section_path: Comparisons/Historical parallels
section_name: Historical parallels
paragraph_text: Historical parallels
  
  The idea of modern America being analogous to Weimar Germany before Hitler's seizure of power was brought up by New York Times reporter Roger Cohen and journalist Andrew Sullivan in 2015. American professor John Russo stated in 1995 that public concerns over job loss would lead to a resurgence of fascism in the United States in the future (the U.S. had previously seen a rise in fascist movements during the 1930s, partly due to the Great Depression, with Leon Milton Birkhead identifying 800 Nazi-friendly organizations in 1938). In a 1995 interview with Dale Maharidge, Russo predicted the emergence of a new American leader similar to Donald Trump, a prediction on which he doubled down in the 2020s.
  
  Jonathan Chait stated that the decision by American conservatives of embracing Trump is analogous to that of German conservatives of supporting Hitler with the hope that they could "tame" him. The same argument was made by historians Nathan Stoltzfus and Eric Weitz. Paul Robin Krugman, in a 2016 article titled How Republics End, stated that, "it takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare." Geoff Eley, despite believing that Trump was not Hitler, also drew parallels between societal fears regarding globalization and immigration in contemporary America and in the 1930s. American historian Timothy Ryback, author of Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, wrote in 2024 that, "our republic appears to be plagued by the myriad ills that doomed Weimar: political fragmentation, social polarization, hate-filled demagoguery, a legislature gridlocked by partisan posturing, and structural anomalies in voting processes."
  
  Conspiracy theories have been a central factor in the emergence of fascist movements. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 that, "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exists." In Germany, Nazi activist employed conspiracy theories including that of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to portray Jews as attempting to take over the world, an idea that Hitler defended in Mein Kampf. In the 21st century, QAnon became one of the most prominent conspiracy theories among the pro-Trump movement, alleging that Trump has been involved with a years-long fight with the " deep state ". Its believers have included House members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. The conspiracy theory that white people were being deliberately ethnically replaced by immigrants also became prominent and was promoted by Fox News ' Tucker Carlson. A 2022 survey carried out by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Turchin Research involving 1,500 respondents reported that nearly 70% of Republicans believed "to at least some extent" this was taking place.
  
  In Weimar Germany, Hitler scapegoated the Jews as one of the causes of the Great Depression. During the 1930s, public support for centrist parties diminished and political infighting broke among leftist parties, which resulted in there being no unified opposition to the NSDAP. Time writer Christine Adams said that although the current political state of the United States may seem analogous to that of Weimar Germany, the presence of a cross-ideological opposition to Trump is a factor that makes America different from Germany in the 1930s.
  
  David Dyzenhaus wrote that although the government of the United States, including conservative judges and vice-president Mike Pence, managed to reject Trump's attempts of overturning election results, the state of democracy in Weimar Germany was also "similarly salvageable" until late 1932, for which reason the analogy between Weimar Germany and 2024 America is, he stated, strong. In that year, the Staatsgerichtshof, the court responsible for settling constitutional disputes related to the federal government and the states, upheld the constitutionality of the right-wing German government's decision to change the government of Prussia under an emergency clause of the Weimar Constitution, a decision that is regarded as a precursor to Hitler's rise to power in the following year. Dyzenhaus stated that the decisions of the mostly conservative U.S. Supreme Court during Trump's post-2024 tenure as president will affect the future of American democracy analogously to how the Staatsgerichtshof 's decisions affected German politics in the 1930s. Trump has stated that he would, if re-elected in 2024, use the Insurrection Act to suppress dissident protesters. Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning wrote in 2022 that a hypothetical emergence of a minority-ruled, authoritarian government in the United States led by Donald Trump and his Republican allies would resemble more an illiberal democracy than a Nazi-like dictatorship. Browning stated that the appointment of election deniers to key positions in state governments in the United States was an "ominous warning", and that the patterns of behavior of the Republican Party amounted to an attempt at a "legal revolution", a term coined by German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher to describe the legal pathways that the Nazi Party undertook in order to seize power following Hitler's unsuccessful 1923 coup attempt.
  
  After Hitler lost his 1932 run for presidency by a margin of 6 million voters, he claimed voter fraud and went to court in order to overturn the election results. According to Hitler, his party had actually gotten 2 million more votes than what was recorded. His case was ultimately dismissed, with a judge stating that the high margin by which Hitler lost precluded the possibility of any significant fraud. At that time, the New York Times published an article titled Hitler to Contest Validity of Election.