The Fix: No, This Is Not 1933 All Over Again

Trump's authoritarianism is bad. But let's see it for what it is.

Nazi SS troops march at the Party Day rally in Nuremberg, 1933. Credit: Everett Collection / Shutterstock

Last week, three eminent scholars of authoritarianism appeared in a New York Times video entitled, “We’re Experts in Fascism. We’re Leaving the U.S.” In it, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley, who previously taught at Yale, explained why they are leaving for Canada, where they will teach at the University of Toronto.

The tone of the video is undeniably fatalistic. “Toni Morrison warned us,” declares Stanley, quoting the esteemed novelist: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It's one step. And then another. And then another.” He goes on to add that “we are seeing those steps accelerated right now.”

Shore, for her part, is all but ready to throw in the towel. “The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later,” she affirmed before likening today’s America to the sinking Titanic.

The experts above might know more about Nazi Germany than I do. But I am familiar enough to recognize an overwrought comparison when I see it.

This matters. For if the coming years are likely to witness anything like Nazi Germany, then you probably should flee the country. If it will be something less than that, then resistance might really make a difference.

America has become an authoritarian regime. This is a point I have stressed repeatedly in this newsletter. Not only that; it will almost certainly get worse in the coming years.

But at no point in the foreseeable future will authoritarianism rise to the level of an outright dictatorship like that of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Putin's Russia. It will not even approach Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, whose regimes, while authoritarian, are not dictatorships in which all dissent has been effectively stamped out.

To see why, consider the advantages those leaders held—advantages that are not available to Trump.