Ron Johnson may be the most anti-vaccine lawmaker in Congress; he’s the kind of guy who says he’s “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated” while claiming without valid evidence that thousands have died from COVID shots. This morning, at the Capitol, Johnson walked over to his Senate Finance Committee colleague Bill Cassidy, a doctor and a passionate advocate for vaccination, and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. The two of them had just advanced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate floor.

The committee vote, which was held this morning in a room crammed to capacity with what appeared to be roughly equal numbers of Kennedy’s skeptics and devotees, certainly fit with the behavior of a compliant GOP. But it was still surprising in its way, if only because, until this morning, Cassidy had been so clearly wary of giving the nation’s highest role in public health to a prominent anti-vaccine activist. At last week’s confirmation hearings, he seemed like he might even be prepared to cast his vote with the opposition. That didn’t happen.

Whether you like Kennedy or not, the hearings showed that he lacks the basic qualifications to hold this office. He knows very little about the nearly $2 trillion behemoth that he would be tasked with running. He flubbed the basics of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and seemed wholly unaware of an important law that governs emergency abortions. The hearings also called attention to a passel of health-related conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. has floated in the past, including that Lyme disease was developed as a bioweapon, that COVID is “ethnically targeted” to infect Caucasians and Black people (and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people), and that standard childhood vaccinations are damaging or deadly.

As of last Thursday, Kennedy appeared to have unwavering support from the committee’s Republicans, who occupy 14 of its 27 seats—with one notable exception: Cassidy. Prior to taking office, the Louisiana senator had personally led a campaign to vaccinate 36,000 kids against hepatitis B. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. And in early 2021, Cassidy joined six other GOP senators in voting to convict Donald Trump on charges of “incitement of insurrection.” The doctor had voted his conscience before. It seemed possible that he would do so once again.

Cassidy made no attempt to hide his skepticism of RFK Jr. during Thursday’s hearing. He spoke up at one point to correct the record after his Republican colleague Rand Paul worked up the crowd of pro-Kennedy spectators by disparaging the practice of vaccinating babies for hep B. Later on, he paused to cite a meta-analysis disproving Kennedy’s often-stated belief that childhood vaccines may be a cause of autism. (Cassidy also explained the concept of a meta-analysis for those in the room and people watching at home.) When RFK Jr. cited his own evidence for being skeptical of vaccines, referring to a paper from a little-known journal, Cassidy put on his reading glasses, peered at his iPad, and reviewed the evidence firsthand. At the end of the hearing, he reported that he’d found “some issues” with the paper, and then implored Kennedy to disavow mistruths about vaccine safety. “As a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed in making America and Americans more secure, more prosperous, healthier. But if there’s someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease [...] It’ll be blown up in the press,” he warned. “So that’s my dilemma, man.”

Cassidy’s “dilemma” hardly went unnoticed by RFK Jr.’s supporters. Calley Means, a proponent of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, said last weekend on The Charlie Kirk Show that MAHA moms are now “camping out at [Cassidy’s] office.” (I did not see any tents or sleeping bags outside his door this morning.) Other MAHA leaders, including the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, have also issued political threats to any lawmakers who might try to stop Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone that votes in that direction, I think, is really burying themselves,” Bigtree told me and a group of other reporters last week.

Cassidy, for his part, wasn’t saying much about his personal deliberations. His only official social-media post from the weekend quoted a Bible verse from the Book of Joshua: “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged,” it read in part. “Be strong and courageous.”

When he arrived at the committee room this morning, Cassidy was somber. He stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed. He’d been verbose at last week’s hearings, but now he said only a single word—“aye”—and left the room. In a social-media post that went up this morning, Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems. “It’s been a long, intense process, but I’ve assessed it as I would assess a patient as a physician,” Cassidy said. “Ultimately, restoring trust in our public-health institution is too important, and I think Senator Kennedy can help get that done.”

Even if Cassidy had voted no, his vote may not have mattered in the end. Under normal circumstances, a nomination that got voted down by the Senate Finance Committee would be dead in the water—but these were not normal circumstances. Majority Leader John Thune could still have scheduled a vote by the full Senate, at which point Kennedy would have been kept from office only if at least three other Republicans had joined Cassidy in opposition.

It’s still not a sure thing that Kennedy will be confirmed by the full Senate. Other Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have raised concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. But the odds of RFK Jr.’s defeat are shrinking, and Cassidy’s thumbs-up may one day be remembered as the mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down from 2017, when that independent-minded senator doomed Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Faced with an opportunity to make the same sort of stand, Cassidy folded. Now the American public is at the whims of the administration’s promises.

A friend of mine, an old-fashioned and very capable scholar, views analogies as the first step on the road to perdition—and, even worse, to political science. These days, he is right to scowl more than ever, because on top of watching Donald Trump trash precedent and common decency, launch initiatives that are likely unconstitutional, and behave vindictively and erratically, we also have to deal with a wave of ill-conceived analogies.

Even sober writers who know that the argument ad Hitlerum is always problematic are now using it. Or they invoke Benito Mussolini, or Viktor Orbán, or Hugo Chavez, or any of a number of other thuggish saboteurs and wreckers of democracy to help explain the current American moment. The words fascism and fascistic appear regularly. It is all terribly misplaced.

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

[Christopher R. Browning: A new kind of fascism]

Nor is the United States like other countries in which democracy has perished. America has nearly a quarter millennium of legitimate self-government under its belt, unlike, say, Weimar Germany, which never had a majority coalition of parties that favored democracy. The U.S. has not experienced in recent years anything like the slaughter of World War I, the murderous chaos of post–World War I Europe, or half a century under the Soviet boot. It is a continental empire, as the Founders called it, and they argued—correctly—that its physical vastness, the diversity of its population, and the multilayered nature of its government would form unequaled (if never impregnable) obstacles to the mob rule or the despotisms experienced by city-states. It is not only much older than the democracies that failed or faltered in Germany, Italy, and Hungary, but nearly an order of magnitude larger in physical extent.

MAGA ideology is itself difficult to define—it lacks a poet like Gabriele d’Annunzio or a propagandist like Alfred Rosenberg to explain it to the masses. In fact, it reflects disparate and divergent tendencies, including the divisions between Silicon Valley techno-futurists and old-fashioned nativists, libertarians and pro-lifers, isolationists and those who look to confront China. In some respects it is ugly indeed, but unlike the ethno-nationalist movements of the right, the MAGA movement has grown more racially diverse over time (although there are racists in it and Trump is perfectly willing to exploit racist tropes), and it is more hostile toward government than eager to expand it.

Nor is it anti-Semitic—just the reverse, in fact. The Jews are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of Western civilization, and the undeniable truth is that MAGA is not only pro-Israel but anti-anti-Semitic, and sometimes fervently so. For Jews (like myself) and philo-Semites who despise Trump and Trumpism, that is a jarring thing to admit. But if you cannot handle cognitive dissonance, you cannot think clearly about politics.

Analogies have their place, although they are most useful as a means of sharpening our understanding of what is different about the past (and the past is always different) rather than purporting to explain the present or predict the future. Sometimes, analogies help us ask the right questions as well.

But for the most part, they are a distraction. Trump and Trumpism, the servility of the Republican Party, and the flight from a values-informed foreign policy are all thoroughly American phenomena, and need to be understood in that way. History can help us see not so much where we are going as how we got here, and the nature and magnitude of the political challenges we face.

Some Democratic politicians, such as Representative Richie Torres of New York, understand this, which is why they are using the moment to reflect on how their party lost the working class rather than to bleat in unremitting outrage. But there is much more to be done. How did the presidency end up with such excessive powers vis-à-vis Congress and the judiciary? Why have so many Americans come to mistrust the government’s expertise and its ability to serve them well? What led them to put in office for a second time an odious and erratic felon? The answers will not be found merely in excoriating one administration or two. These problems have been long in gestation, and only by acknowledging that can we reckon with them.

The despicable parts of the Trump enterprise are best understood in an American context, too—not through the framework of Mussolini’s goons administering castor oil to intellectuals, but rather through the cruelties of Andrew Jackson, America’s ur-populist, who presided over the Trail of Tears. Or think of the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920, the FBI snooping on Martin Luther King Jr. (among others, to the fascination of the Kennedy administration), loyalty oaths, Ku Klux Klan marches, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—all of these help illustrate how America has gone astray in the past.

The personalities that so many find alarming in the Trump administration are best understood not as native variants of Martin Bormann and Nicolás Maduro, but as authentically American demagogues in the mold of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, not to mention business geniuses with wild and reprehensible ideas, such as Robert McCormick and Henry Ford. Indeed, it is only by seeing Trump’s subordinates and henchmen in their American context—in a land that has produced its share of racketeers, bullies, and thugs—that one can understand them at all.

For thoughtful patriots, the Trump moment needs also to be a reckoning with American history. We must come to accept that we are the country that was born with, and in some cases even embraced, the curse of slavery, but also with the principles that ultimately undermined it and which inspired the self-sacrifice of heroes who destroyed it. We despoiled much of our fabulous birthright of natural resources and beauty but also preserved huge swaths of it by creating the greatest national-park system in the world. We have supported dictators, and we have liberated nations. We produced Aaron Burr and George Washington, Preston Brooks and Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump and John McCain. Historical analogies cause us to stare out the window, when what we really need to do is look in the mirror.