Adam Gopnik on Hitler’s Rise to Power

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism. He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe. In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political martyrs, and has called his enemies animals, vermin, and “not people,” and demonstrated countless other examples of authoritarian behavior. In a new essay, Gopnik reviews a book by the historian Timothy W. Ryback, and considers Adolf Hitler’s unlikely ascent in the early nineteen-thirties. He finds alarming analogies with this moment in the U.S. In both Trump and Hitler, “The allegiance to the fascist leader is purely charismatic,” Gopnik says. In both men, he sees “someone whose power lies in his shamelessness,” and whose prime motivation is a sense of humiliation at the hands of those described as élites. “It wasn’t that the great majority of Germans were suddenly lit aflame by a nihilist appetite for apocalyptic transformation,” Gopnik notes. “They [were] voting to protect what they perceive as their interest from their enemies. Often those enemies are largely imaginary.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the political scene and I'm David Remnick.
0:07.0	Just recently Adam Gopnick published an essay in the New Yorker about Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early 30s.
0:18.0	By way of reviewing a book about the ascent of German fascism, Adam discussed the ways that Hitler exploited the weaknesses of a
0:25.3	democratic system to gain power as a fascist. He wrote about the enablers in the German
0:31.9	press and in the German military.
0:34.4	And while I was reading Adam's essay, all I could really think about was our present predicament,
0:39.3	the return of Donald Trump in the 2024 elections.
0:44.4	Now, Adam never mentions once Donald Trump in his essay.
0:48.6	And yet, the subtext is blaring out its warning at full volume.
0:53.7	He would be foolish to say, and Gopnik does not say,
0:56.7	that Trump equals Hitler, that Nazism equals MAGA.
1:00.5	And yet, as the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
1:06.6	Since losing the 2020 election and refusing the peaceful transfer of power, Trump has put the
1:12.1	rule of law itself on his enemies list.
1:15.3	He thunders about terminating articles of the Constitution.
1:19.1	He holds up a mob of insurrectionists as political martyrs and hostages. He says he'll round up his
1:24.8	enemies whom he dehumanizes as a vermin and he's joked about being a dictator if
1:31.1	only just for one day.
1:33.0	So, how seriously should we take this,
1:36.0	and what historical comparison is legitimate?
1:39.0	Adam Gopner came by the office recently
1:41.0	to discuss it all with us.
	...

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