Republican Party-that claimed America’s first black President was not born in the United States and was therefore an illegitimate ruler. . . .
Unfortunately there’s more than just the rhetoric and actions that have made Trump’s presidency a real possibility. There’s the astonishing lack of any serious criticism of him by members of his own party. . . . .
Of course it’s true, no one knew just how little time they would have. No one knew if Hitler would be Chancellor for long. No one knew that the Reichstag would burn. No one knew all the horrors that were still to come. Nobody could know. But that’s precisely the point. No one can know what’s just beyond the horizon. But what we do know is that once that window of opportunity closes, it’s too late. That’s why the time to speak, the time to resist, is now. We’ve already had more time than the Germans did in 1933. Let’s not squander what remains in the misplaced hope that it can’t happen here.
Richard E. Frankel is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Juan Cole. “Warning to US: Erdogan Has Used Same Techniques as Trump to De-Democratize Turkey.”
Informed Comment . Reader Supported News (26 June 18).
Cole writes: “Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, began his legitimate political career at the turn of this century with a push for more political pluralism in a Turkey that had long been dominated by an elite, secular military.” READ MORE [Access is forbidden. –D]
“Reich on Trump.”[A Second Civil War? Trump With? Or Against the “Deep State”? Depends on how you define it.]
(I think this was published in 2018. Google Reich on Trump, where another statement with the same title appears in Feb. 21, 2025. Reich’s been studying Trump for a decade or more. –D)
Imagine that an impeachment resolution against Donald Trump passes the House. Trump claims it’s the work of the “deep state.” Sean Hannity of Fox News demands that every honest patriot take to the streets. Right-wing social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Trump commands the armed forces to side with the “patriots.” Or, it’s November 2020 and Trump has lost the election. He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep state” organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and says he has an obligation not to step down. Demonstrations and riots ensue. Trump commands the armed forces to put them down. If these sound far-fetched, consider Trump’s torrent of lies, his admiration for foreign dictators, his offhand jokes about being “president for life,” and his increasing invocation of a “deep state” plot against him.
The United States is premised on an agreement about how to deal with our disagreements. It’s called the Constitution. We trust our system of government enough that we abide by its outcomes even though we may disagree with them. Only once in our history — in 1861 — did enough of us distrust the system so much we succumbed to civil war.
[Trump embraces the billionaires and bankers and creates a “deep state” of enemy scapegoats of everyone who opposes him. –D]
But what happens if a president claims our system is no longer trustworthy?
Last month, Trump accused the “deep state” of embedding a spy in his campaign for political purposes. “Spygate” soon unraveled after Republican House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy dismissed it, but truth has never silenced Trump for long. Trump’s immediate goal is to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. But his strategy appears to go beyond that. In tweets and on Fox News, Trump’s overall mission is repeatedly described as a “war on the deep state.” In his 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carre describes the “deep state” as a moneyed elite — “nongovernmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce” who rule in secret. America already may be close to that sort of deep state. As Princeton Professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern Professor Benjamin Page found after analyzing 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Instead, Gilens and Page concluded, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests. The data Gilens and Page used come from the period from 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision. It’s likely to be far worse now.
So when Trump says the political system is “rigged,” he’s not far off the mark. Bernie Sanders said the same thing. A Monmouth University poll released in March found that a bipartisan majority of Americans already believes that an unelected “deep state” is manipulating national policy.
But here’s the crucial distinction. [To]Trump [the] “deep state” isn’t the moneyed interests. It’s a supposed cabal of government workers, intelligence personnel, researchers, experts, scientists, professors and journalists — the people who make, advise about, analyze or report on public policy. In the real world, they’re supposed to be truth-tellers. In Trump’s conspiracy fantasy, they’re out to get him. . . .
A second civil war? Probably not. But the way Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest. That’s how low he’s taken us. © 2018 Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor, is a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.
Trump: More Military and Armaments
D-G Staff. “Trump’s Budget Sustains Deficit. $4.4 Trillion Plan Boosts Spending.” NADG (Feb. 13, 2018), 1A. ‘’We’re going to have the strongest military we’ve ever had, by far,’ Trump said. ‘In this budget we took care of the military like it’s never been taken care of before.’ It would continue to markedly increase military spending and set aside money for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
2019
Christian Fuchs. “Henry A. Giroux and the Culture of Neoliberal Fascism.” mronline.org (8-25-19).
HENRY A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the Unforeseen analyzes the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald Trump’s rule and the consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an authoritarian version of capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that holds out the hope that, through collective efforts, change is possible and democracy […] Source
Christian Fuchs (Posted Aug 24, 2019)
Originally published: Los Angeles Review of Books on August 12, 2019 (more by Los Angeles Review of Books). Fascism, ImperialismGlobalReview.
2020
Fascism: History and Theory by David Renton. Pluto P, 2020.
The classic text on the history and theory of fascism, revised for the twentieth anniversary of its first publication
Across Europe and the world, far right parties have been enjoying greater electoral success than at any time since 1945. Right-wing street movements draw huge supporters and terrorist attacks on Jews and Muslims proliferate. It sometimes seems we are returning to the age of fascism.
To explain this disturbing trend, David Renton surveys the history of fascism in Europe from its pre-war origins to the present day, examining Marxist responses to fascism in the age of Hitler and Mussolini, the writings of Trotsky and Gramsci and contemporary theorists. Renton theorises that fascism was driven by the chaotic and unstable balance between reactionary ambitions and the mass character of its support. This approach will arm a new generation of anti-fascists to resist those who seek to re-enact fascism.
Rewritten and revised for the twentieth anniversary of its first publication, Renton’s classic book synthesises the Marxist theory of fascism and updates it for our own times.
TRUMP’S FIRST TERM BEGAN JAN. 20, 2017 AND ENDED Jan. 20, 2021.
TRUMP’S 2ND TERM BEGAN JANUARY 20, 2025.
2025
“Surrendering to Authoritarianism.” The Chris Hedges Report (3-24-25).
Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.
| Chris Hedges. , March, 24, 2025. |  |
I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.
Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.
The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.
The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty. . . .
Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long beforethe protests and encampments began. . . .
And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.
Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.
2025
Volker Ulrich. Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939.
HITLER’S SPEECH TO HIS ARMY COMMANDERS FEBRUARY 10, 1939: German Hyper-Nationalism, Exceptionalism, Hitler’s Megalomania, Destiny/Predestination of Germany and Hitler.
On this day Hitler spoke to his officer corps in Berlin about his easy triumphs over Austria and Czechoslovakia and about his plans for the future (his top military leaders were already aware). The 85 million, “highly civilized race” of Germans “’were the strongest people not just in Europe but practically the entire world.’” They “had a right to greater living space in order to preserve their standard of living,” a right and future that had been “preordained.” And he was the individual predetermined to carry out that destiny. This goal “’will dominate my entire existence,’” and he would “’never shrink back from the most extreme measures.’” Soon afterward he “set about capturing what had escaped his clutches in the autumn of 1938,” the rest of Czechoslovakia. Conquest of Poland and western Europe followed. Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (p. 749).
[ Successful conquests usually do not repeat the patterns of earlier invasions. Imperialists know that leaders and populations on both sides must be surprised, one to be compliant to their leaders’ massive violence, the other to be unaware and overwhelmed by the new arrangement and symbols of violence. The United States military at present has a new total budget of a trillion dollars, some 800 military bases in some 70 countries, and ten aircraft carrier groups with a new carrier doing sea trials. And it all happened gradually, after having been jump-started by WWII. The Reagan administration gave its full support to counterrevolutionary forces in Central America, and developed plans for martial law at home, giving sole power to the president and authority to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up dissidents, aliens, enemies, etc., and place them in detention centers. One morning we all woke up and found ourselves living in a heavily militarized empire.
But Reagan was not Hitler; nor is Trump. Hitler yearned for living space for his fellow exceptional Germans, and mobilized highly visible tanks and planes and marching troops to gain his predestined goal. He needed to use none of it against Austria and Czechoslovakia so intimidating was such power. Our presidents since WWII at first followed this model, until, responding to public uneasiness, they turned increasingly to less visible war— volunteer troops, world-best technology, drones, proxies, contractors. But the cause is similar: dictatorship’s territorial domination for resources, today for fossil fuels especially, with confidence in the unique, exceptional nation under divine providence. –Dick.]
CONTENTS of TRUMP AUTHORITARIANISM, AUTOCRACY, FASCISM, NAZISMANTHOLOGY #1(originally The Insurrection)
PBS Frontline, American Insurrection
NYT, “The Politics of Menace.”
NPR, Fresh Air, Trump’s Strategy, Next Time
Robert Costa and Bob Woodward, Peril
Alfred McCoy, To Govern the Globe and “An American Coup”
Karen Greenberg, Subtle Tools
Robert Kagan, “Our Constant Crisis Is Already Here”
Kate Woodsome, “How the Capitol Attack Unfolded,” Washington Post
Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Was the January 6th a Dress Rehearsal for a Coup d’État”?
Dick, Trump’s Ongoing Attempted Coup Increasingly Autocratic
Joshua Cho, US Media and Trump’s Coup Attempt
Gregory Krieg, CNN, “Trump’s Attempt to Steal the Election”
Ezra Klein, “Trump is Attempting a Coup in Plain Sight”
Two Books Recommended by George Paulson:
Mazower, Hitler’s Empire
Childers, The Third Reich
Painter and Golenbock, American Nero, rev. by Dahlia Lithwick
Dick, Benjamin Hett’s The Death of Democracy
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/01/omni-insurrection-anthology-january-2.html