The Mirror We Refuse to Look Into and How Democracies Die in Daylight
What history’s playbook can still teach us about political decay.
We learn history the way we learn fire: first as story, then as scar, then as warning; we memorize the names, we recite the dates, we swear we would have done something different, and we promise ourselves that we would have seen it coming, because the alternative is unbearable, because it suggests that people like us, people who consider themselves decent, can watch a society step quietly toward the cliff, and still call it normal life.
Hitler is, for many, the ultimate symbol of evil, a singular monster sealed inside a singular era; he is black and white, a villain in a film we have already watched to the end, and we are comforted by that ending, because it implies inevitability, because it tempts us to believe that moral catastrophes only arrive wearing costumes that make them easy to recognize. Yet fascism rarely walks in with a dramatic flourish; it tends to arrive by the door we forget to lock, it speaks in familiar accents, it borrows old resentments and gives them new clothing, it offers relief from complexity and calls that relief “truth.”
This is why comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler provoke such fierce reactions, including from people who otherwise agree that Trump’s behavior is dangerous; the comparison feels too extreme, too sacred, too inflammatory, or too impolite for civil company. But a comparison is not a claim of identical outcomes, nor a claim that history repeats with perfect symmetry; it is a way of tracing patterns across time, a way of identifying how democracies can be hollowed out while their citizens insist the walls are still standing. If we want to keep our society from stumbling into a catastrophe that future generations will call obvious, we must learn to look at the mirror without flinching.
Hitler did not seize power by announcing, plainly, that he would become a dictator and commit atrocities; he rose through a politics of identity and humiliation, through the promise that one group’s pain could be healed by another group’s punishment. He offered a myth of national restoration, and then he attached that myth to an enemy: Jews first, and then many others, all framed as contaminants of the nation, all framed as threats to purity, and as obstacles to greatness.
This is not merely history’s horror; it is also history’s psychology. Human beings are tribal under stress; we are story driven when frightened; we seek simple explanations when our lives feel unstable; we cling to leaders who promise certainty, even if certainty is purchased with cruelty. The scapegoat is not a side effect of authoritarian politics, it is the fuel. You cannot maintain an emergency state without an enemy to justify it, and you cannot ask ordinary people to accept extraordinary violence without first persuading them that the target is less than fully human.
In our time, Trump’s movement has thrived on the same architecture:
