“Nationalism Will Run Roughshod Over Democracy”: What Can Nazi Germany Tell Us About Trump’s GOP? (Podcast)

This week Inside the Hive welcomes historian Peter Fritzsche, author of Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, to help separate fact from exaggeration on the increasingly pressing question of how much Donald Trump’s GOP resembles the Nazis of the early 1930s. As Trump attacks democratic norms and undermines the electoral process, and Attorney General William Barr stokes fear of “a socialist path” if Trump loses, historians are hearing distressing echoes of Adolph Hitler’s rise, from the fearmongering demonization of the left to the threats of street violence and military force against enemies both real and imagined. One difference: “A white ethnic America is much more important in Trump’s campaign than the vision of an Aryanized Germany was in Hitler’s electoral campaigns,” says Fritzsche. The MAGA conception of America, he adds, “means there are villains who have undone America, but now there are the virtuous who can remake America and ‘make it great again.’ I call it ‘muscular melodramatic populism’”—the same phenomenon that brought Hitler to power.