LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.

“Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for the display of pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. It replaced a slew of traditional words and phrases: People were told to stop saying master bedroom, breastfeeding, manpower, and brown-bag lunch, and to start saying primary bedroom, chestfeeding, workforce, and sack lunch. At the extreme, it designated certain words—such as brave—beyond redemption.

This was often a nuisance and sometimes a trap, causing the perpetual sense that one might inadvertently offend and consequently self-destruct. In certain industries and professions, wrongspeak had tangible consequences. In 2018, Twitter introduced a policy against “dehumanizing language” and posts that “deadnamed” transgender users (or referred to them by their pre-transition names). Those who were judged to have violated the rules could be banned or suspended.

Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.

“Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.”

Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.

An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side’s astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new “woke right.”

The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism.” DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book’s “apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.” It “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims. But “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”

Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reimagined this nation’s founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.

The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois recently introduced Representative Sarah McBride, Congress’s sole transgender member, as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride.” The activist Christopher Rufo, one of the most belligerent voices on the right, endorsed the move: “We are all tempted to be polite,” he wrote on X. “But complicity in the pronoun game is the opening ante for the entire lie. Once you agree to falsify reality, you have signaled your submission to the gender cult.”

Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. “I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1 that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” the White House press secretary said. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.” European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.

Trump supporters fell immediately into line. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia—in a gesture encapsulating the digital-political fusion that has come to define the woke right—tweeted trollingly, “Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America.”

Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020—posting their identical black squares on Instagram and Facebook and, in the case of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS Sports, pausing their content for a symbolic eight minutes and 46 seconds—some of the country’s most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right’s new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump’s risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that “at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘DEI’ from their most recent annual reports to investors.”

Some state leaders are following in Trump’s footsteps. In January, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the “Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government”—a loquacious way to say she ordered state agencies to stop using the word Latinx. Others, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, were woke right avant la lettre. The 2022 Individual Freedom Law, paradoxically known as the “Stop WOKE” act—developed under Rufo’s guidance—imagines the state as one enormous, humid safe space. The legislation aggressively restricts speech in workplaces, K–12 schools, and public universities, and even encourages snitching on community members who dare to advance illicit perspectives.

All of these moves are ripe for mockery—and they deserve it. The scholar and provocateur James Lindsay gained a large online following in 2018 after he and two colleagues successfully placed a number of outrageously bogus papers in peer-reviewed academic journals focused on what Lindsay called “grievance studies,” including one text arguing that dogs engage in “rape culture” and another that rewrote Mein Kampf from a feminist point of view. Last year, Lindsay applied the same test to the woke right, cribbing 2,000 words from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and submitting them as a critique of liberalism to The American Reformer, a respected platform in conservative Christian media. The gag ran under the title “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”

“What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose,” Lindsay wrote last week on X, “is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.” The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as “lame.” More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.

Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right’s woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov poll found that the share of Republicans who say he should have “a lot” of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence “at all.” Over the past two weeks, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.

The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right’s illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.

He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”

In my recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, I chronicled the fraught relationship between the tyrant and the titan, but my story ended in January 1933, so I did not detail the subsequent impact on Hugenberg’s fortunes, let alone the catastrophic consequences that lay ahead for other corporate leaders, their companies, and their country.

In the ’20s and early ’30s, the Hitler “brand” was anathema to capitalists and corporate elites. His National Socialist German Worker’s Party was belligerently nationalistisch but also unapologetically sozialistisch—a true Arbeiter Partei, or “working man’s party.” Its 25-point political platform explicitly targeted bankers and financiers, calling for “breaking the bondage of interest,” as well as industrialists who profited from wartime production. Profits were to be confiscated by the state without compensation, and corporate executives charged with treason. Platform Point 13 was explicit: “We demand the nationalization of all existing corporate entities.”

Through the 1920s, businessmen preferred to place their political bets with conservative, centrist, business-friendly politicians, such as those in the Center Party or the Bavarian People’s Party or the right-wing but decidedly pro-business German Nationalists. Out of necessity, then, the National Socialists had to derive most of its financing via storm troopers standing on street corners begging for contributions and from admission fees to Hitler rallies. Among the exceptions to this were socialites—Viktoria von Dirksen, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann—who were smitten with Hitler. But the most significant exception was Fritz Thyssen.

Thyssen, heir to one of Germany’s leading industrial fortunes, had been an early financier of the Nazi movement. He first met Hitler in the autumn of 1923 after attending a beer-hall rally. “It was then that I realised his oratorical gifts and his ability to lead the masses,” Thyssen recalled in his 1941 memoir, I Paid Hitler. “What impressed me most, however, was the order that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers.” Thyssen provided the party, by his own estimate, approximately 1 million reichsmarks—more than $5 million today—and also helped finance the acquisition and refurbishment of a Munich palace as the Nazi Party headquarters. Most important, Thyssen arranged for Hitler to speak to his fellow industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932.

Hitler sits next to Hermann Göring at the Düsseldorf Industrieclub, while Fritz Thyssen, a wealthy industrialist who was one of Hitler’s early financial backers, speaks at the microphone, January 27, 1932. (Ullstein bild / Getty)

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

“The speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists,” Thyssen said, “and in consequence of this a number of large contributions flowed from the resources of heavy industry into the treasuries of the National Socialist party.” This financing, estimated at a still-cautious 2 million marks annually, was channeled through a trusted intermediary: Alfred Hugenberg.

Hugenberg had served as a director of Krupp A.G., the large steelmaker and arms manufacturer, during the Great War, and had subsequently founded the Telegraph Union, a conglomerate of 1,400 associated newspapers intended to provide a conservative bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy press. Hugenberg also bought controlling shares in the country’s largest movie studio, enabling him to have film and the press work together to advance his right-wing, antidemocratic agenda. A reporter for Vossische Zeitung, a leading centrist daily newspaper, observed that Hugenberg was “the great disseminator of National Socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines and films.”

To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right-wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a “freedom law” that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg “one of the most evil geniuses of Germany.”

Though both Hitler and Hugenberg were fiercely anti-Communist, antidemocratic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, their attempts at political partnership failed spectacularly and repeatedly. The problem lay not in ideological differences but in the similarity of their temperaments and their competing political aspirations. Like Hitler, Hugenberg was inflexible, stubborn, and self-righteous. When challenged, he doubled down. Hugenberg had spoken of a “third Reich” as early as 1919, well before Hitler was a force on the political scene, and he envisioned himself as the future Reichsverweser, or “regent of the Reich.” His followers greeted him with “Heil Hugenberg!” Joseph Goebbels noted that Hitler invariably emerged from his meetings with Hugenberg red-faced and “mad as shit.”

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

But by late January 1933, the two men’s fates were inextricably entangled. Hugenberg, who had leveraged his wealth into political power, had become the leader of the German National People’s Party, which had the votes in the Reichstag that Hitler needed to be appointed chancellor. Hitler had the potential to elevate Hugenberg to political power. As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: “Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.”

After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached: Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship, in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet post as head of a Superministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn’t hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg’s calculus as follows: “Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.”

The New York Times expressed astonishment that Hugenberg, an “arch-capitalist” who stood “in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement,” was suddenly in charge of the country’s finances. Hitler’s “socialist mask” had fallen, the Communist daily Red Banner proclaimed, arguing that “Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler!” The weekly journal Die Weltbühne dubbed the new government “Hitler, Hugenberg & Co.”

As self-proclaimed “economic dictator,” Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. “The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,” one of Hugenberg’s newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue “the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.” Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. “It just won’t do,” Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, “that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.” Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. “Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.” The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat —the “consultant of confusion.”

Hugenberg didn’t care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or “woof woof.” Even his close associates referred to him as “the Hamster.” But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled. Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party’s entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy.

In late June 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German-delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. “The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa,” Hugenberg explained. “The second would be that the ‘people without space’”—Volk ohne Raum—“would open areas in which our productive race would create living space.” The announcement made headlines around the world. “Reich Asks for Return of African Lands at London Parley,” read one New York Times headline. Below that, a subhead continued: “Also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe.”

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s foreign minister, tried to walk back the Hugenberg statement, asserting that Hugenberg had expressed only a personal opinion, not government policy. Hugenberg dug in his heels, retorting that, as economic minister, when he said something, he was speaking for the entire government. Foreign policy was just an extension of economic policy. Confusion and embarrassment followed.

Back in Berlin, Neurath insisted in a cabinet meeting that “a single member cannot simply overlook the objections of the others” and that Hugenberg “either did not understand these objections, which were naturally clothed in polite form, or he did not want to understand them.” Hitler sought to mediate, saying that “what had already happened was no longer of any interest.” But Hugenberg wouldn’t back down: He wanted the issue resolved and on his terms. “It was a matter between Hitler and me as to who was going to seize the initiative,” Hugenberg later admitted. Hitler prevailed. On June 29, 1933, Hugenberg resigned his minister post.

By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg’s corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists. Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder’s villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction. Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy.

Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge. On Monday, February 20, 1933, Hermann Göring, one of two Nazis ministers in the Hitler cabinet and the president of the Reichstag, hosted a fundraiser at his official residence for the Nazi Party in advance of upcoming elections. The event was presided over by Hjalmar Schacht, a respected banker and co-founder of a centrist political party who saw Hitler as the best bet against left-wing political forces and had lobbied President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor.

Among the two dozen industrialists, bankers, and businessmen in attendance, the most prominent was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, known as “the cannon king” for his armament production. “I was astonished,” Schacht recalled, “because I knew that this same Krupp von Bohlen had refused an invitation from Fritz Thyssen to attend an event with the Rhine-Westfalen industrialists four weeks earlier.”

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen (at left) and Adolf Hitler during a visit to the Krupp Factory in Essen. Krupp, another wealthy Hitler backer, supplied armaments to the Third Reich. (DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy)

Perhaps equally surprising was the presence at this fundraiser of four directors from the board of the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had to that point been staunchly pro-democracy, pro–Weimar Republic, and anti–National Socialist. (The Nazis derided the company, which employed many Jewish scientists, as “an international capitalist Jewish company.”)

Hitler himself stunned party attendees by showing up as the unannounced guest of honor. Clad in a suit and tie rather than a brown storm trooper’s uniform, Hitler addressed the assembled corporate elite, warning of the dangers of communism and trumpeting his appointment as chancellor as a “great victory” that he saw as a mandate for radical change. He outlined his plans to restore the power of the military, assert totalitarian control over the country, destroy the parliamentary system, and crush all political opponents by force. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” Hitler told them.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

After Hitler departed, Schacht spoke of the need for additional campaign financing in advance of the upcoming elections. Hermann Göring added that the election, scheduled for March 5, “will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years.” By day’s end, the fundraiser had generated 3 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of $15 million today.

The following three weeks delivered a series of blows to the Weimar Republic that resulted in its demise: the arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, which saw the very symbol of parliamentarian democracy consumed in flame; the March 5 elections from which the Nazis emerged with a mandate for Hitler’s reforms; and the passing of an “enabling law,” on March 23, that established Hitler as unchallenged dictator. In a letter to Hitler, Gustav Krupp wrote, “The turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time.”

German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen, a “car for the people.” Mercedes-Benz provided Hitler and his chief lieutenants with bulletproof sedans. Hugo Boss designed the black uniforms for the SS. Krupp supplied armaments. Miele produced munitions. Allianz provided insurance for concentration camps. J.A. Topf & Sons manufactured crematoria ovens. A dismayed executive at Deutsche Bank, which was involved in the expropriation of Jewish businesses, sent a letter to the chairman of his supervisory board: “I fear we are embarking on an explicit, well- planned path toward the annihilation of all Jews in Germany.”

For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)

By October 1942, I.G. Farben and its subsidiaries were using slave laborers in 23 locations. The life expectancy of inmates at an I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 people lost their lives on the construction site alone. As corporate practices adapted to evolving political realities, the company aligned its wide technological and human resources with government priorities. Jews were purged from the corporate ranks. The I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division, Bayer, supported Nazi medical experiments. A postwar affidavit alleges that Bayer paid 170 reichsmarks for 150 female Auschwitz prisoners. “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition,” the affidavit reads. “However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments,” and “we would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.” Although recent investigations have questioned the veracity of this particular affidavit, Bayer’s involvement in medical experimentation on Auschwitz inmates is undisputed.

The I.G. Farben company Degussa owned a chemical subsidiary that produced a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B, used primarily for fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains—and, after 1942, as a homicidal agent at Nazi extermination facilities. Company logs confirm the delivery of an estimated 56 tons of Zyklon B from 1942 to 1944; more than 23.8 tons were sent to Auschwitz, where it served as the primary instrument of death for the more than 1 million Jewish people murdered there.

In August 1947, 24 senior I.G. Farben managers were placed on trial for their role in Nazi aggression and atrocity. In his opening statement before the court, the prosecutor Telford Taylor said of these executives, “They were the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true. They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.” The 15,638 pages of courtroom testimony, along with the 6,384 documents submitted as evidence—purchase orders, internal memos, board minutes—indicated that these Farben executives knew the exact number of airplane and truck ties, the running feet of tank tread, the amount of explosives, as well as the precise number of canisters of Zyklon B gas delivered to Auschwitz. The defense attorney for the chairman of I.G. Farben’s supervisory board argued that his client was “no robber, no plunderer, no slave dealer,” but rather just a 60-year-old senior executive doing what senior executives were paid to do—run the company with an eye to the bottom line. If he collaborated with the government, it was out of “a feeling of personal responsibility to the company.” Twenty-three I.G. Farben directors were eventually charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; 13 of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.

[From the February 1937 Issue: Hitler looks eastward]

At the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Gustav Krupp was indicted as a major war criminal alongside the likes of Göring and Hans Frank, but he was too ill to stand trial. Instead, his son was tried in 1947, in The United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. The indictment charged the younger Krupp, alongside 11 Krupp corporate directors, with crimes against humanity and war crimes, for participating in “the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.” Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”

As for Alfred Hugenberg? Unlike other early private-sector Hitler enablers such as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht—both of whom ended up in concentration camps after crossing Hitler—Hugenberg got off lightly. Hugenberg withdrew to his sprawling estate, Rohbraken, in the former feudal province of Lippe, where he lived as the local regent while his business empire was gradually whittled away.

The German Nationalist Party was disbanded as soon as Hugenberg stepped down from his cabinet post in June 1933. In December of that year, the Telegraph Union was taken over by the ministry of propaganda and absorbed into a newly created entity, the German News Office. In 1943, Hugenberg’s publishing house, Scherl Verlag, was acquired by the Nazi publisher, Eher Verlag. By war’s end, the defrocked cabinet minister and disenfranchised media mogul was diminished and dissipated but still defiant.

On September 28, 1946, Hugenberg was arrested by the British military police. He was detained for five months, and his assets were frozen. After a formal hearing, Hugenberg was deemed to be a “lesser evildoer”—officially, a “Mitläufer,” the lowest order of complicity in the Nazi regime—on the grounds that he had left his cabinet post in the first months of the Hitler regime and had never been a member of the Nazi Party. With undiminished temerity, Hugenberg balked at even that lesser charge. Having been stripped of most of his business empire, Hugenberg saw himself as a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. He appealed the hearing’s determination and won. He was declared “untainted,” which allowed him to lay claim to his frozen assets. Unrepentant to his dying day, Hugenberg refused to publicly countenance any suggestion of guilt or responsibility for Hitler’s excesses.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, 1933, less than 24 hours after enabling Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg reportedly spoke with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a fellow conservative and the mayor of Leipzig. “I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,” Hugenberg allegedly told Goerdeler. “I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world.”

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.

Our fractured age’s greatest heroes are a far cry from Achilles. They fight not for glory but freedom, with weapons forged of pure moral steel. Consider the fatalistic courage of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. By the time he was poisoned in 2020 with a neurotoxin secretly applied to his underpants by Vladimir Putin’s agents, he’d suffered at least one previous chemical attack and been jailed by the regime more than 10 times. After five months of convalescence in Germany, Navalny returned to Moscow, where he was arrested at the airport and later imprisoned in a remote penal colony. He seemed undaunted by the prospect of death. “If they decide to kill me,” he said in the 2022 documentary film Navalny, “it means that we are incredibly strong.”

The supreme Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, who fell afoul of the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, was Navalny’s equal in staking his life on publicly resisting ideological tyranny. Mandelstam sealed his fate in late 1933, when he composed verse that portrayed Stalin as a murderer with “cockroach whiskers” who “forges order after order like horseshoes, / hurling them at the groin, the forehead, the brow, the eye.” Brutally interrogated in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1934, he was sent into exile, was rearrested in the spring of 1938, and died in a Gulag transit facility that winter.

In her memoir of those terrible years, Hope Against Hope, his wife, Nadezhda—whose name means “hope,” and who published a sequel, Hope Abandoned—writes that Mandelstam’s “destiny was hatched from character, like a butterfly from its chrysalis.” He attacked Stalin because he “did not want to die without stating in unambiguous terms what he thought was going on around us.” Mandelstam anticipated Navalny when he observed that “poetry is power” and is “respected only in this country—people are killed for it.” Both men died in Siberian prison camps at the age of 47—86 years apart.

[Read: A dissident is built different]

The power of Mandelstam’s poetry, a bell pealing in the muffle of a pea-soup fog, arises from the harmony of his words and actions. “The dominant theme in the whole of M.’s life and work,” Nadezhda writes, “was his insistence on the poet’s dignity, his position in society and his right to make himself heard.” Mandelstam’s speech was his deed. In 1918, he saved the life of an art historian targeted by the Cheka (the secret police), ignoring a pistol-brandishing Chekist’s warning that he’d be shot if he dared to interfere in the case. He later stopped the execution of five bank officials by sending to Nikolai Bukharin a volume of poems that the Central Committee member had helped him publish, accompanied by the message that “every line here is against what you are going to do.” Bukharin returned the favor by writing to Stalin in Mandelstam’s defense after his arrest in 1934. It’s hard to say what he appreciated more: Mandelstam’s adamant integrity or his poetry. While terrified artists mouthed the alien language of the state, Mandelstam’s verse sprang inexorably from some high and sacred ground that would not fall. He captures this almost physical necessity in his very short poem “Meteorite,” which describes an “exiled line” of poetry that, having fallen “from the heavens” and woken the earth, “couldn’t be anything else.”

It’s not that Soviet leaders disliked Mandelstam’s work. Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the secret police who, along with Bukharin, was condemned to death in the last show trial of old Bolsheviks in 1938, was so fond of Mandelstam’s Stalin poem that he learned it by heart. Nor, it seems, were leaders particularly hostile to him because he was a Jew: Official anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia didn’t hit full swing until 1952, when all of the prominent Yiddish writers and eight other Jews were executed on Stalin’s orders in what came to be known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. According to Nadezhda, Mandelstam’s real crime was his defiant confidence, his “usurpation of the right to words and thoughts that the ruling powers reserved exclusively to themselves.” Equally unforgivable was his inclination to “lay down the law, as a writer is supposed to”—that is, to pass unequivocal judgment on social realities, a consequence of his inability to “be indifferent to good and evil, and … [to] say that all that exists is rational” (a Communist dogma frequently invoked to excuse terror as historical necessity).

The viciousness of the totalitarian state only strengthened the poet’s hand. For while rulers who rely on terror lack authority—power that is rooted neither in coercion nor persuasion but is spontaneously recognized as legitimate, like that of a doctor on an airplane when a passenger falls ill—Mandelstam radiated it. This was not just because he was a generous and conscientious man who couldn’t keep a second pair of trousers (there was always someone more in need), and who blamed himself for leading into temptation whatever friend betrayed him after he recited his Stalin poem to a dozen people. His authority came from what Nadezhda calls “the absolute character” of his urge to be a source of truth for his fellow men, and his inability “to curb or silence himself by ‘stepping on the throat’ of his own song.” Above all, it came from the authenticity of his “inner voice.”

But what awakens that voice? For Mandelstam, poetry sprang from joy as much as from anger—and emerged in the manner that a musical phrase does.  Like the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Mandelstam composed by ear, uttering the same lines with minor variations over and over until they achieved their proper form. Watching him work must have been like listening to a songbird, one whose protective coloring couldn’t conceal its deepest feelings. Mandelstam, who called poetry the “yeast of the world,” suggests as much in his poem “The Cage”:

When the goldfinch like rising dough
suddenly moves, as a heart throbs,
anger peppers its clever cloak
and its nightcap blackens with rage.

The goldfish sings in a cage built from “a hundred bars of lies” and the plank on which he sings is “slanderous.” These are inhospitable conditions, but Nadezhda explains that he was reconciled with persecution and poverty by his “simple love of life.” For him, eternity was “tangibly present in every fleeting fraction of time, which he would gladly stop and thus make even more tangible.” He knew, in the words of the poet Anna Akhmatova, “from what trash poetry, quite unashamed, can grow,” turning into vibrant song the colorless prose of daily existence under the crushing weight of totalitarianism. This was the “drop of good” that “the merciless grip of the age” squeezed out of him. But the evil age could not forgive him for that good, and not just him: the feeling for poetry, which Mandelstam regarded as the definitive characteristic of the true intelligentsia, “went with the qualities of the mind which in our country doomed people to death.” Foremost among them was the dynamic strength of the individual who sings his inner freedom, as Mandelstam does in a 1935 poem that ends with the triumph of the poetic voice: “you could not stop my lips from moving.”

Courageous and authoritative individual voices are as urgently necessary today as they have ever been, not just in Russia but across the West. In Soviet fashion, the proponents of cultural Marxism seek consensus through intimidation, insisting, among other things, that “oppressors” have no right to an opinion about “oppressed” groups or individuals. Primary and secondary schools have for years spoon-fed students such ideological pap, damaging their capacity to appreciate any ideas not packaged in hackneyed phrases. In universities, professors expose intellectually susceptible undergraduates to popular partisan concepts, concepts as stale, in Orwell’s words, as “tea leaves blocking a sink.” These viral variants of recombinant Marxism—having in common a peculiarly enervated voice—have now spread throughout society by multiple vectors, including ubiquitous DEI training programs, to which 52 percent of U.S. workers have now been subjected. One new study suggests that these programs “increase the endorsement of the type of demonization and scapegoating characteristic of authoritarianism.”

[Read: Poetry is an act of hope]

Donald Trump’s reelection, among other cultural shifts, suggests that Americans have grown tired of progressive bullying. But if anything, technology poses a more insidious threat to the development of future Mandelstams than ideology. It’s not just that people prefer new iPhones to old books. I tell undergraduates who are laboring to improve their writing that their ultimate goal is the achievement of style: a voice so distinctive that readers will immediately recognize whose work they hold in their hands. But nearly four in 10 students admit to using programs such as ChatGPT to write their papers, and the actual rate of AI plagiarism is probably much higher. As this technology advances, few will be able to resist the temptation to outsource the greatest part of their thinking to machines.

This brings to mind the poets of ideology and algorithms that Nadezhda would have called “mechanical nightingales.” When a friend told the Mandelstams about a bird he’d seen that, on its owner’s signal, hopped out of its cage, sang, and then obediently returned to confinement, his precocious son remarked: “Just like a member of the Union of Writers.”

Too many writers and artists in the West sing the same potted tunes on demand, hopping from perch to scandalous plank. But unlike songbirds, poets and readers can learn from the dead, and they can refuse to be tamed by the forces of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck. That’s the spirit we need today. Let a hundred poets whose lips are still moving, heroes living or dead, leaven our days, and let them teach their life-affirming music to our young.

The beginning of I’m Still Here is a careful trap. In the first 20 minutes of his new film, the director Walter Salles introduces the Paiva family, a vibrant Brazilian clan based in Rio de Janeiro. It’s 1970, and we watch the seven family members—Eunice (played by Fernanda Torres), Rubens (Selton Mello), and their five kids—eat, chatter, hit the beach, and go dancing. Their bond feels palpably warm and realistic, a comforting lull that Salles is tempting the audience into. Despite knowing that the story is based on wrenching, real-life events, I started to hope against hope that maybe nothing too plotty would happen—that instead, I would just get to spend a couple of hours with this lovely, buzzing unit.

But the vaguest sense of political instability hums in the background of the Paivas’ sandy idyll. In 1964, a military coup overthrew Brazil’s populist democracy, in which Rubens had served as a left-wing congressman. Nearly seven years on, the country is still under martial law. One day, as Eunice and Rubens are playing backgammon and sorting through old photos, the police knock on the door; they curtly take Rubens away for questioning. “I’ll be back for the soufflé,” he tells his wife calmly. In retrospect, it’s the most devastating line in the movie: He won’t see her or their children ever again.

What happened to Rubens Paiva is well known in Brazil. Rubens was one of many citizens disappeared by the country’s military dictatorship over the 21-year regime—suspected Communists the military whisked away, never to return. The government admitted to Rubens’s death at its hands only decades after the fact, and his body still hasn’t been found. His case became particularly notorious because of Eunice’s years-long efforts to draw attention to it: She became a well-known human-rights lawyer, campaigning for victims of political repression. But what happened to Rubens is still a matter of controversy in a country where far-right politicians, until recently, held power.

[Read: The Golden Globes got a little weird with it]

Salles could have taken a blunt, agitprop approach to rendering these events, primarily devoting the film’s screen time to Eunice’s fight for recognition. But the director avoids framing I’m Still Here as an “inspirational true story” focused on Eunice’s legal career; plenty of good articles and books have been written about it. Instead, he confines that information to a few title cards that roll before the end credits. Salles’s take on the Paivas’ saga is subtler and, in my opinion, more successful than this manner of biopic. He creates a quieter sort of historical drama that lives in the aftermath of Rubens’s disappearance, a situation that sometimes feels eerily ordinary. By highlighting Eunice’s role as a parent, Salles pushes viewers toward considering the mundanity of living under a dictatorship—and the gnawing nightmare of lacking control in the face of obvious evil. The years roll on for Eunice and the children, but their everyday bickering or meal prep becomes defined by an absence.

That unsettling feeling is communicated by Torres’s devastating, genuine performance. She won a surprising but well-deserved Golden Globe earlier this month—a shocker not only because I’m Still Here is relatively small-scale, but also because Torres’s work is light on the histrionics that often draw in awards votes. Following their initial visit, armed men then take Eunice and her second-eldest daughter to a mysterious location, where they’re interrogated about both Rubens and their own Communist ties. Eunice remains imprisoned for almost two weeks before she’s released without much explanation; she returns home and immediately tries her best to project an air of normalcy. All the while, Eunice is looking for answers as to her husband’s whereabouts. The kids are old enough to be aware of their family’s ordeal, but their shared anxiety doesn’t affect the restrained atmosphere. Much of what occurs from then on feels sweetly, almost dully relatable.

I’m Still Here’s thoughtful perspective has resonated in Brazil, where it has become the highest-grossing domestic film since the coronavirus pandemic. Acclaim for Salles’s diligent, low-key filmmaking dates back to his international breakthrough, 1998’s Central Station; its star (and Torres’s mother) Fernanda Montenegro received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Salles has continued to favor a muted tack throughout his career—even when making a Hollywood horror movie, such as the largely forgotten (and somewhat underrated) Dark Water.

[Read: A novel in which nightmares are too real]

Perhaps adding to the local hype for I’m Still Here is that it marks the end of Salles’s directorial hiatus. His last effort, an underwhelming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, premiered back in 2012. I’m Still Here is a very worthy comeback, and certainly his strongest work since 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries, a portrayal of Che Guevara’s early years touring Latin America. That film, like this one, wore its political message on its sleeve without overdoing it. Salles hasn’t always nailed this delicate balance (again, his rather limp On the Road), but in this case, it pays off beautifully.

I’m Still Here’s most impressive magic trick, though, is a piece of meta-casting near its conclusion. The timeline leaps forward to the year 2014, introducing the 95-year-old Montenegro as the older version of Eunice. What happens during these closing moments is as tempered and straightforward as everything that precedes them: The action boils down to a few feelings vaguely flickering across Eunice’s face—but that’s all Salles needs to deliver a final emotional hammer blow.

Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.

Hans Frank served as Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law” and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. Following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system, a determination he reiterated in a Legalitätseid—“legality oath”—before the Constitutional Court in September 1930. Invoking Article 1 of the Weimar constitution, which stated that the government was an expression of the will of the people, Hitler informed the court that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement.

“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.

“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.

By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections.

When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them. Though the vote share of his National Socialist party had been rising—in the election of September 1930, following the 1929 market crash, they had increased their representation in the Reichstag almost ninefold, from 12 delegates to 107, and in the July 1932 elections, they had more than doubled their mandate to 230 seats—they were still far from a majority. Their seats amounted to only 37 percent of the legislative body, and the larger right-wing coalition that the Nazi Party was a part of controlled barely 51 percent of the Reichstag, but Hitler believed that he should exercise absolute power: “37 percent represents 75 percent of 51 percent,” he argued to one American reporter, by which he meant that possessing the relative majority of a simple majority was enough to grant him absolute authority. But he knew that in a multiparty political system, with shifting coalitions, his political calculus was not so simple. He believed that an Ermächtigungsgesetz (“empowering law”) was crucial to his political survival. But passing such a law—which would dismantle the separation of powers, grant Hitler’s executive branch the authority to make laws without parliamentary approval, and allow Hitler to rule by decree, bypassing democratic institutions and the constitution—required the support of a two-thirds majority in the fractious Reichstag.

The process proved to be even more challenging than anticipated. Hitler found his dictatorial intentions getting thwarted within his first six hours as chancellor. At 11:30 that Monday morning, he swore an oath to uphold the constitution, then went across the street to the Hotel Kaiserhof for lunch, then returned to the Reich Chancellery for a group photo of the “Hitler Cabinet,” which was followed by his first formal meeting with his nine ministers at precisely 5 o’clock.

Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But given that Social Democrats and Communists collectively commanded 221 seats, or roughly 38 percent, of the 584-seat Reichstag, the two-thirds vote Hitler needed was a mathematical impossibility. “Now if one were to ban the Communist Party and annul their votes,” Hitler proposed, “it would be possible to reach a Reichstag majority.”

The problem, Hitler continued, was that this would almost certainly precipitate a national strike by the 6 million German Communists, which could, in turn, lead to a collapse of the country’s economy. Alternatively, Reichstag percentages could be rebalanced by holding new elections. “What represents a greater danger to the economy?” Hitler asked. “The uncertainties and concerns associated with new elections or a general strike?” Calling for new elections, he concluded, was the safer path.

Economic Minister Alfred Hugenberg disagreed. Ultimately, Hugenberg argued, if one wanted to achieve a two-thirds Reichstag majority, there was no way of getting around banning the Communist Party. Of course, Hugenberg had his own self-interested reasons for opposing new Reichstag elections: In the previous election, Hugenberg had siphoned 14 seats from Hitler’s National Socialists to his own party, the German Nationalists, making Hugenberg an indispensable partner in Hitler’s current coalition government. New elections threatened to lose his party seats and diminish his power.

When Hitler wondered whether the army could be used to crush any public unrest, Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg dismissed the idea out of hand, observing “that a soldier was trained to see an external enemy as his only potential opponent.” As a career officer, Blomberg could not imagine German soldiers being ordered to shoot German citizens on German streets in defense of Hitler’s (or any other German) government.

Hitler had campaigned on the promise of draining the “parliamentarian swamp”—den parlamentarischen Sumpf—only to find himself now foundering in a quagmire of partisan politics and banging up against constitutional guardrails. He responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down.

The next day, Hitler announced new Reichstag elections, to be held in early March, and issued a memorandum to his party leaders. “After a thirteen-year struggle the National Socialist movement has succeeded in breaking through into the government, but the struggle to win the German nation is only beginning,” Hitler proclaimed, and then added venomously: “The National Socialist party knows that the new government is not a National Socialist government, even though it is conscious that it bears the name of its leader, Adolf Hitler.” He was declaring war on his own government.

We have come to perceive Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as part of an inexorable rise to power, an impression resting on generations of postwar scholarship, much of which has necessarily marginalized or disregarded alternatives to the standard narrative of the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) with its political and social persecutions, its assertion of totalitarian rule (Gleichschaltung) and subsequent aggressions that led to the Second World War and the nightmare of the Holocaust. In researching and writing this piece, I intentionally ignored these ultimate outcomes and instead traced events as they unfolded in real time with their attendant uncertainties and misguided assessments. A case in point: The January 31, 1933, New York Times story on Hitler’s appointment as chancellor was headlined “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.”

In the late 1980s, as a graduate student at Harvard, where I served as a teaching fellow in a course on Weimar and Nazi Germany, I used to cite a postwar observation, made by Hans Frank in Nuremberg, that underscored the tenuous nature of Hitler’s political career. “The Führer was a man who was possible in Germany only at that very moment,” the Nazi legal strategist recalled. “He came at exactly this terrible transitory period when the monarchy had gone and the republic was not yet secure.” Had Hitler’s predecessor in the chancellery, Kurt von Schleicher, remained in office another six months, or had German President Paul von Hindenburg exercised his constitutional powers more judiciously, or had a faction of moderate conservative Reichstag delegates cast their votes differently, then history may well have taken a very different turn. My most recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, ends at the moment the story this essay tells begins. Both Hitler’s ascendancy to chancellor and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability.

Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the country’s first democratic republic came almost as much as a surprise to Hitler as it did to the rest of the country. After a vertiginous three-year political ascent, Hitler had taken a shellacking in the November 1932 elections, shedding 2 million votes and 34 Reichstag seats, almost half of them to Hugenberg’s German Nationalists. By December 1932, Hitler’s movement was bankrupt financially, politically, ideologically. Hitler told several close associates that he was contemplating suicide.

But a series of backroom deals that included the shock weekend dismissal of Chancellor Schleicher in late January 1933 hurtled Hitler into the chancellery. Schleicher would later remember Hitler telling him that “it was astonishing in his life that he was always rescued just when he himself had given up all hope.”

[Thomas Weber: Hitler would have been astonished]

The eleventh-hour appointment came at a steep political price. Hitler had left several of his most loyal lieutenants as political roadkill on this unexpected fast lane to power. Worse, he found himself with a cabinet handpicked by a political enemy, former Chancellor Franz von Papen, whose government Hitler had helped topple and who now served as Hitler’s vice chancellor. Worst of all, Hitler was hostage to Hugenberg, who commanded 51 Reichstag votes along with the power to make or break Hitler’s chancellorship. He nearly broke it.

As President Hindenburg waited to receive Hitler on that Monday morning in January 1933, Hugenberg clashed with Hitler over the issue of new Reichstag elections. Hugenberg’s position: “Nein! Nein! Nein!” While Hitler and Hugenberg argued in the foyer outside the president’s office, Hindenburg, a military hero of World War I who had served as the German president since 1925, grew impatient. According to Otto Meissner, the president’s chief of staff, had the Hitler-Hugenberg squabble lasted another few minutes, Hindenburg would have left. Had this occurred, the awkward coalition cobbled together by Papen in the previous 48 hours would have collapsed. There would have been no Hitler chancellorship, no Third Reich.

In the event, Hitler was given a paltry two cabinet posts to fill—and none of the most important ones pertaining to the economy, foreign policy, or the military. Hitler chose Wilhelm Frick as minister of the interior and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio. But with his unerring instinct for detecting the weaknesses in structures and processes, Hitler put his two ministers to work targeting the Weimar Republic’s key democratic pillars: free speech, due process, public referendum, and states’ rights.

Frick had responsibility over the republic’s federated system, as well as over the country’s electoral system and over the press. Frick was the first minister to reveal the plans of Hitler’s government: “We will present an enabling law to the Reichstag that in accordance with the constitution will dissolve the Reich government,” Frick told the press, explaining that Hitler’s ambitious plans for the country required extreme measures, a position Hitler underscored in his first national radio address on February 1. “The national government will therefore regard it as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will,” Hitler said. “It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests.”

Frick was also charged with suppressing the opposition press and centralizing power in Berlin. While Frick was undermining states’ rights and imposing bans on left-wing newspapers—including the Communist daily The Red Banner and the Social Democratic Forward—Hitler also appointed Göring as acting state interior minister of Prussia, the federated state that represented two-thirds of German territory. Göring was tasked with purging the Prussian state police, the largest security force in the country after the army, and a bastion of Social Democratic sentiment.

Rudolf Diels was the head of Prussia’s political police. One day in early February, Diels was sitting in his office, at 76 Unter den Linden, when Göring knocked at his door and told him in no uncertain terms that it was time to clear house. “I want nothing to do with these scoundrels who are sitting around here in this place,” Göring said.

A Schiesserlass, or “shooting decree,” followed. This permitted the state police to shoot on sight without fearing consequences. “I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. “When they shoot, it is me shooting,” Göring said. “When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.”

Göring also designated the Nazi storm troopers as Hilfspolizei, or “deputy police,” compelling the state to provide the brownshirt thugs with sidearms and empowering them with police authority in their street battles. Diels later noted that this—manipulating the law to serve his ends and legitimizing the violence and excesses of tens of thousands of brownshirts—was a “well-tested Hitler tactic.”

As Hitler scrambled to secure power and crush the opposition, rumors circulated of his government’s imminent demise. One rumor held that Schleicher, the most recently deposed chancellor, was planning a military coup. Another said that Hitler was a puppet of Papen and a backwoods Austrian boy in the unwitting service of German aristocrats. Still others alleged that Hitler was merely a brownshirt strawman for Hugenberg and a conspiracy of industrialists who intended to dismantle worker protections for the sake of higher profits. (The industrialist Otto Wolff was said to have “cashed in” on his financing of Hitler’s movement.) Yet another rumor had it that Hitler was merely managing a placeholder government while President Hindenburg, a monarchist at heart, prepared for the return of the Kaiser.

There was little truth to any of this, but Hitler did have to confront the political reality of making good on his campaign promises to frustrated German voters in advance of the March Reichstag elections. The Red Banner published a list of Hitler’s campaign promises to workers, and the Center Party publicly demanded assurances that Hitler would support the agricultural sector, fight inflation, avoid “financial-political experiments,” and adhere to the Weimar constitution. At the same time, the dismay among right-wing supporters who had applauded Hitler’s earlier demand for dictatorial power and refusal to enter into a coalition was distilled in the pithy observation “No Third Reich, not even 2½.”

On February 18, the center-left newspaper Vossische Zeitung wrote that despite Hitler’s campaign promises and political posturing, nothing had changed for the average German. If anything, things had gotten worse. Hitler’s promise of doubling tariffs on grain imports had gotten tangled in complexities and contractual obligations. Hugenberg informed Hitler during a cabinet meeting that the “catastrophic economic conditions” were threatening the very “existence of the country.” “In the end,” Vossische Zeitung predicted, “the survival of the new government will rely not on words but on the economic conditions.” For all Hitler’s talk of a thousand-year Reich, there was no certainty his government would last the month.

Over the eight months before appointing Hitler as chancellor, Hindenberg had dispatched three others—Heinrich Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher—from the role, exercising his constitutional authority embedded in Article 53. And his disdain for Hitler was common knowledge. The previous August, he had declared publicly that, “for the sake of God, my conscience, and the country,” he would never appoint Hitler as chancellor. Privately, Hindenburg had quipped that if he were to appoint Hitler to any position, it would be as postmaster general, “so he can lick me from behind on my stamps.” In January, Hindenburg finally agreed to appoint Hitler, but with great reluctance—and on the condition that he never be left alone in a room with his new chancellor. By late February, the question on everyone’s mind was, as Forward put it, how much longer would the aging field marshal put up with his Bohemian corporal?

That Forward article appeared on Saturday morning, February 25, under the headline “How Long?” Two days later, on Monday evening, shortly before 9 p.m., the Reichstag erupted in flames, sheafs of fire collapsing the glass dome of the plenary hall and illuminating the night sky over Berlin. Witnesses recall seeing the fire from villages 40 miles away. The image of the seat of German parliamentary democracy going up in flames sent a collective shock across the country. The Communists blamed the National Socialists. The National Socialists blamed the Communists. A 23-year-old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught in flagrante, but the Berlin fire chief, Walter Gempp, who supervised the firefighting operation, saw evidence of potential Nazi involvement.

[From the May 1944 issue: What is German?]

When Hitler convened his cabinet to discuss the crisis the next morning, he declared that the fire was clearly part of a Communist coup attempt. Göring detailed Communist plans for further arson attacks on public buildings, as well as for the poisoning of public kitchens and the kidnapping of the children and wives of prominent officials. Interior Minister Frick presented a draft decree suspending civil liberties, permitting searches and seizures, and curbing states’ rights during a national emergency.

Papen expressed concern that the proposed draft “could meet with resistance,” especially from “southern states,” by which he meant Bavaria, which was second only to Prussia in size and power. Perhaps, Papen suggested, the proposed measures should be discussed with state governments to assure “an amicable agreement,” otherwise the measures could be seen as the usurpation of states’ rights. Ultimately, only one word was added to suggest contingencies for suspending a state’s rights. Hindenburg signed the decree into law that afternoon.

Put into effect just a week before the March elections, the emergency decree gave Hitler tremendous power to intimidate—and imprison—the political opposition. The Communist Party was banned (as Hitler had wanted since his first cabinet meeting), and members of the opposition press were arrested, their newspapers shut down. Göring had already been doing this for the past month, but the courts had invariably ordered the release of detained people. With the decree in effect, the courts could not intervene. Thousands of Communists and Social Democrats were rounded up.

On Sunday morning, March 5, one week after the Reichstag fire, German voters went to the polls. “No stranger election has perhaps ever been held in a civilized country,” Frederick Birchall wrote that day in The New York Times. Birchall expressed his dismay at the apparent willingness of Germans to submit to authoritarian rule when they had the opportunity for a democratic alternative. “In any American or Anglo-Saxon community the response would be immediate and overwhelming,” he wrote.

More than 40 million Germans went to the polls, which was more than 2 million more than in any previous election, representing nearly 89 percent of the registered voters—a stunning demonstration of democratic engagement. “Not since the German Reichstag was founded in 1871 has there been such a high voter turnout,” Vossische Zeitung reported. Most of those 2 million new votes went to the Nazis. “The enormous voting reserves almost entirely benefited the National Socialists,” Vossische Zeitung reported.

Although the National Socialists fell short of Hitler’s promised 51 percent, managing only 44 percent of the electorate—despite massive suppression, the Social Democrats lost just a single Reichstag seat—the banning of the Communist Party positioned Hitler to form a coalition with the two-thirds Reichstag majority necessary to pass the empowering law.

The next day, the National Socialists stormed state-government offices across the country. Swastika banners were hung from public buildings. Opposition politicians fled for their lives. Otto Wels, the Social Democratic leader, departed for Switzerland. So did Heinrich Held, the minister-president of Bavaria. Tens of thousands of political opponents were taken into Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), a form of detention in which an individual could be held without cause indefinitely.

Hindenburg remained silent. He did not call his new chancellor to account for the violent public excesses against Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews. He did not exercise his Article 53 powers. Instead, he signed a decree permitting the National Socialists’ swastika banner to be flown beside the national colors. He acceded to Hitler’s request to create a new cabinet position, minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, a role promptly filled by Joseph Goebbels. “What good fortune for all of us to know that this towering old man is with us,” Goebbels wrote of Hindenburg in his diary, “and what a change of fate that we are now moving on the same path together.”

A week later, Hindenburg’s embrace of Hitler was on full public display. He appeared in military regalia in the company of his chancellor, who was wearing a dark suit and long overcoat, at a ceremony in Potsdam. The former field marshal and the Bohemian corporal shook hands. Hitler bowed in putative deference. The “Day of Potsdam” signaled the end of any hope for an Article 53 solution to the Hitler chancellorship.

That same Tuesday, March 21, an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes. The first concentration camp was opened that afternoon, in an old brewery near the town center of Oranienburg, just north of Berlin. The following day, the first group of detainees arrived at another concentration camp, in an abandoned munition plant outside the Bavarian town of Dachau.

Plans for legislation excluding Jews from the legal and medical professions, as well as from government offices, were under way, though Hitler’s promise for the mass deportation of the country’s 100,000 Ostjuden, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was proving to be more complicated. Many had acquired German citizenship and were gainfully employed. As fear of deportation rose, a run on local banks caused other banks and businesses to panic. Accounts of Jewish depositors were frozen until, as one official explained, “they had settled their obligations with German business men.” Hermann Göring, now president of the newly elected Reichstag, sought to calm matters, assuring Germany’s Jewish citizens that they retained the same “protection of law for person and property” as every other German citizen. He then berated the international community: Foreigners were not to interfere with the domestic affairs of the country. Germany would do with its citizens whatever it deemed appropriate.

Adolf Hitler's address to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, at the Kroll Opera House. On this day, a majority of the delegates voted to eliminate almost all constitutional restraints on Hitler’s government. (Ullstein Bild / Getty)

On Thursday, March 23, the Reichstag delegates assembled in the Kroll Opera House, just opposite the charred ruins of the Reichstag. The following Monday, the traditional Reich eagle had been removed and replaced with an enormous Nazi eagle, dramatically backlit with wings spread wide and a swastika in its talons. Hitler, dressed now in a brown stormtrooper uniform with a swastika armband, arrived to pitch his proposed enabling law, now formally titled the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.” At 4:20 p.m., he stepped up to the podium. Appearing uncharacteristically ill at ease, he shuffled a sheaf of pages before beginning to read haltingly from a prepared text. Only gradually did he assume his usual animated rhetorical style. He enumerated the failings of the Weimar Republic, then outlined his plans for the four-year tenure of his proposed enabling law, which included restoring German dignity and military parity abroad as well as economic and social stability at home. “Treason toward our nation and our people shall in the future be stamped out with ruthless barbarity,” Hitler vowed.

[Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

The Reichstag recessed to deliberate on the act. When the delegates reconvened at 6:15 that evening, the floor was given to Otto Wels, the Social Democratic leader, who had returned from his Swiss exile, despite fears for his personal safety, to challenge Hitler in person. As Wels began to speak, Hitler made a move to rise. Papen touched Hitler’s wrist to keep him in check.

“In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism,” Wels said. He chided Hitler for seeking to undermine the Weimar Republic, and for the hatred and divisiveness he had sowed. Regardless of the evils Hitler intended to visit on the country, Wels declared, the republic’s founding democratic values would endure. “No enabling act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible,” he said.

Hitler rose. “The nice theories that you, Herr Delegate, just proclaimed are words that have come a bit too late for world history,” he began. He dismissed allegations that he posed any kind of threat to the German people. He reminded Wels that the Social Democrats had had 13 years to address the issues that really mattered to the German people—employment, stability, dignity. “Where was this battle during the time you had the power in your hand?” Hitler asked. The National Socialist delegates, along with observers in the galleries, cheered. The rest of the delegates remained still. A series of them rose to state both their concerns and positions on the proposed enabling law.

The Centrists, as well as the representatives of the Bavarian People’s Party, said they were willing to vote yes despite reservations “that in normal times could scarcely have been overcome.” Similarly, Reinhold Maier, the leader of the German State Party, expressed concern about what would happen to judicial independence, due process, freedom of the press, and equal rights for all citizens under the law, and stated that he had “serious reservations” about according Hitler dictatorial powers. But then he announced that his party, too, was voting in favor of the law, eliciting laughter from the floor.

Shortly before 8 o’clock that evening, the voting was completed. The 94 Social Democrat delegates who were in attendance cast their votes against the law. (Among the Social Democrats was the former interior minister of Prussia, Carl Severing, who had been arrested earlier in the day as he was about to enter the Reichstag but was released temporarily in order to cast his vote.) The remaining Reichstag delegates, 441 in all, voted in favor of the new law, delivering Hitler a four-fifths majority, more than enough to put the enabling law into effect without amendment or restriction. The next morning, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Sackett sent a telegram to the State Department: “On the basis of this law the Hitler Cabinet can reconstruct the entire system of government as it eliminates practically all constitutional restraints.”

Joseph Goebbels, who was present that day as a National Socialist Reichstag delegate, would later marvel that the National Socialists had succeeded in dismantling a federated constitutional republic entirely through constitutional means. Seven years earlier, in 1926, after being elected to the Reichstag as one the first 12 National Socialist delegates, Goebbels had been similarly struck: He was surprised to discover that he and these 11 other men (including Hermann Göring and Hans Frank), seated in a single row on the periphery of a plenary hall in their brown uniforms with swastika armbands, had—even as self-declared enemies of the Weimar Republic—been accorded free first-class train travel and subsidized meals, along with the capacity to disrupt, obstruct, and paralyze democratic structures and processes at will. “The big joke on democracy,” he observed, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”

As I witnessed the despair and incomprehension of liberals worldwide after Donald Trump’s victory in November’s U.S. presidential election, I had a sinking feeling that I had been through this before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. The difference was that the world that collapsed in 1989 was theirs, the Communists’. Now it is ours, the liberals’.

In 1989, I was living within a Warsaw Pact nation, in my final year of studying philosophy at Bulgaria’s Sofia University, when the world turned upside down. The whole experience felt like an extended course in French existentialism. To see the sudden end of something that we had been told would last forever was bewildering—liberating and alarming in equal measure. My fellow students and I were overwhelmed by the new sense of freedom, but we were also acutely conscious of the fragility of all things political. That radical rupture turned out to be a defining experience for my generation.

But the rupture was even broader—on a greater global scale—than many of us realized at the time. The year 1989 was indeed an annus mirabilis, but one very different from the way Western liberals have framed it for the past three decades. The resilience that the Chinese Communist Party demonstrated in suppressing the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square turned out to be more consequential than the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Russians, the most important aspect of 1989 was not the end of Communism, but the end of the Soviet empire, with the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. It was thus the year that Osama bin Laden proclaimed the jihadists’ victory over the godless U.S.S.R. And 1989 was also when nationalism began to reclaim its political primacy in the former Yugoslavia.

The return of Trump to power in the United States may prove another such instance in a period of enormous political rupture. If liberals are to respond effectively to the challenge of a new Trump administration, they will need to reflect critically on what happened in 1989, and discard the story they’ve always told themselves about it. The means of overcoming despair is to be found in better comprehension.

[Tom Nichols: Stalin’s revenge]

From a liberal point of view, comparing the anti-Soviet revolutions of 1989 with the illiberal revolutions today might seem scandalous. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, 1989 was “the end of history,” whereas Trump’s victory, many liberals assert, may portend the end of democracy. The year the Berlin Wall fell was viewed as the triumph of the West; now the decline of the West dominates the conversation. The collapse of Communism was marked by a vision for a democratic, capitalist future; that future is now riddled with uncertainty. The mood in 1989 was internationalist and optimistic; today, it has soured into nationalism, at times even nihilism.

But to insist on those differences between then and now is to miss the point about their similarities. Living through such moments in history teaches one many things, but the most important is the sheer speed of change: People can totally alter their views and political identity overnight; what only yesterday was considered unthinkable seems self-evident today. The shift is so profound that people soon find their old assumptions and choices unfathomable.

Translated to this moment: How, just six months ago, could any sane person have believed that an aging and unpopular Joe Biden could be reelected?

Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, some political commentators grimly looked back to the 1930s, when fascism stalked the world. The problem is that the 1930s are beyond living memory, whereas the 1990s are still vivid to many of us. What I learned from that decade is that a radical political rupture gives the winners a blank check. Understanding why people voted for Trump will be little help in apprehending what he will do in office.

Political ruptures are achieved by previously unimaginable coalitions, united more by their intensity than a common program. Politicians who belong to these coalitions typically have a chameleonlike ability to suit themselves to the moment—none more so, in our time, than Trump. American liberals who are gobsmacked that people can treat a billionaire playboy as the leader of an anti-establishment movement might recall that Boris Yeltsin, the hero of Russia’s 1990s anti-Communist revolution, had been one of the leaders of the Communist Party just a few short years earlier.

[Read: How China made the Tiananmen Square massacre irrelevant]

Like the end of the Soviet era, Trump’s reelection victory will have global dimensions. It marks the passing of the United States as a liberal empire. America remains the world’s preeminent power, yes, and will remain an empire of sorts, but it won’t be a liberal one. As Biden’s spotty record of mobilizing support to defend the “liberal international order” in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, the very idea of such an order was for many critics always a Western fiction. It existed as long as the U.S. had the power and political will to impose it.

This is not what Trump will do. In foreign policy, Trump is neither a realist nor an isolationist; he is a revisionist. Trump is convinced that the U.S. is the biggest loser in the world it has made. Over the past three decades, in his view, America has become a hostage, rather than a hegemon, of the liberal international order. In the postwar world, the U.S. successfully integrated its defeated adversaries Germany and Japan into democratic governance, international trade, and economic prosperity. This did not apply to China: In Trump’s view, Beijing has been the real winner of the post-1989 changes.

Trump’s second coming will clearly be different from the first. In 2016, Trump’s encounter with American power was like a blind date. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and American power didn’t know exactly who he was. Not this time. America may remain a democracy, but it will become a more feral one. Under new management, its institutions will likely depart from the safety of consensual politics and go wild. In times of rapid change, political leaders seek not to administer the state, but to defeat it. They see the state and the “deep state” as synonymous. Illiberal leaders select their cabinet members in the same way that emperors used to choose the governors of rebellious provinces: What matters most is the appointee’s loyalty and capacity to resist being suborned or co-opted by others.

In Trump’s first administration, chaos reigned; his second administration will reign by wielding chaos as a weapon. This White House will overwhelm its opponents by “flooding the zone” with executive orders and proclamations. He will leave many adversaries guessing about why he is making the decisions he does, and disorient others with their rapidity and quantity.

[George Packer: The end of Democratic delusions]

In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by promising normalcy. Normalcy will no longer help the Democrats. In the most recent example of an antipopulist victory, Donald Tusk triumphed in Poland’s 2023 parliamentary elections and returned to be prime minister, not because he promised business as usual but because his party, Civic Platform, was able to forge a compelling new political identity. Tusk’s party adopted more progressive positions on such controversial issues as abortion rights and workers’ protections, but it also wrapped itself in the flag and embraced patriotism. Tusk offered Poles a new grand narrative, not simply a different electoral strategy. Civic Platform’s success still depended on forming a coalition with other parties, a potentially fragile basis for governing, but it offers a template, at least, for how the liberal center can reinvent itself and check the advance of illiberal populism.

The risk for the United States is high: The next few years could easily see American politics descend into cruel, petty vengefulness, or worse. But for liberals to respond to this moment by acting as defenders of a disappearing status quo would be unwise. To do so would entail merely reacting to whatever Trump does. The mindset of resistance may be the best way to understand tyranny, but it is not the best way to handle a moment of radical political rupture, in which tyranny is possible but not inevitable.

Back in 1989, the political scientist Ken Jowitt, the author of a great study of Communist upheaval in that period, New World Disorder, observed that a rupture of this type forces political leaders to devise a new vocabulary. At such moments, formerly magic words do not work anymore. The slogan “Democracy is under threat” did not benefit the Democrats during the election, because many voters simply did not see Trump himself as that threat.

As the writer George Orwell observed, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The challenge of apprehending the new, even when the fact of its arrival is undeniable, means that it may come as a shock to liberal sensibilities how few tears will be shed for the passing of the old order. Contrary to what seemed the correct response in 2016, the task of Trump opponents today is not to resist the political change that he has unleashed but to embrace it—and use this moment to fashion a new coalition for a better society.