Prof. Ferguson, who is married to the anti-Islam campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali, uses his column in the paper today to reject his colleagues’ comparisons of Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler, likening him instead to populist former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, and even Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez.

Prof. Ferguson writes:

Panic is setting in. “Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand . . . exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany.” Thus my Harvard colleague, the political theorist Danielle Allen.

“[Trump’s] remedy is 1930s to the core: nationalism, crude bombast, mytho-history and sloganeering.” Thus Victor Davis Hanson, also a colleague at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Welcome to Weimar America.

I respect these writers, but I’m afraid I don’t buy their analogy.

He notes that economics conditions today are less like 1930s Germany, and more like the late 1800s, when Mr. Jennings Bryan was a member of Congress before going on to be Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Mr. Jennings Bryan resigned over his pacifism after President Wilson marched America into war.