American Fascism, American Hitlers

Summary

History As It Happens — "American Fascism, American Hitlers"

Host: Martin Di Caro
Guest: Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, historian at Fairfield University and President of the Center for Jewish History
Date: February 6, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the resonance and misuse of fascism and Hitler analogies in contemporary American discourse. Through a robust conversation with historian Gavriel Rosenfeld, the show investigates whether "American fascism" exists, how to responsibly compare the present to the Nazi past, and what dangers—and insights—are contained in the analogies that saturate our politics. The discussion considers the roots of American right-wing populism, the historical reality of American Nazi and fascist movements, and how terms like "fascism" often obscure more than they reveal.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Ubiquity (and Danger) of Fascist Analogies

• Hitler & Nazis as Default References:
  • Since Donald Trump's emergence in politics in 2015, scholars, journalists, and commentators have debated whether his movement is fascist, often equating fascism with Nazism.
  • Rosenfeld: “Every American president since Herbert Hoover has been attacked as either a fascist or someone tantamount to Hitler.” (02:05, 09:24)
• Concerns Over Hyperbole:
  • Using Nazi analogies too freely may obscure the unique features of each era and dilute the historical specificity of Nazism.
  • Host Martin Di Caro: “As bad as things are in America today, it's not as bad as it was then. So I guess that's where I'm—I'm struggling here.” (17:57)

2. Appropriate vs. Inappropriate Analogies

• Balancing Historical Memory:
  • Need to “stress differences as well as similarities” (02:05, 09:24) — remembering Santayana’s warning ("those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") while also recalling Friedrich's retort ("those who cannot forget the past are condemned to misunderstand it"). (05:34)
• Political Rhetoric vs. Analysis:
  • Alarmist language about fascism is often used for effect rather than accuracy:
    • Rosenfeld: “It pays, based on the economy of attention on the Internet, to invoke the worst possible case scenario ... which is Nazism.” (15:12)
• American Historical Parallels:
  • Host questions if the Trump movement is better understood via American figures and phenomena (Pat Buchanan, George Wallace, the nativist Know Nothing movement, the KKK…) than European interwar fascism. (13:28)

3. Defining (American) Fascism

• Comparative Definitions:
  • Rosenfeld highlights major academic attempts:
    • Robert Paxton’s behavioral approach (fascism as action and style)
    • Roger Griffin’s palingenetic ultranationalism (the myth of national rebirth)
• Core Distinction:
  • “I tend to...see fascism existing in a Venn diagram relationship with populism. Where the two really diverge...is in the area of violence.” (23:35)
  • Modern forms: today’s right-wing populism may resemble “illiberal democracy" rather than outright fascism. (23:35)
• Does an American tradition exist?
  • There are homegrown American traditions of nativism and violence. Applying “fascist” to the pre-Nazi period (e.g., calling the Klan of the 1860s the first fascist movement) is anachronistic but sometimes done for political impact. (20:23)

4. The Reality of Historic American Fascists

• American Nazi & Fascist Movements:
  • The German American Bund of the 1930s (noted for its 1939 Madison Square Garden rally) was mostly made up of recent German immigrants, not native-born Americans. (07:05, 35:35)
  • Other domestic groups included the Silver Shirts, Father Coughlin’s organizations, Black Legion, and various strains of the KKK, with varying degrees of influence and connections to European fascism. (35:35)
  • Their popular appeal was always limited, especially after World War II began. (37:28)

5. The Modern Immigration Paramilitary Analogy (ICE as Brownshirts?)

• Host grapples with his own use of the “Brownshirts” analogy for ICE.
  • Di Caro: “Rather than call ICE another form of the Brownshirts...both major political parties are responsible for pouring billions of dollars into militarized immigration enforcement since 2001...” (13:28)
  • Rosenfeld: There are significant historical continuities in U.S. policy toward immigrants, predating Trump by decades. (15:12)
  • On ICE: “If...far right wing extremists like the Proud Boys...have been hired...to unleash havoc and mayhem...I could certainly see some premeditation that's comparable to using paramilitaries the way the Nazis did. But of course this is an existing government agency ... so the comparison is worth entertaining.” (42:14)

6. The Danger of Centralized Power

• Shift in GOP from State to Federal Power:
  • Rosenfeld notes the irony in Trump’s tendency to centralize state power, given generations of Republican rhetoric about small government. “Anytime you’re in a position where you're starting to centralize state power, that is getting into a more fascist orbit. I'm not saying it's fascism itself, but it is moving in that direction.” (26:42)

7. American Populists and Uniqueness of Trump

• Trump as Part of a Longer Tradition:
  • Rosenfeld: “I would favor the line of argumentation that sees him as the most recent incarnation of a right wing populist tradition in American history...” (46:53)
  • References to Shays’ Rebellion, the Paranoid Style (Hofstadter), John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan, George Wallace…
  • The difference is Trump’s rise “to a position of state power” — a populist now wields the levers of the federal government. (48:14)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Historical Analogies & Danger:
  • “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. One must be careful not to lose sight of Otto Friedrich's retort that those who cannot forget the past are condemned to misunderstand it.” (05:34, Di Caro referencing Rosenfeld)
• On the Overused Hitler Analogies:
  • “By the end of World War II, they realized none of those historical precedents helped to make sense of Hitler because he was so much more extreme. That after 1945, everyone said…we're going to always use Hitler…as the default comparison.” (17:57, Rosenfeld)
• On the Definition of Fascism:
  • “I do think that the use of violence is when populism tips over into fascism.” (23:35, Rosenfeld)
• On the Seductiveness of Nazi Analogies:
  • “It pays…to invoke the worst possible case scenario and the worst possible precedent, which is Nazism.” (15:12, Rosenfeld)
• On American Nazi Movements:
  • “There is an indigenous American form of fascism that's not just copycat.” (36:38, Rosenfeld)
• On the Persistent Appeal of the Nazi Past:
  • “The Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history.” (03:38, 51:10, quoting Richard Evans)

---

Important Timestamps

• [02:05] — Rosenfeld on the legitimacy but pitfalls of Nazi analogies in American discourse.
• [09:24] — The challenge for historians: drawing connections without alarmism.
• [13:28] — Di Caro critiques the tendency to focus on Hitler instead of homegrown U.S. populism.
• [15:12] — Rosenfeld on media rhetoric vs. sober historical analysis.
• [20:23] — Defining American fascism and the anachronism of labeling the KKK as "fascist."
• [23:35] — The behavioral distinction between populism and fascism: violence as the fault line.
• [26:42] — On the centralization of power being a step toward fascism, regardless of ideology.
• [35:35] — American Nazi and fascist movements in the 1930s.
• [42:14] — The complexities of comparing ICE to Nazi paramilitaries.
• [46:53] — Trump as the culmination of a tradition of American right-wing populism.
• [51:10] — The persistent relevance of the Nazi example and why we study it.

---

Flow & Tone

The episode is marked by careful, self-reflective analysis and precise, nuanced debate. Both host and guest stress sobriety and caution in using terms like “fascism” and “Hitler,” but do not deny the value of historical analogy when used judiciously. The conversation is intellectually rigorous yet accessible, never losing sight of moral seriousness, but rejecting alarmist and simplistic soundbites. Throughout, the host’s voice is measured, openly wrestling with the challenges of interpreting disquieting trends in the U.S. while resisting false equivalency or minimization.

---

Conclusion

This episode of History As It Happens delivers a rich, balanced, and deeply informed conversation about the American use—and misuse—of fascism and Hitler analogies. It ultimately advocates for careful historical reasoning, attention to specificity and difference, and an awareness of the political stakes and potential dangers of rhetorical overreach. Rather than simple answers, listeners are left with methods for thinking through current anxieties with clarity and historical depth.

---

Further Reading

• Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism since World War II (2019)
• Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich
• Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
• Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism

Transcript

[Mackenzie]

My name is Mackenzie and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about 10, $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising.

[Podcast Advertiser]

Platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Gofundme.Com gofundme.com this podcast is supported by.

[Podcast Host]

GoFundMe history as it happens. February 6, 2026. American fascists, American Hitlers, they don't like.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

It when I said that, and I never read Mein Kampf. They said, oh, Hitler said that it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

To say that he's a fascist is completely accurate. I mean, it does fit the definition. He wants to send the military in to attack his opponen. I mean, what more do you really need to hear? Leaders cannot call their political opponents Nazis and fascists and enemies of the state.

[Podcast Host]

Every recent president's been compared to or even called a modern day Hitler. In the hyperpolarized atmosphere of American politics today, as federal immigration agents trample the Constitution, Fascism and Nazism analogies abound. They're meant to shock or to draw parallels with a dark past. What we're witnessing, some say, is American fascism. What does that actually mean? That is next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

My own belief, of course, is that German history has a lot to teach us about American history, and vice versa. And comparing the past and the present between the Nazi era and present day America is totally in bounds. It's not out of bounds, but any comparison has to stress differences as well as similarities. And I know so many of my colleagues who are scholars in German history, really since 2015, have been trying to figure out how they can make appropriate comparisons without being accused of hyperbole or alarmism. And when I talk about Nazi analogies in the present, I also Point out, for example, that every American president since Herbert Hoover has been attacked as either a fascist or someone tantamount to Hitler.

[Historical Reenactor]

To island flies island, Frost island drugs island, Harley kite man bear and be a beetle and boss. Throughout the world, throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe. It is five years and more since Hitler marched into Poland, years full of suffering and death and sacrifice. Now the war against Germany is won.

[Podcast Host]

Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich have been been dead nearly 81 years, yet they're still with us when it comes to why we have to continue. To study them, I always turn to historian Richard Evans. The final page in the concluding volume of his three volume trilogy, Evans wrote, the Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. That is why the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history. Now, since Donald Trump entered politics in 2015, historians, political scientists, journalists, commentators, everyone's been debating whether he or his movement is fascist. And in many people's minds, fascism is synonymous with Nazism. Now, this debate has only intensified recently as ice ages descended on Minnesota, shooting and assaulting American citizens, barging into homes without warrants, while Trump administration officials defended the violent conduct and blamed the victims. As some have pointed out, we were warned this would happen.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

It's the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control. It's really a very important mission. And I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.

[Podcast Host]

But military as historian Gabrielle Rosenfeld wrote in 2019 for Cambridge University Press, although scholars of German history have been able to highlight the lessons of the Nazi past for the American present, they also run the risk of viewing the latter too much through the prism of the former. Since 1945, he says, German historians have consistently stressed the importance of historical memory and admonished others about the perils of forgetting the lessons of history. Yet while one may embrace George Santayana's claim that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. One must be careful not to lose sight of Otto Friedrich's retort that those who cannot forget the past are condemned to misunderstand it. Rosenfeld went on to say, determining how to balance these two competing insights about the relative perils of too little and too much memory has never been more important again. That was six years ago. The same could be written today. So what does it mean to say we're witnessing American fascism, not interwar European fascism? Can American, not European history guide us today? Well, there have been small fascist or Nazi movements in the United States. You may have seen the PBS American Experience documentary about the German American bundle. In February 1939, that is the year that World War II started, more than 20,000Americans filled Madison Square Garden. It was billed as a pro American rally.

[Historical Reenactor]

My fellow Americans, what would George Washington think and do were he alive today? Would he not plead with his thinking? The loyal and law abiding people, the true Christian Americans?

[Podcast Host]

How utterly bizarre to see banners with George Washington's image next to swastikas now. Donald Trump is not a Nazi. As you know, I don't believe he's a fascist either. In a recent newsletter, I did refer to ICE as an American form of the Brownshirts because of their violent tactics in Minnesota. But this analogy or expletive is inaccurate. The origins and purposes of Hitler's paramilitary are dramatically different than those of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet there is a tradition of right wing populism in our country, of racism, nativism and xenophobia that Donald Trump has tapped a receptive audience for his speeches vilifying immigrants, more liberals, Marxists, communists, whoever draws his ire.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing.

[Podcast Host]

Gabrielle Rosenfeld is a historian at Fairfield University and the President of the center for Jewish History. He is the author or editor of eight books, including the Fourth Reich, the Specter of Nazism since World War II and Fascism in Past and Present. Our conversation next Remember, you can support this podcast and enjoy ad free listening, bonus content and 247 access to the entire catalog of more than 500 episodes. Become a subscriber it's easy. Go to historyasithappens.com Supercast will set you up to listen in the exact same place. You're listening now without ads. Gavriel Rosenfeld, welcome to the show.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Good to be with you in your.

[Podcast Host]

Class today, you are teaching students about Mein Kampf. Are they drawing comparisons or analogies to what's happening in the United States today, to the fascism of Adolf Hitler?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

First of all, great to be with you. I think one of the challenges of being a professor in the United States at the moment is that we're, of course, tremendously eager to draw connections between the past and the present. At the same time, the politics of present day college campus life are such that if we stray too far into what some people might regard as activism or preaching or moralizing, we run the risk of running afoul of administrators or donors. My own belief, of course, is that German history has a lot to teach us about American history, and vice versa. And comparing the past and the present between the Nazi era and present day America is totally inbounds. It's not out of bounds. But any comparison has to stress differences as well as similarities. And I know so many of my colleagues who are scholars in German history, really, since 2015, have been trying to figure out how they can make appropriate comparisons without being accused of hyperbole or alarmism. And these days, I think one other thing to keep in mind is that with social media and phones being ubiquitous, anyone can be recorded, anyone can be taped, things can be edited and distorted, and so your words can be used against you. So I've basically committed myself to trying to be as. As objective as possible. And when I talk about Nazi analogies in the present, I also point out, for example, that every American president since Herbert Hoover has been attacked as either a fascist or someone tantamount to Hitler. And that puts the present day immediacy of the moment into a larger context. So I think you can, you know, I can spare myself the accusation of sloganeering.

[Podcast Host]

My gosh, Herbert Hoover, too? I didn't know that. Well, this is a free speech zone. You can say whatever you want. But no, I don't envy your situation as a professor. Academic freedom is paramount. And if you have to watch what you say because someone might deliberately misconstrue it, I'm glad I'm not in your shoes there. So you wrote this article in 2019 during the first Trump term for Cambridge.org, i'll make sure I share a link to this article in my weekly newsletter and in the show notes to this episode so people can read it. The title of the article was An American Nazi Analogies and the Struggle to Explain Donald Trump. And in this article, among many things you do is you track the frequency of Nazi analogies in newspaper articles, what have you. And at some point, you say it peaked during Trump's first term, and then it started to diminish. But if you were to update this article today, you might say we're seeing a resurgence of it now. I mean, I see the word fascism all over the place. I've not done any type of empirical study. This is just what I see online because of what ICE is doing in Minnesota, broadly speaking. Gavriel, as a scholar, you're watching the second Trump term unfold. What are you thinking about?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Right, so the first essay that you just referenced, that was published in 2019, that came out of a larger research project I was working on that came out that same year. It's a book called the Fourth Reich about the specter of Nazism Since World War II and how many many people across the west, not just in the US have been on the alert for the possible resurgence of Nazism and what's been called a Fourth Reich, an actual Nazi regime, whether in Germany or elsewhere. In the piece that you referred to, I had more or less argued that ever since Trump ran for office in 2015 and through the midterm elections of November 2018, fascism comparisons really exploded across the American media landscape. They did, however, decline appreciably after the Democrats took back the house in 2018. There's no coincidence there. It tends to be the fact that political parties out of power, at least in recent American history, have tended to wield the fascism allegation much more actively than those that are in power. And when there's a sense of security that one has a say in policymaking, there's less rhetorical need to invoke that comparison. In the post 2024 era, I think, as you were just suggesting, there have been some new alarming signs of intensification of things that some might regard as fascist trends. Happy to talk about that.

[Podcast Host]

Sure. Well, how did Hitler's party do in his first midterm elections? Ha. See, it's self evident we're actually not living in a Nazi dictatorship, but that doesn't mean there is no fascism. There might be other reasons why we shouldn't call it fascism. So here's my take on this. I understand there could be an American fascism. You edited a book of 12 essays about this subject. We'll get to that as well. There might be an American fascism. I mean, we know there were American Nazis in the interwar period. They held a big rally at Madison Square garden, but from 30,000ft up. My problem with comparing what's happening in the United States today to fascism or even Nazism that these analogies can absolve Trump's critics from grappling with recent American origins or causes of what we call the Trump movement. Rather than Adolf Hitler, we might be talking about Pat Buchanan and the rise after the Cold War of right wing populism in the Republican Party or just populism more generally in American politics. Rather than call ICE another form of the Brownshirts, and I have to admit that I did refer to ICE as a brownshirt type of paramilitary recently. I actually regret doing that for historical reasons, but rather than comparing it to the Brownshirts, we can reckon with the fact that both major political parties are responsible for pouring billions of dollars into a militarized immigration enforcement since 2001 in a liberal Democratic system. I mean, I'm just looking at an article here about the abuses of the Border Patrol under President Obama. The headline the Border Patrol was Monstrous Under Obama. This is obviously an op ed that I'm referring to. Can you start peeling away the layers of that onion I just served up about the big picture here?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Sure. I mean, I think there's a built in contradiction between rhetoric and analysis in present day media discourse. Oftentimes it's the rhetoric that prevails over the actual analysis. And I've seen this in any number of contexts. If you want to get attention for whatever cause you're advocating for or opposing, you need to invoke the most alarmist rhetoric possible. Oftentimes the analysis might not bear out the rhetoric, but most of the time it's the cart before the horse in that regard. Sobriety and objective analysis of major trends that people are worried about. It pays, based on the economy of attention on the Internet and beyond, to invoke the worst possible case scenario and the worst possible precedent, which is Nazism. I agree with you in many respects. To make sense of American trends, you don't have to go across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe to Germany in the 1930s to see comparative analogies to things. Like you said, there's a long standing nativist streak in American history that more most recently was seen by Buchanan's independent run for the presidency in the 90s, George Wallace in the 60s and 70s, Barry Goldwater go all the way back to the John Birch Society. Not to mention the know nothings in the 1840s and really vicious efforts to expel immigrants that oftentimes involved physical violence against Irish Catholics in the 1840s, for example. I was rereading recently some of the statistics about Eisenhower's expulsion campaign against Mexicans and Mexican Americans, thousands of Mexican American citizens actually were ensnared in that dragnet in 1954. There are many traditions that are being continued today. And so we shouldn't lose sight of that continuity and race just to the worst case scenario. At the very same time you say if one were to only take that kind of sober, objective approach, then you would be accused of potentially downplaying how bad the present is. And that's when the rhetoric comes in and it's so tempting for people to use it that oftentimes they just don't restrain themselves.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

Sure.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, I find myself struggling with this problem as well as you refer to it in your essay. How much is too much historical memory versus too little historical memory? So, based on my age and growing up when I did and going through the school system when I did, and then going to college, you know, the lessons of World War II, the Holocaust and Nazism drummed into my head. This is the most important stuff we have to learn post 1945. Never again. But if you abuse and overuse that, then it cheapens it or it waters it down, or, you know, you lose sight of the fact that just how horrendously, absolutely monstrous it was to live during the time of the Third Reich or to be a citizen in Nazi Germany. As bad as things are in America today, it's not as bad as it was then. So I guess that's where I'm. I'm struggling here.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

And that's a perennial downside of making any historical comparison. And as I mentioned to you just a second ago, before we went live, I wrote a piece. It was a journal, academic journal article, and then I excerpted it for the Atlantic. It was called who Was Hitler Before Hitler? And it made the argument that before Hitler and the Nazis came onto the historical stage, most people had a very, very diverse awareness of the many, many historical villains that had come and gone over the course of several thousand years of Western history. Whether it was Maximilian Robespierre, whether it was Napoleon iii, whether it was Genghis Khan, whether it was Emperor Nero. And so when Hitler first came on the scene in the 20s and early 30s, people were constantly trying to figure out which historical villain does he most resemble. By the end of World War II, they realized none of those historical precedents helped to make sense of Hitler because he was so much more extreme. That after 1945, everyone said, you know what? We're going to always use Hitler going forward as the de facto or default comparison, maybe that was seen as an insurance policy at the rhetorical level. What it did is sort of deny us a broader range of people to pick and choose from. So, like, I can't assume that most Americans know who Father Coughlin was or who, you know, William Jennings Bryan was in the 1890s when the first major antisemitism of American populism came on the scene, let alone some of the other figures like George Lincoln Rockwell, who was an outright Nazi.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, he was an American fascist. An American Nazi. You know, I have a friend who's a major historian of 19th century American politics, antebellum politics, who says to me, his problem with my argument, or others who make it about not invoking fascism, because that takes you back to interwar Europe. And in my view, fascism is not. Well, I have second thoughts about this now, but it's not an eternal or perpetual political phenomena. It was of that period, interwar Europe. Right? Or you can say interwar United States. My friend says, okay, that's fine. I understand that you don't want people to start thinking of interwar Europe when we have examples in the recent US Past to explain the rise of Trump. Well, he would say, well, yeah, there's an American fascism. The Klan, for instance, was the paramilitary arm of the Southern Democratic Party. So my question to you is, is there an American fascism? How would you define it that doesn't take us back again to interwar Europe, something that's grounded here in the United States that might explain Trump.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm actually working on a book right now, six chapter book. I'm on chapter five. It's called A Century of American Fascism between rhetoric and reality. And it basically reconstructs the hundred year debate within this country among many, many different camps about whether there is such a thing as American fascism. And one of the things I'm trying to argue is that it's nearly impossible to separate the rhetoric from the reality. Because at every point in time, everyone who's taking a stand on this issue has a political agenda, has a political explanation for why they think fascism is or isn't American phenomenon. And one of the things I'm trying to critique, while making it clear that I believe there is an American fascist tradition, is that a lot of times people levy the charge of American fascism in an anachronistic way. So, for example, black radicals in the 1930s were oftentimes very fond and sort of white Marxists later on were very fond of claiming that the first Ku Klux Klan right after the Civil War was the first fascist movement in history. Robert Paxton famously flirted with that idea as well. Now, to my mind, however much the first Klan was on the far right of America's then political spectrum, it's totally anachronistic to call it fascist, because fascism didn't even exist. So maybe call it proto fascist, but that's not what people want to claim, because for obvious political reasons, there were efforts in the 30s, 40s, and 50s before the civil rights movement to make it clear that African Americans deserved equality. And one way of accentuating that was to claim that America's tradition was just as unjust as the tradition then in power in Germany in the 1930s, namely Nazism. But I don't think we should shy away from pointing out when there are fallacies, logical fallacies of interpretation, whether anachronism or hyperbole or you name it, that define a lot of these arguments. And you see the same arguments being trotted out in the 30s, even to today among various camps, whether they're Marxist, liberal, conservative, you name it. So that's apparel.

[Podcast Host]

So American fascism, then. I want your definition, but maybe we should start with just defining fascism. I just took this up recently. I wrote a newsletter where I cited two different definitions at the top of it taken from books written on the subject. One was Robert Paxton, who you mentioned his 2004 book the Anatomy of Fascism, where he defines it mostly as behavior, although he does not dismiss the importance of ideas. I also cited Roger Griffin's definition that he's laid out in a number of books, including his first major book, the Nature of fascism from 1991, where it is a political ideology whose mythic core, in its various permutations, is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism. Okay, Gavriel, you know what that means. But the number of people outside academia who understand that sentence, myself not included, is probably three or four palingenetic. Or that just means rebirth. But I subscribe to Griffin's definition, even if you're not all in on the rebirth, the importance of rebirth. It's a political ideology, and Donald Trump is not pursuing an ideological agenda, which is why I don't call him a fascist. I don't call ICE fascism, although it is a paramilitary. Give me the Gabrielle Rosenfeld definition of fascism.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Well, look, I mean, you and I both know that the numbers of folks who, ever since the 1930s have tried to define fascism in multiple ways have made political choices in the process of doing so. Anyone who's a Marxist will take a materialist explanation that reduces fascism to a sign of sort of the puppet master theory of big business controlling or trying to forestall socialism by using the lower middle class as a buffer class against the workers who want anti capitalist revolution. There are people who are on the liberal center who will make a different argument. Fascism studies really came about into its own in the 60s. And whether it was Stanley Payne or Gilbert Allardyce or Fritz Stern or George Mossey, there's dozens and dozens of people. I tend to these days try and see fascism and existing in a Venn diagram relationship with populism. And where the two really diverge, I think, is in the area of violence. And fascism, of course, is a more extreme version of right wing populism, which has always existed, I think, even back to the middle ages. You can say that on the political spectrum there's always been a space for right wing populism. Between 1918, 1919 and 1945, fascism occupied that space. I think today I tend to side with those people that see the political space of the populist right being occupied by either. Some people would call it illiberal democracy of the Victor Orban variety, where they're still multiparty elections, Although the state puts its thumb on the scale. There is an independent judiciary, but it may be hindered in certain ways. I do think that the use of violence is when populism tips over into fascism. And so when, you know, you've had two terrible killings in Minneapolis over the last couple weeks, I think a lot of people justifiably want to ask the question, are we careening into fascism? The point, of course, that I often would make. You know, in 1968 in Berkeley, local police shot dead in People's park, student protesters against the Vietnam War. Kent State, four people shot by the national guard protesting Vietnam. Strike. Strike.

[Historical Reenactor]

Strike.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

Strike.

[Podcast Host]

Strike. They've got grievances, they've got demands.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Their demands on both sides.

[Historical Reenactor]

We have to talk. Leave this area immediately.

[Podcast Host]

And all of a sudden I heard the shooting.

[Historical Reenactor]

Strike, strike.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Killings by police, not to mention of people in the African American community and beyond, are not unknown in American history. So that's not fascism in any systematic sense. Although I certainly know that lots of people in those communities have called it fascism in the moment.

[Podcast Host]

Well, it's a behavioral definition of fascism, but there are a lot of authoritarian forms of government that rely on violence. Hayatollah Khamenei and his security services may have just butchered something like 20 or 30,000 people. They're not fascists.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Unless you subscribe to the idea that guided neoconservatives in the early 2000s, when Islamo fascism was on the rage, when Saddam Hussein was called that, and of course later on some of the Iranian mullahs and so forth, that would have.

[Podcast Host]

Been news to Saddam Hussein. Wasn't he an Arab socialist at one point? Wasn't the Ba' Athist party a form of Arab socialism?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Well, national socialism in the sense that it had a pan Arabist sort of nationalist dimension as well. But that's again, that gets us far afield. I think certainly Robert Paxton and others have said there are animating passions that drive the fascist mentality and that however much our current president may not be an ideological fascist, some of his instincts would be certainly anti democratic in the sense that it's my way or the highway. I'm just going to sort of push forward by force tariffs, even though they may not be constitutionally authorized. I think now when you see talk about imperialist adventures in Greenland or when you talk about the government federalizing elections and taking power away from the states to conduct them, I will say I am alarmed at that development simply because the Republican Party, even in its right wing populist incarnation for many, many decades, has basically said, we want to take apart federal power. We want to be small government. That was Reagan's claim, it was Goldwater's claim. And we want to return power to the states to do things like regulate gun laws or have no gun laws or we limit a woman's right to choose. Now, I think we do see this temptation to centralize power in the form of Trump's presidency. And that's where now maybe libertarians in his base will balk at that. But anytime you're in a position where you're starting to centralize state power, that is getting into a more fascist orbit. I'm not saying it's fascism itself, but it is moving in that direction.

[Podcast Host]

Well, Roger Griffin himself has said that fascism or fascists do not see themselves as, or do not see their ideology as the fruit of any doctrine or theory. There's no great body of work of fascist theory or fascist theoreticians. Energy, dynamism, action, those are the key concepts. But Griffin would argue it is still an ideology that can be defined. And again, I mentioned palingenesis, rebirth, create society anew. For the young members of the Nazi Party who joined the SA, the brown shirts, in the 1920s, it wasn't that because they were reading dry ideological tracts. They were listening to speeches and going to rallies almost at an anthropological level, Organic racial community. That's what I'm trying to get at here in my long and meandering question, Gavriel. So I was going to ask you about American fascism in the interwar period. There was that big rally.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Can I just interject one thing, though? I think one issue that you're raising, which is fascinating and very, very important about fascism is discursively, or to put it this way, rhetorically. When people invoke the threat of fascism, most often they're assuming that people will read that to mean Nazism. And fascism and Nazism are extremely different in all kinds of ways. It's not just that Nazism was the German version of fascism. Nazism was much more ideologically coherent than Mussolini's fascism ever was. Mussolini focused on the power of the state. For Hitler, the state was just a means to an end, to support and safeguard the future of the Aryan race. And Mussolini had no racial thinking. Not until the late 1930s did he have any racial thinking. And so rhetorically, there's sometimes a bait and switch. So you may be familiar with Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism, that came out in 2008, 2009.

[Podcast Host]

Ridiculous.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Claiming it was claiming that Obama and Democrats and liberals dating back to Woodrow Wilson were essentially fascist because they were focusing on government regulation of the economy and social collectivism and so forth. He protested when people said he was comparing Democrats and Obama to Hitler. He said, no, no, no. I'm just comparing them to fascists. And fascists are much more mild than Nazis. I'm going to bracket the Nazis off entirely. But the truth is, when anyone invokes the idea of fascism, they know that people will hear Nazism. When they mention the idea of a fascist, they'll think Hitler. You know, there's a lot of bad faith arguments and analogies that oftentimes take place. And so I would just want your listeners to understand, you know, race had no role initially in the existence of fascism, but it was absolutely central to Nazism. And depending on whether you're comparing Trump to Mussolini or Trump to Hitler, the answers could be very different.

[Podcast Host]

That's true. There were many fascist movements in Europe, and many of them never reached power. We tend to focus on two that did. That would be Italian fascism and the Nazis in Germany. Yeah, anti Semitism was not a major factor in the other fascist movements, and I shouldn't say all of them. And some of the other fascist movements in Europe, certainly the French fascists, were they anti Semitic. I mean, anti Semitism was everywhere in Europe. So I'm going to go down a rabbit hole here if I'm not careful with what I say. No, but you're right about the importance of being precise with language. I was just checking Richard Evans book the Coming of the Third Reich. And I reread the chapters about the foundation of the Brownshirts because I want to talk to you about them in relation to ice. For young members of the Brownshirts, even for them, antisemitism was incidental to their attraction to the Nazi Party. They were concerned with beating the heads in of the Marxists and the Social Democrats and the others who brought ruin upon the country after the defeat in.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

World War I. I mean, I would just, I would add a friendly amendment to that, only to say that what the SA thought ideologically about the far left is that the far left was Jewish, both in its composition and in its original ideas. And so, in fact, you know, those were the people, you may have heard this term before, known as the Beefsteak Nazis because they were brown on the outside, but red on the inside. They were in fact quite anti capitalist, but they were anti capitalist because they believed the Jews were the string pullers behind the capitalist economy. And if only the Jews could be excluded from the German economy, then capitalism could work well for the lower middle class. That's why these people weren't real socialists. I mean, real socialists would say, you don't just kick the Jews out, you actually abolish capitalism. And then everyone's hunky dory.

[Podcast Host]

I'll just pass on a paragraph from Evan's work, page 218. The coming of the Third Reich. The chapter is called the Roots of Commitment. More significant still was the inspiration provided by the basic elements of Nazi propaganda. The speeches by Hitler and Goebbels, the marches, the banners, the parades. At this level, ideas were more likely to be acquired through organs such as the Nazi press, election pamphlets and wall posters than through serious ideological tracts. As we discussed before, among ordinary party activists in the 20s and 30s, the most important aspect of Nazi ideology was its emphasis on social solidarity, the concept of the organic racial community of all Germans, followed at some distance by extreme nationalism and the cult of Hitler. Antisemitism, by contrast, was of significance only for a minority, and for a good proportion of these, it was only incidental. The younger they were, says Evans, the less important ideology was at all, and the more significant were features such as the emphasis on Germanic culture and the leadership role of Hitler. He's obviously not saying that antisemitism wasn't there. He's just talking about these people who are drawn to the sa, as you say, some of them were socialist, some of them were apolitical. They just wanted to go out and beat people's heads in. It was cleansing.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

One has to remember that the Nazi Party recruited from all segments of the German population. So you've got middle class, educated white collar people and elites and aristocrats. You've got lumpen proletariat, blue collar workers to some small degree, more so lower middle class clerks and war veterans and so forth. The essay did disproportionately recruit from military veterans who had served in World War I. And the truth of the matter is the reason why, both in Italy and in Germany and other places, all fascist leaders showed up not in three piece suits, but in uniforms with leather marching boots and insignia and flags, is that they had militarized their identities in World War I and then they militarized politics thereafter. So I totally agree with Richard Evans that the whole idea of bonding through social solidarity and using the non verbal signs and emotions of coming together, stressing the folk and the race and so forth, that certainly was more important for most people than the ideas. As you quoted Evans himself saying, the only way you can create a kind of unity within the folk is through what some other scholars, Peter Longerich, for example, have referred to as negative integration. You can only create a sense of self by creating others who don't belong. Because Germany had a long, long history of internal religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants, between the far left and the far right. Integrating and creating a sense of social unity by demonizing Jews was sort of the secret sauce. And I think that's where, maybe not in the 20s and 30s, but certainly with the Nazis being in power, that's where that came to the forefront.

[Podcast Host]

See all these complexities, they get lost in a lot of, I would say 99% of the analogies I see. But as you say, fascism does just become synonymous with Nazism, even though Nazism was an unusual form of fascism. So in interwar America, I mentioned the big rally at Madison Square Garden of the American Nazis. Who were these people people? And who are their, if they have any today, who are their inheritors?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Well, so the German American Bund was the group you referenced that held the rally, the infamous one in Madison Square Garden. From everything I've read about them, they were primarily a group that was joined by German immigrants to the United States. German immigrants, remember, had been discriminated against quite a bit during World War I. And you know, most of Them were entirely loyal to the US had assimilated tremendously since they had immigrated here already in the 18th, but especially after the 18th century, but after the 1840s as well, when Germany was undergoing upheaval in the 1848 revolutions, they were essentially the German American Bund was a group of not sort of born and bred Americans, it was more foreigners. And by the way, the American Italian fascist movements that also existed were mostly first generation Italian immigrants who joined them. Now they openly identified as Nazis or as fascists. There are other groups like the Silver Shirts organized by William Dudley Pelley, groups like the Black Legion in Detroit that was sort of a more radical offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlan's Christian Mobilizers and Christian Front groups that came out of that Catholic milieu. You know, none of them would have wanted to been called imitators of European fascism because they wanted to be seen as patriotic American organizations. In fact, I came across some interesting quotes of klansmen in the 1920s for swearing any allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan. Because as you know, the second Ku Klux Klan of the 20s was very anti Catholic, very Protestant, WASP centric, and Italians were Catholics. So Klansmen in the twenties said, we don't want to have any part of this Italian fascism because we don't trust Italians. So it gets to be a little inside baseball in terms of who's a rival of whom. There is an indigenous American form of fascism that's not just copycat.

[Podcast Host]

Sure. Did they have a large following these many groups you just mentioned during interwar US prior to Pearl Harbor? Did they have a following?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

They'd numbered in the tens of thousands. Especially in certain cities like New York City. There were entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that had followers of the Christian Front, mostly in Irish and Italian neighborhoods. And there were, you know, conflicts between neighborhoods that had large Jewish populations. And the New York City police under Ferro La Guardia was infiltrating the Christian Front. But like I think you were starting to intimate, prior to Pearl harbor, those groups were relatively small. They were worrisome because there were incidents of assaults and beatings in American neighborhoods. And even as far as late as 1943, 44 in parts of Boston, there were still anti Semitic beatings that took place among people who sympathized with the Nazis. But Pearl harbor basically ended those groups as a political force. And you probably are familiar with Philip Roth's famous novel, the Plot Against America. Charles Lindbergh actually gets elected in 1940, but he, you know, Somebody in state power that could have allowed those people to come more to the fore instead of scurry back under their rocks. That's what Philip Roth was worried about. And I think some would argue that ever Since Charlottesville in 2017, the idea that the American government could provide oxygen to groups that have always been here, have always been on the margins. However, that's maybe where things are different today.

[Podcast Host]

You're right. You know, I was thinking of the Unite the Right rally this morning when I was preparing for our conversation here. There are neo Nazis and fascist types and fascist adjacent people in our country. Not sure how influential or how much of a following they have. Some people say Stephen Miller is a fascist. He's a major figure in the Trump administration. I really don't know. I don't know what Miller's politics are. I know what he sounds like when I listen to him. Sounds unhinged, this neoliberal frame that the.

[Political Commentator]

United States job is to go around the world and demanding immediate elections be held everywhere, immediately, all the time, right away, no vacuums. That's not what I think. But you invaded the country, we took the country and we seized the leader of Venezuela. Damn straight we did. And I'm saying we're not going to let. So is the US Going to have new elections that we're not going to let Timpak communist dictators send rapists into our country, send drugs into our country, send weapons into our country.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Political Commentator]

And we're not going to let a country fall into the hands of our adversaries.

[Podcast Host]

There were people in the United States during the interwar period who, some of them may have even been involved with the New Deal, who had a certain admiration for what Mussolini or they thought Mussolini was accomplishing in Italy.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

Right.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Where most people would claim there was affinity between American movements or American political leaders in the 30s was with regard to coping with the horrible effects of the Great Depression. Everyone who's a fascist has always supported the idea of government control of the economy or what's oftentimes called corporatism. That's the right wing form of economic regulation. As this thing from the Bolshevik or communist form of where free market capitalism just is entirely abolished, whereas there's more of a partnership between government and private enterprise and corporatism. Roosevelt was attacked both from the left and the right for being both a socialist and a fascist because of all his New Deal policies. The NRA legislation that came about with regard to legalizing labor unions, rationing, any kinds of things that might put the government in the Business of having a say in economic life was admired by some and demonized by others. But truthfully, and this is a point I've always made, fascist or Nazi economic policies are not what distinguish the uniqueness of fascism or Nazism. Sure, Hitler was great for building autobahns and promoting German. In German, the word is Automobilizierung, sort of the auto mobilization of the. Of the country. And sure, technological innovation and modernization took place under the Nazis, but that's not why the Nazis are known in history. Some of those things are incidental. I think economic regulation is one of those things.

[Podcast Host]

Race and war, blood and soil. The Nazis had an ideological project. You obviously know this, but I think it's worth emphasizing this point to create a racial empire in Europe, Lebensraum, a Jew free Europe, which went from taking away citizenship of Germany's small Jewish population to taking away their property, deporting them, and then it evolved into, you know, biological extermination. And that went for all the rest of the Jews in Europe as well. And the Untermensch, as they would be called in Slavic East Europe, that was supposed to be a racial empire right there, shows you that what we're dealing with in the United States today is not on the same level. But is it too much or is it too little ICE as a paramilitary?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Well, so two things. One is there's. I always tell my students, there's a huge distinction between the Nazi movement between 1920 and 1933, and then the Nazi regime in power in peacetime from 33 to 39, and then the Nazi regime at war from 39 to 45. All, all the worst tendencies of Nazism got on steroids in World War II. The most destructive, racially extremist forms of Nazi ideology ran to their logical conclusion during the war. We're not at war right now, thank goodness, at least in any foreign theater in any sustained way. Although in a way, I guess, we've been at war nonstop since 9 11. But that being said, domestically, what we have going on here is not anything that would be comparable to what happened to Germany's Jews after 1939, let alone the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe. Now, with regard to ICE and what the best analogy would be, you know, I'm still trying to make up my mind about whether the organization itself is just inherently corrupt based on the very concept of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or whether it's the people who have been hired in the last period, maybe already from 2016 to 2020, in the sense that they've been hired from any number of ranks of far right wing extremists like the Proud Boys. And maybe they haven't been trained whatsoever, or maybe it's all part of a deliberate scheme to unleash havoc and mayhem in America's neighborhoods. If it's the latter, then I could certainly see some premeditation that's comparable to using paramilitaries the way the Nazis did. But of course this is an existing government agency that previous administrations have had as well, so the comparison is worth entertaining. I'm and you know, I don't know if we even know the answer necessarily, and historians down the line will probably provide some some clarity.

[Podcast Host]

Well, the essay or the Brownshirts were liquidated too in 1934 by Hitler. He did not want a potential threat to his power. They were used, of course, as his street enforcers in the years prior to being levered into power in 1933. Here's why I think ICE is a paramilitary, even if they're not the Brownshirts. Of course, different ideology, all that we've discussed here, because there is a political purpose here too. And as you said, the most recent wave of hires, these people are not properly trained. They're being put to a political purpose. President Trump has pulled back on deportations from workplaces in so called red states, farms, meatpacking, what have you, because he understood that that was bad for the US Economy and for his constituents. He's unleashed ICE lawlessly in Minnesota where they're terrorizing not just white American citizens who look like me, but the Somali refugees who are there who already been vetted, packing them off to detainment centers in Texas and then sending them back to Minnesota after they've been vetted again on their own dime. ICE is being used as a political paramilitary lawlessly right now, in violation of the Constitution, even if it may not fit the strict interwar Europe definition of paramilitary.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Yeah, no, I totally agree. A lot of people are who are perhaps, or were perhaps favorably disposed towards the Republican Party, even maybe the MAGA movement, when they see that due process is being ignored and that people can get warrantless entry into your home or even can start limiting the ability of Americans who have concealed carry permits to show up in public with them. That's where you see the mission creep developing. That I think should alarm even people who maybe were loyal libertarians as part of the GOP coalition. And you see at least anecdotally on social media, people worrying about going over the line. And I think historically there's always this idea about the boomerang theory where for lack of a better term, mainstream voters in Western countries tolerate what their governments do overseas. But when those same methods come back and are used internally against people that they regard as part of the in group, that's when they start ringing the alarm bell.

[Podcast Host]

Trump is not Hitler. Is he Mussolini? Is he like Mussolini? You know, you never hear people compare Trump to Francisco Franco, you know, because that doesn't have any shock value. Maybe he's more like Kim Jong Un. I don't know who likes to bluster as well. I guess what I'm getting at here is cuz you raised this issue in Your article From 2019, the Trump Hitler comparison. It's not very sound, but it does have shock value. I mean, who would you compare Trump to? You mentioned Sean Wilentz in your article. Sean Wilentz is one of my favorite historians. He apparently said sometime around 2019 that you really can't compare Trump to anyone because he's unprecedented in American history. What do you think?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Yeah. No, I would favor the line of argumentation that sees him as the most recent incarnation of a right wing populist tradition in American history that dates back, I mean, you could almost say to the founding of the country. There's a great book, I believe, by Stephen Hahn called Illiberal America that recently appeared that argues that Shays Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion that George Washington had to put down by force when people were blanching at the economic situation of the federal government and their own economic desperation. And that goes through everything that Richard Hofstadter talked about when he wrote about the paranoid style in American history. Not to mention other more recent scholars like Matthew Dallek, who have talked about the John Birch Society, all the right wing populists that existed certainly in the 20th century. Whether we're talking about Pat Buchanan, George.

[Historical Reenactor]

Wallace, this is a people's movement. It doesn't make any difference whether the major politicians are going to support you or not. If they don't support us in this movement to take back our government and give it to us and let us run our own institutions, those who stand in the way are liable to get run over by you people who are in this auditorium here tonight.

[Historical Quote Speaker]

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Barry Goldwater, none of them ever rose to a position of governmental power. There were always candidates, third party candidates, in the case of George Wallace, that carried, I think carried four states in 1968. And Nixon, of course, benefited because he was able to sound like a moderate when George Wallace was sounding like an extremist. But I think in the case of Trump, he's channeling a lot of these forces that have long existed. And for people who were traditional Republican voters who, if you remember, I think in 2015, Trump was one of 16 Republican candidates running for president. And he was the only one who wasn't, you know, sounding like an establishment normie, like Jeb Bush, who was basically just saying, we'll cut your taxes and we'll pay, you know, some lip service to anti abortion sentiment. But Trump really was going outside the box and appealing to those voters in a way that actually got him the nomination. And then, of course, we know whatever, you know, everything that happened thereafter. So I would just say the distinction is this is the first time a long standing American trend on the political spectrum has risen to a position of state power. And the difference between 2016 to 2020 now is that all the guardrails are gone. It's now loyalists that are helping him and not outside experts.

[Podcast Host]

Trump also says he wants to be a peacemaker, unlike, say, Adolf Hitler, although he also claimed, falsely, he said he wanted peace. Yes, he wanted to peace in Europe. Just give me all the territory I want. Trump wages war differently. He's not looking for territory. Well, all right, Greenland, well, there hasn't been a war over Greenland, but it's a different type of kleptocratic gangsterism rather than, you know, creating a racial empire over Eurasia and exterminating all the people you don't want to have there. All right, last question you wrote in 2019. Given the many pitfalls of historical analogies, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the key question driving the Trump Hitler debate, whether or not the Nazi past helps us understand the American presentation, is unanswerable. Seven years later, is it still unanswerable?

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

Well, let's put it this way. I keep turning back to this topic in my own research because I'm still trying to make up my own mind. You alluded earlier to a book that came out two years ago called Fascism in America that I co edited with my friend Janet Ward. 12 leading scholars of German American history weighed in on is it or isn't it this new book on fascism in America, A Whole Century of debating? The question is also my attempt to figure out, can we understand by looking at the history of this endless debate where we are today? And I guess all I would say is I'm less comfortable pooh, poohing the comparison now than I been you know, several years ago when Biden was in office. Unfortunately, if we overemphasize the danger, then we'll lead people to tune out. And if we underestimate the danger, we'll get caught with our pants down, just like people felt in 1945 when they underestimated Hitler and said he was only like Maximilian Robespierre when in fact he was like the devil.

[Podcast Host]

Well, you know, as Richard Evans said in the final pages of his trilogy on the Reich, he said, the Third Reich raises in the most acute form the possibilities and consequences of the human hatred and destructiveness that exist, even if only in a small way, within all of us. It demonstrates with terrible clarity the ultimate potential consequences of racism, militarism and authoritarianism. It shows what can happen if some people are treated as less human than others. It poses in the most extreme possible form the moral dilemmas we all face at one time or another in our lives of conformity or resistance, action or inaction in the particular situations with which we are confronted. And that is why, he says, the Third Reich will not go away, but continues to command the attention of thinking people throughout the world long after it has passed into history. That's my prism, I guess, that I use. I don't call Trump a fascist, but I still reflect on those words by Richard Evans when I'm looking at the.

[Gavriel Rosenfeld]

World today by way of my final word of wisdom in our 250th anniversary of marking the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence. I'd like to think that people would take seriously what we've had for a quarter of a millennium in our liberal democracy, however imperfect and flawed it's been. And we'll see whether people want to live up to our ideals or whether they want to nurse resentments. But it's a pivotal year, certainly, for the country.

[Podcast Host]

Speaking of America 250 on the next episode of History As It Happens, what were the ideas of the American Revolution, ideas that still matter today. Now, if you caught the Ken Burns documentary on pbs, one criticism of an otherwise excellent program was that it was light on ideas. More about the battles and the war, more about the people who shaped American culture. We're going to get into the ideas next as we report History as it Happens. And you can keep up to date on what I'm doing here by signing up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.

[Podcast Advertiser]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.