Howls from Beyond
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—George Santayana
Totalitarian tyranny is coddled by three things:
Silence
Forgetting
Allowing
In his new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, Timothy Ryback chronicles a single year, 1932, during which Hitler didn’t grab power. He was handed power.
Germans were voting for safety, stability, and security—not for the depredations and nightmares to come—just for some nice programs they thought would benefit them, help them buy bread [Freiheit und Brot], and protect them from the people they feared.
And what people did they fear? They feared the people Hitler told them to fear. Hitler knew precisely how to reassure Völkisch nationalists that he would protect their pure culture, pure race, pure language, and a common moral order from “the evil other.” There is a shivering echo of this in recent American rhetoric condemning immigrants for "poisoning the blood of our country."
For this, Hitler was handed control of German politics.
Next, he was handed control of German culture. The Nazis condemned modern art as "degenerate" [Entartete Kunst], claiming it contained impure cultural influences, much of it rooted in racist and anti-semitic ideologies.
Hitler's rise to power as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of degeneracy.
The Reichstag Fire at the German Parliament just weeks later was perfectly timed. Hitler used it as a pretext to claim a Communist plot and suspend civil liberties. Press and speech freedoms were among the first to go.
First politics, then culture, and finally total control via the "Enabling Act" - giving Hitler power to pass laws by decree without the inconvenience of involving Parliament.
We hear these echoes from the past in Project 2025:
Calls for an imperial presidency
Cultural proscriptions against marginalized groups
Restricted rights and freedoms of women and vulnerable minorities
It worked for Hitler. It could happen again.
Similar tactics are used by Putin in Russia, Orbán in Hungary, and other authoritarian regimes. They present simplistic portrayals of the West as a place where family, church, nation and traditional notions of marriage and gender go to die. These autocrats have a perverse obsession with enforcing heteronormativity while claiming victimhood and yearning for a mythical past.
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum says it is not enough for a tyrant to control the masses through surveillance, observation, and repression. It is just as important for the tyrant to poison and destroy liberal ideas coming from abroad, which the masses may find seductive.
“That is why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned.”—Anne Applebaum
Autocracy depends on the steady drumbeat of discrediting democracy as divided, degenerate, dangerous, and weak. The autocratic narrative is about stability and safety. About tradition. About nice programs. Buying bread. And being protected from “the evil other.” It is more than concerning that groups and think tanks spearheaded by Project 2025 echo authoritarian rhetoric and plan to deploy it in the next sympathetic conservative administration. It should be noted that Project 2025 is in it for the long game. Trump may be a convenient enabler if elected. But Project 2025 has been in the works for years, and its authors are prepared to wait until the time is right.
Whistling Past November
What are we willing to do to defend our democracy with howls coming from within our own country and from beyond in authoritarian regimes abroad? At the very least these days call for watchfulness, civic engagement, and participation. Yet, on a recent Primary Day, a university student said, “a lot of people are turned off from politics because they don’t want to get engaged in it.”
Not engaged?
Not an option.
We are engaged when women’s reproductive freedoms are restricted. When women face prosecution and persecution because of their life and health choices. We are engaged when contraception is in the crosshairs of the next Supreme Court challenge. We are engaged when vulnerable minorities are threatened with government-sanctioned discrimination and stochastic attacks. When all manner of rights, freedoms, and liberties are subjugated to anti-liberal diktat. We don’t have the luxury of not being engaged.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line,
“The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”
The country cannot afford to be convinced of the invincibility of the founding fathers, their documents, or their ideas. None of these are invulnerable. Recent Supreme Court decisions and initiatives like Project 2025 have undermined them. Efforts to portray authoritarian policies as mere alternative interpretations of democracy are a ruse.
This is no time for complacency. Our political senses should be on alert. Our concerns about rights and liberties should be heightened.
January 6, 2025, is not far off. The election that decides the outcome is not about a horse race between two candidates. This is a titanic clash between two diametrically opposed visions of governance: on one side, a democracy championing equal rights and freedoms for all; on the other, the iron-fisted rule of Christian nationalism, bent on authoritarian subjugation. We note the ascent of firebrand J.D. Vance to V.P. nominee at the Republican Convention this week. Vance, once a never-Trumper, is now an ordained MAGA acolyte with a long record of espousing the policies of Victor Orbán.
Trump did not pick Vance to bring Republicans together. His selection of Vance reinforces that the MAGAs have taken over the Republican Party with an ideology that rejects democracy in favor of Christian nationalism. Vance has repeatedly elevated Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s destruction of democracy in favor of a strong leader imposing Christian family structures, ending abortion rights, enforcing anti-LGBTQ+ policies and encouraging attacks on immigrants, and seizing universities. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is also aligned with Orbán and was key to the production of Project 2025, which echoes Orbán’s co-called “illiberal democracy,” cheered Vance’s selection.—Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American Substack
Voter apathy in November is not an option.
Silence is not an option.
“The more we as a society bow to the pressure and self-censor—the dream of autocrats is for you to silence yourself, doing their job for them—the more arrogant and lawless the enemies of democracy will become.”—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid Substack
Forgetting is not an option.
“Historical lessons, it seems, fade after three generations. Warnings of the disasters that engulfed 20th-century Europe under fascist governments tend not to resonate with 21st-century supporters of xenophobic nationalist movements that have none of the militarism of fascism, nor the personality cults of its dictatorial leaders, but are fed by hatred of “the other” and jingoistic hymns to national glory.”—Roger Cohen, New York Times
Allowing is not an option.
“If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can.” —Robert Kagan, Washington Post
Resources and Recommendations
The America First Policy Institute
Applebaum, Anne. (May 6, 2024). The New Propaganda War. The Atlantic Magazine
The Authoritarian Playbook For 2025: How An Authoritarian President Will Dismantle Our Democracy - January 2024 - A Report By United To Protect Democracy. Also available as pdf at The Authoritarian Playbook For 2025
Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty Christians Against Christian Nationalism
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. (July 15, 2024) Silence Enables the Autocrat; Talk about Policy Outcomes, not Personalities. Lucid Substack
Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021, Insurrection. A Joint Project from Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)
Cohen, Roger. (May 5, 2024) Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right? New York Times
Freedom from Religion Foundation
Frum, David. (July 14, 2024) The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator: Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others. The Atlantic Magazine
Gopnik, Adam. (March 18, 2024) The Forgotten History of Hitler's Establishment Enablers. The New Yorker Magazine
Kagan, Robert. 2024. Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart - Again. New York: Penguin Random House
Kagan, Robert. (April 24, 2024) We have a radical democracy. Will Trump Voters Destroy It? Washington Post
Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project "The 2025 Presidential Transition Project paves the way for an effective conservative Administration based on four pillars: a policy agenda, Presidential Personnel Database, Presidential Administration Academy, and playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration."
Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” Heritage Foundation, 2023.
Richardson, Heather Cox, (July 16, 2024) Letters from an American Substack
Ryback, Timothy W. 2024. Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power. New York: Knopf
Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books
Wittstock, Uwe. 2023. February 1933: the Winter of Literature. Polity Press, Cambridge UK
Wow!
Powerful piece, Harry. We should be horrified to the bone.