David Remnick: Just recently, Adam Gopnik published an essay in the New Yorker about Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the early '30s. By way of reviewing a book about the ascent of German fascism, Adam discussed the ways that Hitler exploited the weaknesses of a democratic system to gain power as a fascist. He wrote about the enablers in the German press and in the German military. While I was reading Adam's essay, all I could really think about was our present predicament, the return of Donald Trump in the 2024 elections.

Now, Adam never mentions once Donald Trump in his essay, and yet the subtext is blaring out its warning at full volume.

It would be foolish to say, and Gopnik does not say, that Trump equals Hitler, that Nazism equals MAGA. Yet, as the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Since losing the 2020 election and refusing the peaceful transfer of power, Trump has put the rule of law itself on his enemies list. He thunders about terminating articles of the Constitution. He holds up a mob of insurrectionists as political martyrs and hostages. He says he'll round up his enemies, whom he dehumanizes as a vermin, and he's joked about being a dictator if only just for one day. How seriously should we take this and what historical comparison is legitimate?

Adam Gopnik came by the office recently to discuss it all with us. A couple of years ago, you laid claim legitimately to having been among the first people to call Trump a fascist, which we were all, or many people were quite wary to do, what were you seeing in 2015, 2016 that allowed you to use the word fascist where Trump is concerned?

Adam Gopnik: My favorite essay on fascism is Umberto Eco's famous essay on the subject. Eco, of course, grew up under Mussolini and had a intense firsthand experience of it. The point he makes is that the mistake we make is searching for a fascist ideology. That the essence, if you like, the core of fascism, is not to have an ideology because it makes you dependent on the charismatic leader. The charismatic leader may twist right one day, twist left the other day. One day he's in favor of government control over capitalism, the next day he's in favor of free enterprise, so that the allegiance to the fascist leader is purely charismatic.

You have no idea where you're going. It changes, but you follow it exactly because you're caught up, so to speak, like a tractor beam in a sci-fi movie in the inexorable pull of the charismatic leader. I should add, that there's a scholarly and historical debate about Hitler exactly about, did he have a plan and an ideology which he then executed however hideously, or was he a paranoid improviser? My own reading, and several years ago, as you may recall, David, I did a whole piece about Mein Kampf. I actually sat down and read Mein Kampf when it was republished in Germany for the first time.

What's startling is that it isn't an ideological testament, it's an account of wounds and humiliations that Hitler had suffered. Not being allowed into art school is a huge one for him. His hatreds of the French and the Jews and the rest of it come out of the sense that these people have perpetually humiliated him. It's a creepy, strange non-ideological document in that way, but what it does, of course, is it gives license to people who share his sense of resentment and humiliation to articulate and express those things.

David Remnick: But it would require on the part of the fascist leader, the would-be fascist leader, an element of mastery and connection with the public. Otherwise, it's just a book written in the dark of night and completely meaningless. How would you connect those two figures, if you would, meaning Hitler and Trump, which seems like an outrageous thing to do, but is it so outrageous?

Adam Gopnik: I think that there are genuine and powerful similarities between authoritarian right-wing, nationalist authoritarian rulers, left left-wing totalitarian rulers are another and related phenomenon, an issue. Certainly, in that sense, the idea that you would have someone, and this is disputed within the Hitler literature, but I think strongly, whose power lies in his shamelessness throughout Ryback's book and throughout the literature, people are constantly trying to persuade Hitler to stand. He was a soldier. Be there for the Fatherland, make compromises that you need to make, because they imagine that Hitler had a core set of positive values that were as strong as his hatreds.

In that sense, Trump is a very, very similar psychological type. The positive doctrines of Trumpism are very hard to enunciate. Even when they fail, "We'll build the wall." Then you don't build the wall, but it doesn't disable his appeal. The negative doctrines of Trumpism who you hate and who you now have a right to hate the libs, the immigrants, the Muslims are very well defined. Those are the key emotional offers. In that sense, I think that we're not wrong to see a very real similarity, recognizing, of course, all the differences in circumstances that surround them.

David Remnick: How would you compare the publics involved, the Weimar German public and the American public and its circumstances in 2016 and again in 2024?

Adam Gopnik: One of the points that the many of the political scientists and historians who studied the Weimar elections make is that the 32 elections, there were several, were normal, which was startling to me when I first encountered that.

David Remnick: Normal in what sense?

Adam Gopnik: Exactly, normal in what sense? What they mean by it is that it wasn't that the whole of Germany or the great majority of Germans were suddenly lit a flame by a nihilistic appetite for apocalyptic transformation. They were voting along the lines that they normally did, very much as in 2016 and 2020, and I fear in 2024, people voting for Trump are not voting for the end of American democracy for burning it all down, beginning again. They're voting according to longstanding patterns. Republicans vote Republican, no matter who the Republican candidate might be, and they're voting to protect what they perceive as their interest from their enemies.

Now, often those enemies are largely imaginary as the Jews were an imaginary enemy in Germany, a tiny, tiny, I think, 3% of the population, tiny minority. In the same way, it's quite clear that the Marxist socialists who are now tearing our country apart, and when you identify them with people like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg as these Marxist socialists, you're clearly not--

David Remnick: Fascist and socialists.

Adam Gopnik: Yes. They're simultaneously fascist and socialist.

David Remnick: That's right.

Adam Gopnik: It's clear that in that vocabulary, it's completely empty. It's a form of name-calling, but it creates a kind obvious, the kind of hysteria.

David Remnick: Mein Kampf was a collection as you point out of resentments, hatreds autobiography. What are the collections of Trump's own autobiographical resentments and incidents that might have caused him to go from being a shady real estate guy in New York and seemingly a self-knowing New York character? How did he make the leap from that to this entirely other thing?

Adam Gopnik: I can think of a couple of things that play along. One is that his sense of social humiliation on the part of the New York real estate establishment, especially. I once wrote a long piece about the five families of New York real estate, not the five Mafia families, and they had contempt for Trump, and he felt that contempt. He was an outsider. He was never allowed into the the mainstream of New York social life where museums and philanthropies and public libraries and so on, which often favor very conservative figures like David Koch, but nonetheless, he was not part of that world, and I think he felt the exclusion.

I was present and wrote about, it's the only time I've ever been to the White House Correspondents' dinner, the famous one in which Obama mocked Trump at the height of the birth certificate madness. By the way, David, it is typical, I think, of rising authoritarian leaders that the fire hose of crazy is so intense that we forget significant things. Trump came to political attention by telling an insane lie about Obama's Americanness. Obama to his credit, welcomed Trump into the White House the day after his election or that week. There you saw, just by chance, the New Yorker table where I was not far from the Trump table. Normally Americans are trained to be good sports.

David Remnick: That's two seats away from you. I remember.

Adam Gopnik: Exactly. You're good sports when somebody mocks you at a roast, you shake your head.

David Remnick: You know the camera's looking at you, and you laugh a little bit.

Adam Gopnik: And you poke your companion and you say, "Okay."

David Remnick: He didn't do that.

Adam Gopnik: Stood there, stock-still, his neck fixated. Intolerable humiliation to be treated that way.

Barack Obama: Donald Trump is here tonight. No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. That's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter like, did we fake the moon landing? [laughter] What really happened in Roswell? Where are Biggie and Tupac?

Adam Gopnik: There are people who believe that that was one of the things that drove him forward to declare his candidacy. I wouldn't be resolute on that point, but I certainly think that, and this is a genuine analogy, that the accumulated humiliations of a lifetime, the feeling of never having been deferred to respected in the godfather-like sense efficiently, are very, very powerful actors.

David Remnick: I'm talking with Adam Gopnik, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and will continue in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking on the show today with Adam Gopnik. Recently, Adam wrote an essay about the rise of Adolf Hitler. He was reviewing a book by the historian Timothy Ryback. In the course of that essay, he focuses on the dilemmas faced by Germans a century ago. Germans who knew that Hitler was exploiting democracy in order to obliterate it and replace it with the form of fascism known as Nazism. The question is, what relevance is that dark episode to our own politics of 2024?

Donald Trump was elected in 2016, and the difference between the German experience and the American experience, if we're going to make these comparisons, is that, in fact, between 2016 and 2020, yes, Trump said a lot of miserable things and enacted some policies that were equally miserable, but that there were, in fact, people in his administration and in the bureaucracy and in the national security establishment who were, in fact, to use that Washington establishment phrase, guardrails against something far, far, far worse and more unhinged that did not maintain in Germany.

Adam Gopnik: No.

David Remnick: What are the differences there? What are we now looking at as the campaign proceeds?

Adam Gopnik: Nobody can predict the future, but it certainly seems overwhelmingly clear, to me at least, that 2024 Trump is more embittered and enraged than ever, more incoherent and deranged than ever, and possess now of a firm belief that he can uproot the deep state, he shouldn't trust those generals who he trusted in his first term, all of whom were, as we know, utterly appalled by his character and behavior.

David Remnick: Mattis, Milley, those people.

Adam Gopnik: Exactly. Kelly, and we're very reluctant in ways that are predictable. Military men do not like to be in opposition, open opposition, to the hierarchy. It's not how they're trained. Even now, and I think it's this source of some alarm, those people; Mattis, Milley, Kelly, who have been explicit in their contempt for Trump and in their fear of Trump are very reluctant to take a leading role, they see that is not appropriate for them. They refuse to do it. I think it's one of the more frightening aspects of what's going on, but you just have to listen to what Trump is saying and believe what he says.

Howard Kurtz: Why do you use words like 'vermin' and 'poisoning of the blood'? The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, "Well, that's the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used."

Donald Trump: That's what they say. I didn't know that, but that's what they say because our country is being poisoned. Look, we can be nice about it. We can talk about, "Oh, I want to be politically correct, but we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers, people--"

Adam Gopnik: The demagogue always has a huge rhetorical advantage on the moderate and the rational speaker.

David Remnick: How would you compare the demagogic talents of somebody like Hitler and Mussolini to Donald Trump?

Adam Gopnik: Hitler is a fascinating case because of course, one of the things that's most striking about him is that he did not incarnate, in his own person, the imaginary ideal that he was putting forward all the time. His famous story that Charlie Chaplin, the first time Charlie Chaplin saw Hitler in the newsroom, he said, "Oh, he's imitating me," because he had stolen the little pencil mustache, and then Chaplin of course, brilliantly imitated Hitler. He was an old-fashioned orator in the sense that he was grand eloquently rhetorical with hand gestures, and so on. It's newsreel and meeting hall style rather than a television style, and Trump clearly has a television style.

I've always thought that Trump's tone derives from insult comedians from the Sam Kinison type as much as it does from earlier American demagogues. That's part of its quiddity, and it's one of the things that makes it powerful. It feeds on American familiarity, that kind of insult comedian, and the understanding that they both mean it and they don't mean it.

David Remnick: That's really interesting. You're watching him, and depending on who you are, you're either outraged or you're amused. Or if you're outraged, some people will think "Well, he doesn't really mean it." How does he pull that off? Why is it so important to his popularity and sustained stature in our political life?

Adam Gopnik: Because his function is to give license. He gives permission to people to express and articulate hatreds and resentments that in normal social life, they would be reluctant to do, but he also gives them the insurance, the immunity of being able to say, "Oh, he always exaggerates, mean tweets." It's curious. Again, I want to push these analogies to the proper edge and not past it, but Hitler's general tone was always hugely sarcastic. People tend to forget that. Even well into the war, his tone was mocking and warning. I think that that ability to simultaneously give his followers license for the very worst impulses, while also giving them a kind of alibi that enables you to feel, "Oh, well, I'm not really inscribed."

"He goes too far." That's the classic protective thing we say about the demagogue. "He goes too far, but he's right about a lot of things." Right now I'm sure you have heard that, David, as I have, particularly, I'm bound to say, for many very wealthy people, "Oh, he's a clown. He goes too far, but he's not wrong about A, B, and C. He's not wrong about immigration, he's not wrong about the woke."

David Remnick: Cultural politics.

Adam Gopnik: About cultural politics.

David Remnick: You quote in your essay, "No less than authority on fascism than Goebbels." The propaganda minister of the Nazi Party. Goebbels said this, "The big joke on democracy is that it gives his mortal enemies the tool to its own destruction." The tools to its own destruction. As you look at the various attempts to stop Trump by constitutional means, and watching them fail very often, are we falling somehow into the same trap? I don't want to have the analogy stretched so thin, but are we falling into the same trap as the Germans in the Weimar Republic?

Adam Gopnik: To a considerable degree, I think that we are. I think the trap, though, is more complicated than we sometimes recognize. Liz Cheney is quite right to say that we're sleepwalking into dictatorship. That's a risk, but I think just as well, we might say, we are role-playing our way into dictatorship. We see it so clearly with the attempts to use the instruments of law, of the judiciary to come to terms with Trump. At one level, it seems self-evident that you should do this. I've written in the past, if Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated on January 20th, Trump would have been in prison on January 21st, because the one thing Lincoln would not tolerate was sedition. That was the whole point of Lincoln's administration.

David Remnick: Wait, what should have been done?

Adam Gopnik: I think that we should have had the courage, Merrick Garland, whomever is in the position Garland is, to not try to placate or not try to accept the fact that there was going to be a confrontation with Trump and Trumpism after the properly so-called insurrection.

David Remnick: That would set the courage of your convictions in the letter of the law.

Adam Gopnik: Yes, exactly. Instead, I have the strong feeling that Merrick Garland and the people around him, for the most honorable of purposes said, "Let's not do that. Let's follow the procedures of the Department of Justice more than the letter of the law." Liberals are, by training, proceduralists and institutionalists. Let's protect the institution. Let's follow the procedures, and that will be the powerful antidote to the demagogue.

David Remnick: As a liberal, you think liberalism is fatally flawed in this sense?

Adam Gopnik: I think liberalism is perpetually alien in this sense. [chuckles] Let me put it a little more. Yes, there's somebody who is an evangelist for liberalism. One of the perpetual traps where liberalism is you get too invested in your own procedural integrity and you congratulate yourself for your own procedural integrity and you entirely miss the scale of the threat and in the confrontation between institutionalists and fascists. The fascists always win.

David Remnick: What's the skill of the threat here, of the election of 2024?

Adam Gopnik: I think it's enormous. It seems to me that Trump could not be more categorical in his plans. We know from the people around him, this very motley crew of embittered and resentful authoritarians. They have a plan, too. Let's uproot the so-called Deep State, which is simply a synonym for the rule of law. Let's use the Department of Justice clearly, explicitly, and without apology to go after our political opponents. Of course, what's then gets said is, "Oh, but the Biden administration is doing the same thing." Of course, they're not.

It's very difficult to readily construct, in a persuasive way, the profound differences between what's been going on in the past four years in terms of bringing Trump to justice and what Trump is proposing and what Trump actually did. People now forget the Durham Report, which was done entirely at Trump's behest so that somebody would officially go after his political enemies, even though it turned out to be a complete circus, a complete clown show.

David Remnick: Let's be self-examining here. Our institutions like the New Yorker, the New York Times, the so-called liberal mainstream media in all their shades and varieties themselves being too complacent, behaving in a way that is not appropriate to the occasion. There's a lot of internal debate and discussion about that. Let's make it public. What's your view of it?

Adam Gopnik: I think so. Yes. Ryback in the book I'm writing about has deeply painful [unintelligible 00:21:35] fun with the New York Times correspondent in Birchall in Berlin at that time, because he was constantly doing that. You have to understand what's really going on here. Don't pay attention to the demagogue's rhetoric. You have to understand the maneuverings of the conservative political class. They're the ones with the real power.

David Remnick: Is that happening now?

Adam Gopnik: Yes. I think so. I think that it's not our instinct, and we're implicated in this along with The Times and The Post and whomever is that we don't want to simply repeat an ideological message. We can't simply be ringing our bell, or I do, but ringing our bell and saying terror, terror, terror all the time. As you know, David, one of the things that makes journalism, journalism is having something new to say. If you're simply repeating Trump is dangerous and deranged, Trump is dangerous and deranged, it ceases to be interesting to your readers, to your editors and they're enormous internal.

David Remnick: It ceases to be heard.

Adam Gopnik: I suspect it ceases to be heard, too, but our job is, I think, to be right, and to tell the truth. I laid no claims to particular prescient of any kind. In 2016, I was saying, "This guy is not a clown, and he's not a regular issue Republican." Call it what you want, retro fascism, neo-fascism, post-fascism. This is something totally outside the realm of normal American--

David Remnick: We don't disagree then, but what should we be doing if we're going to be a little intramural about it?

Adam Gopnik: Speaking up, saying it over and over again, saying it loudly, going out to--

David Remnick: We're not just speaking to the converted?

Adam Gopnik: The choir are the only people sometimes you have to preach to. What I always say about that, it's one of the things I worship about Albert Camus, who is maybe first among all my heroes, is that Camus was writing brilliantly and passionately about totalitarianism, about the occupation in a newspaper called Combat that no one read because it was in a clandestine newspaper, but his job was to teach the people on his side how to speak, what the right arguments were, what the wrong arguments were, to help find a tone and a manner, a voice, if you like. That's what we're doing, is to find a voice that can speak against the encroaching danger.

David Remnick: Adam, let me read a passage to you. This is you writing about the 1932 German election and the measures that Hitler's opponents contemplated to stop him. "A war in the streets, or more likely, a civil confrontation leading to a military coup seemed horrific. The trouble unknowable to the people of the time is that since what did happen under Hitler is the worst thing that has ever happened. Any alternative would've been less horrific." What's the analogy with 2024 if we imagine that Donald Trump, who is now leading in the polls, comes to office again?

Adam Gopnik: I don't know, David. Like you, we have children who are growing up in this world. The last thing in the world we want for them is to live through an era of civil violence or much less civil war revolution. We want to the degree that we can to maintain those guardrails and those institutions. They seem to me to be coming under a stress that may not be endurable. What we can't do is kid ourselves about the scale of the threat or delude ourselves about the nature of the threat. I am not a prophet, and I don't think it's useful for writers to pretend to be prophets. I don't know what the outcome is. I know that it's already been terrible.

I wrote back in 2016 that countries don't recover from giving way to authoritarian demagogues like Trump. Of course, in one level, everyone said, "Well, we did. We got him elected out and all that." Clearly, we didn't. The virus is still ranging and it's still--

David Remnick: That leads me to this question. Four years ago, before the last election, Politico wrote a piece with the following headline: Trump is an authoritarian, so are millions of Americans. That leads to maybe an even darker conclusion. Are Americans committed to democracy as much as we believe them to be?

Adam Gopnik: I don't think, David, I think the answer is that Americans, not uniquely, but human beings generally are less committed to democracy than we want them to be in entirety. Liberal democracy has always been, despite the accident that you and I might have grown up in a time when it seemed to be a bulwark and successful. Liberal democracy has always been desperately beleaguered and endangered set of beliefs about--

David Remnick: And fragile.

Adam Gopnik: Fragile beyond measure. Perpetually fragile. In my own lifetime, I can remember in the 1950s when I was a very small child, the sense that, oh, world communism is militant and strong and will eradicate liberalism. Ronald Reagan, people now no longer remember, came to power not saying America is inherently strong, but that we're desperately weak in the face of Soviet expansionism and so on. After 9/11, how many times should we hear that we can't resist the decadent, ironic liberal societies of the West, can't resist Islamic fanaticism and certitude?

Liberalism is always being seen as beleaguered and dying. In the sense it always is because it's hugely fragile and it's a set of conjoined attitudes and beliefs and practices that are often hard to define and are rarely, neatly, narrowly inspiring. I feel frightened about all that. On the other hand, the truth is that in each time liberal democracy, liberal practices have been threatened. They have emerged, often at the end of terrible struggles, triumphant and intact because they offer the possibility of living in prosperous and pluralist societies of a kind that no human society has offered to the same degree, something we should be proud of.

We're an amazing number of faith practices and personal practices and sexual practices and political practices can all coexist. That's a unique human phenomenon, and it's one that we should protect with the last breath of our bodies.

David Remnick: Adam Gopnik, thank you very much.

Adam Gopnik: Pleasure being here, David.

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David Remnick: You can read Adam Gopnik's essay on the rise of Adolf Hitler at newyorker.com. We discussed Timothy Ryback's new book called Takeover about the 1932 elections in Germany. Adam Gopnik's newest book, All That Happiness Is, comes out in April.

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