With every police beating of demonstrators, every right-wing armed counter-demonstration, every undermining of the electoral process, and every handing down of an unconstitutional executive order or abuse of power — like the White House being the backdrop for the Republican National Convention — some people legitimately worry that our country is slipping into fascism. They are right to be concerned, as it can happen here. Yet so far, the debate has largely bypassed the on-the-ground facts of historical fascism in power, and in particular its most notorious case: Nazi Germany.

The hallmarks of Nazi rule in the first years after the seizure of power were consensus, persecution and coercion, achieved through national consolidation, the marginalization of minorities and the incarceration of political opponents.

An examination of these fundamental issues shows that four years into the Trump administration, the United States, far from slipping into this kind of fascism, is a study in contrasts.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power with by far the largest majority backing of any fascist dictator in the 1930s. Within a year, the Nazis transformed a moribund democracy into a dictatorship that was genuinely popular. Hitler beat down the unemployment rate, tore up the despised Treaty of Versailles and remade the German Army into a feared fighting force. Four years into the regime, most Germans were applauding. W.E.B. Du Bois, the brilliant African American sociologist, pegged Hitler’s support at 90 percent when he visited the country in the summer of 1936. It was, no doubt, an overestimation — but a revealing one.

How did German institutions and society come to support the most notorious of fascist dictators? One powerful answer is in the process of national consolidation, or Gleichschaltung (“put into the same gear”). Within a few years, the whole panoply of German schools, unions, churches, student organizations and governmental agencies (including the armed forces) came under the dictatorship’s sway. The process was extremely swift, taking at most a few years. As a mix of true believers in Nazism and career opportunists emerged in leading positions in institutions, they aligned their organizations with the goals of the regime, and eagerly purged those members who did not, or could not, go along. As a result, civil society was quickly gutted, and spaces for resistance soon evaporated.

....

The contrast could not be starker with the United States today. In the United States, there is no national consolidation, and civil society is not unified but is instead starkly divided. One sector of the society supports the Trump government, while the other engages in vigorous and open resistance to it. As a consequence, universities have remained sites of debate and criticism, schools still teach that evidence is required for truth-telling, journalists still demand answers of the government, and courts of law (despite politicization) remain jealous of their independence. Even generals, retired and active, have used public forums to voice their opposition to Trump directives. Far from caving to a program of national consolidation, a new and surprisingly robust independence has emerged in state and city governments, and the covid-19 crisis has given it confidence.