Never Again?

America is not Nazi Germany, not yet.

Germany did not wake up one day going, “Sieg Heil.”

That’s not how it happened.

People ask me—as if I’m the Oracle of Totalitarianism, perhaps I am—whether America is about to go fascist. Dr. Richardson gets the same question. The implication is always the same: Is it time to leave?

I heckle the Regime in public, tossing around Nazi comparisons and mocking its would-be führers. “Trumpler has only got one ball” (Homan has two, but they’re small. Miller is very simil’r. And that bitch Bondi, has no balls, at all).

(Plus tiny baby hands and a small dick, to hear South Park tell it.)

But the United States is not Nazi Germany.

Nor is our “end state” likely to look like some Obergruppenführer Smith running the “American Reich” à la Philip K. Dick.

Most of humanity lacks the imagination for how fascism works.

I don’t.

And I can tell you: America is headed in the wrong direction—if you care about the founding of the Republic, the postwar order, America’s role in that order, and the trajectory we’ve been on since 1945.

Still: it is not Nazi Germany. Not yet.

There are no torchlit parades. No secret police dragging people from their homes at midnight. No leader’s portrait staring down from every schoolhouse wall. We still have elections worth stealing, courts that occasionally tell a president to shove it, and a press that—though often craven—remains uncaged.

And yet—

The guardrails are melting away. The driver keeps swerving toward the cliff.

At the realization of the horror of the holocaust, the survivors of that brutality encapsulated their exhaustion, rage, horror, grief, loss, and all the emotions that they felt, in a simple expression.

“Never again.”

But “Never again” was not meant to be uttered over the ashes of another atrocity; it was meant as a navigational command: never again should we stare down that road.

And here we are. What was the world’s most successful experiment in democratic self governance, going down the tubes daily.

Every person detained, claiming their right to be here unlawful.

Every person spied upon, claiming the rights of the state take precedent.

Every person’s liberty denied by the pyschophants that occupy the halls of Congress.

We aren’t just staring down that road—we’re walking it.

The Scale

People like tidy binaries.

Is it fascism or not? Yes or no. They want the political equivalent of a pregnancy test: one line, you’re fine; two lines, pack the kids and passports.

Why? Because the vast majority of people in this country aren’t interested in fascism, so they want an indication to tell themself a lie that everything is fine in the United States until the last possible moment.

Until Hitler, I guess, is standing in their fucking living room yelling at them and demanding “Zeig Heil!”

But authoritarianism doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t arrive in a single news cycle, waving a flag and goose-stepping across the lawn, buttstroking your neighbors and hauling off the “undesireables” (although we’re close to that moment, I grant you). It seeps. It accretes. It eats away at the political body until you wake up and realize it’s not the same organism anymore.

If you want to measure where we are — and, more importantly, how fast we’re moving — you need something better than the clickbait panic or the smug dismissal.

This isn’t BREAKING NEWS! And it’s not some phony nonsense from Rachael Maddow blathering about the end of the American democracy, and so by default, clearly it’s Nazism (or fascism).

You need a scale.

Mallen Baker postulated a twelve-point taxonomy of fascist and totalitarian regimes. I think it’s one of the better tools I’ve seen. It’s not “country-centric,” it’s not historically locked to one case, and it sidesteps the usual path-dependency trap. It’s also a lot more useful than the lazy “Trump is Hitler” bumper sticker.

What are his the twelve indicators:

1. Authoritarian leadership — Power concentrated in one leader.

2. Extreme nationalism — The country and its people seen as superior to all others.

3. Xenophobia and racism — Fear and hatred of outsiders or “the other.”

4. Militarism — Glorification of the armed forces and expansionist aims.

5. Crushing political opposition — Using state power to eliminate dissent.

6. Cult of personality — The leader as infallible embodiment of the nation.

7. State control of the economy — Direct political control over economic life.

8. Propaganda and censorship — Media as a tool of the regime.

9. Obsession with national security — Inflated or fabricated threats to justify power.

10. Rejection of democracy — Weakening or dismantling democratic institutions.

11. Emphasis on tradition — Romanticized “golden age” as national goal.

12. Use of paramilitary forces — Violence as a routine tool of political control.

These aren’t on/off switches — they’re dials, from 1 (absent) to 5 (fully maxed). A country that’s all fives is a hardened authoritarian state. A country with a mix of 1’s, 2’s, and a few 3’s might be a democracy under stress.

Even Nazi Germany didn’t start at all fives. In the early 1930s, it was ramping up. By its wartime peak, it was a 55–57 out of 60. Stalin’s USSR was in the low 50s. Modern Russia and China live in the high 40s or low 50s — not quite Hitler’s Reich, but well past the point where any internal opposition can function.

The U.S. today:

• Authoritarian leadership: 3

• Extreme nationalism: 3

• Xenophobia/racism: 3

• Militarism: 2–3

• Crushing opposition: 1–2

• Cult of personality: 2–3

• State control of economy: 2

• Propaganda/censorship: 1–2

• Obsession with security: 1–2

• Rejection of democracy: 3

• Tradition fetish: 4

• Paramilitary use: 1

Call it 25–31 points out of 60. That’s not great.

But it’s not Hitler either.

The danger isn’t that every dial jumps to five overnight. It’s that they keep inching upward while the public argues over whether they should even be looking at the damn panel.

Why the Dials Move

One of the great political delusions is that authoritarianism arrives fully formed — a sudden coup, a midnight declaration, a switch from democracy to dictatorship in the time it takes to refresh your news feed.

That’s just not how it happens. Government is, by its nature, iterative.

Authoritarian movements operate like burglars testing a house. First, they jiggle the windows. Then they try the door. If nobody yells, they come back with better tools. They don’t have to get in the first time. They have to find the weak points and remember them for later.

The Nazis are a case study. They didn’t seize the German state in one clean lunge. They failed thrice before 1933 — once in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, once in the 1926 elections, and again in 1928 when electoral gains evaporated. As a result of the May 1928 elections, Social Democratic politician Hermann Müller became chancellor of Germany, not Hitler.

Those “failures” didn’t destroy the movement. They trained it. The Nazi party learned how to work the courts, how to adapt the propaganda, and Hitler himself learned (and deliberately positioned) to make himself look less like a street thug and more like a statesman. In the wake of economic upheaval caused by the Great Depression, by the end of 1932, the Nazis would be a dominant party. By 1933, Hitler would displace Hindenburg; the last multi-party election in Germany, until its surrender by the Nazis in 1945, would be March 5, 1933. In July 1933, the Nazi Party became the only legal political party in Germany. By April of 1934, Hitler became the Führer.

Each run moved the dials. The rhetoric hardened. The propaganda sharpened. Street violence became more organized. By the time they did take power, the groundwork was so well-prepared that dismantling the Weimar Republic was a matter of months, not years.

The American dials are moving the same way. A failed power grab doesn’t reset them to zero — it shows where the guardrails flex, which ones break, and how to apply more force next time. January 6 wasn’t the Reichstag fire (which is what many of us wondered in that moment). It was a stress test. The lesson authoritarian actors will take from it isn’t “don’t try again,” it’s “next time, do it better.”

And here we are. This is what “better” looks like.

That’s why a score in the mid-20s on the fascism scale shouldn’t comfort you. It’s not a fixed number; it’s a trajectory. And if the last decade has shown us anything, it’s that once the dials start moving, they never drift back down on their own.

Trump and the Third Act Problem

Trump isn’t a genius of authoritarianism.

He’s not a genius of anything. He’s a huckster, rapist, and fraudster who, according to people who have been in his presence, smells like a garbage dumpster behind a McDonald’s next to a pork rendering factory.

He’s not methodical. He’s not disciplined. He’s not building a Ministry of Fear in the basement of Mar-a-Lago. What he is, is a man with vile instincts, incredibly self-centered and piggish, and no patience — a showman who treats politics like a casino floor: loud, distracting, and designed to keep the suckers inside.

But here’s the problem: you don’t have to be a genius to be useful to history. Sometimes all you have to do is prove the rules aren’t as rigid as everyone thought.

Trump has done that in spades. If not an authoritarian himself, he’s pointed the way for someone who is truly willing to walk that path.

He’s shown that you can attack the legitimacy of elections, erode the independence of the judiciary, create a personality cult inside a political party, and float openly expansionist fantasies — and survive.

Not just that. He’s attacked what was “dogma” in Congress for nearly 70 years: attacking social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements. If Johnson had the “war against poverty,” Trump is engaging in the “war on the poor.” Millions are going to lose benefits, and Trump will undoubtedly just say, “did I do that,” as some kind of Ochre colored version of Eurkle.

All of this points the way for the vile bureaucratic scum of MAGA, now empowered by the federal government’s mantle of power, to indulge in their whims and fantasies of retributive and fascistic governance.

And they don’t have to get everything they want this round.

Authoritarianism doesn’t usually succeed on the first try. As I previously wrote, the Nazis failed twice before they ascended to being the controlling power structure. Each failure was a rehearsal: the rhetoric hardened, the propaganda sharpened, the organization tightened. By the third run, they weren’t just angry street brawlers — they were a machine.

Trump may be America’s second run. The first was the post-9/11 security state: the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, a culture willing to trade liberty for the illusion of safety. Trump refined the formula — he turned distrust of institutions into a rallying cry, and made contempt for the system a mark of loyalty.

The danger is in the third act.

That’s when someone comes along who understands the machinery Trump banged together — and runs it with competence. A leader who can turn “own the libs” into an actual governing program, who knows how to work the courts instead of just shouting at them, who can build a state apparatus that doesn’t collapse under its own corruption.

Imagine a “smart Trump” who is ruthless. Who doesn’t smell like armpit, french fries, and dogshit. Who isn’t a fraudster who’s bankrupted every business he’s tried to run legitimately, and thus, is now relegated to fraud and hucksterism to stay afloat? Imagine a “Trump” who’s cunning, understands the government well, understands how to manipulate people’s fears well, and builds an apparatus of wealthy and influential people to back him.

He’s out there. Spoiler alert: he’s not JD Vance, or the vile Trump spawn (at least I don’t think so.)¹

History Matters

Fascism is not simply the product of one man’s ambition or the charisma of a demagogue.

It feeds on crisis — real, tangible, gut-punch crisis.

Weimar Germany didn’t slide into the Third Reich because the beer halls were especially rowdy. It happened after the Great Depression kneecapped the global economy. The Dawes Plan loans that had been propping up Germany were called in, unemployment exploded, and the middle class — the one thing standing between the street mobs and state power — collapsed. Hungry, frightened people stopped caring about liberal democracy’s ideals and started caring about survival.

The Nazis didn’t create that desperation; they exploited it.

The United States isn’t in that place now. But the appeal of Trumpism doesn’t spring fully formed from cultural grievances alone. Economic precarity is the compost heap where authoritarian politics grows best. Stagnant wages, shredded safety nets, and entire towns left for dead by deindustrialization are not just statistics — they’re lived realities. And when a political movement offers a simple villain and a simple promise, people will grab it with both hands, even if the villain is imaginary and the promise is poison.

If you want to prevent a “Trump III” — or worse, a competent heir to his movement — you don’t just beat the candidate. You solve the conditions that make his pitch attractive in the first place. You fix the rot that convinces a man in a fading factory town that his best shot is to vote for the guy who brags about assault and hires cronies like it’s a blood sport.

The Democratic Party loves to cast itself as the last bulwark against authoritarianism. “We’re defending democracy,” they tell you, usually while fund-raising off the latest outrage from the right. And yet, when it comes to doing the actual hard work of removing the conditions that breed authoritarian politics in the first place, they’ve been asleep at the wheel for decades.

They treat Trumpism like a branding problem, not a structural one. As if the answer to an entire rust belt town that’s been hollowed out for 30 years is a slicker ad buy or a cringe celebrity TikTok.

They’ll give soaring speeches about “our values” while ignoring the lived economic collapse under their feet. Rural hospitals closing? Supply chains pulling good jobs offshore? Rent doubling in six years? Student debt still chaining a generation to poverty? They’ll commission a task force and a logo.

Meanwhile, the right just has to point to someone — immigrants, “coastal elites,” trans kids, whatever the outrage du jour is — and promise the same broken man in the same broken town that they’ll “take his country back.” And because that’s at least a promise, however poisonous, it feels more real than another Beltway symposium on “innovation hubs.”

This is what the Democrats don’t get: You cannot shame people out of voting for authoritarians if their daily reality feels like a slow bleed. You have to give them something tangible — not in 2050, not after another two years of “stakeholder engagement,” but now.

That means:

• Stop fetishizing bipartisanship when the other side is openly authoritarian.

• Stop doing Wall Street donor maintenance while pretending you’re the party of the working class.

• Stop outsourcing “economic policy” to think tanks who’ve never stepped foot in a town with one grocery store and no bus service.

• Start fixing the structural rot: wages, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, industrial policy — all the unsexy work that keeps democracies from rotting out.

Because here’s the ugly truth: the next Trump won’t need to have Trump’s baggage. They’ll be younger, more disciplined, more strategic — and if Democrats keep treating “defending democracy” as a marketing campaign instead of a material project, that successor is going to waltz into office.

And when that happens, all the well-lit speeches about the “soul of America” won’t mean a damn thing.

History’s lesson is ugly but clear: when the economic floor gives way, political gravity takes over. And it doesn’t pull toward the center.

The Direction of Travel

Trump isn’t competent enough to be a fascist. He lacks the discipline, the ideological consistency, and the organizational ruthlessness that history’s great dictators possessed in spades. He governs by impulse, not by plan — and his White House often looked less like the Reich Chancellery than a reality TV green room.

That’s not just luck.

America’s guardrails make consolidation of power difficult even for someone who isn’t a moron. The courts still attempt to block executive overreach. Congress — when it can be bothered — could check a president’s ambitions. The press, however battered and polarized, still publishes without state approval.

These aren’t trivial obstacles. They won’t “save us,” but the dam hasn’t completely burst just yet.

In a truly authoritarian state, they’d already be gone.

Again, in saying these things, I’m not saying, “All is well!”

It is not. But it is worth pointing out these things when others are running around yelling fascism and Hitler.

Trumpler may only got one ball (and tiny hands), but we’re not jackbooting down the street just yet.

The lesson of the last decade is that these guardrails aren’t immovable; they’re permeable. Trump showed that you can pound on the judiciary, delegitimize elections, turn a major political party into a personal vehicle, and flirt with open authoritarianism — and pay no real price within your own coalition. That’s the normalization that matters.

The “playbook” — contempt for institutional limits, loyalty over competence, governance by grievance, the constant testing of boundaries — will outlast Trump. In eight to twelve years, in the hands of someone shrewder, more disciplined, and more strategically cruel, it could become something far more dangerous.

If you want to know when the line has been crossed, there are markers worth memorizing now:

• Abolishing the two-term limit or inventing a pretext to ignore it.

• Purging the civil service and judiciary until only personal loyalists remain.

• Media capture where dissenting outlets are effectively silenced or absorbed.

• Systematic political violence carried out and protected by the state.

Cross those, and it won’t matter who’s driving — the guardrails will be gone, and the road will only lead one way.

What You Can Do While the Guardrails Still Exist

America is not Nazi Germany. Not yet. But if you don’t want to live in the sequel, you don’t wait until the guardrails are gone — you reinforce them now.

Watch the Dials

• Keep the 12-point scale in mind. Don’t just look at the score — watch the trend.

• Memorize the tripwires: scrapping term limits, purging the judiciary, state-captured media, and organized political violence.

• Ignore the circus. The real danger often comes in dull, bureaucratic changes no one tweets about.

Reinforce the Guardrails

• Vote — every election, every level. Authoritarians love low turnout.

• Demand Congress use its spine. “If they choose to” shouldn’t be our only hope.

• Support independent media. If you want a free press, you have to help pay for it. (Subscribing on Substack helps!)

• Back rule-of-law groups that drag power grabs into court.

Attack the Root Causes

• Push for real fixes to economic precarity and civic decay — the soil where grievance politics grows.

• Don’t let scapegoating slide, especially in your own circles. Strongmen feed on “us vs. them.”

• Build local resilience. People with strong communities are harder to frighten into submission.

You’re not just a spectator here. Democracies don’t die on their own — they get murdered, and the weapon is usually public apathy. The good news is that, right now, you can still lock the door.

This is the part where you don’t get to say, ten years from now, ‘Nobody warned me.’

Consider yourself warned.

1. My money is on someone like Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia. That man, in his inaugaral address, gave a speech that was so familar to me as I listed to it I went, “where the fuck have I heard that rhetorical before?”

I found it, eventually… Adolf Hitler.

Youngkin’s first address had a few key characteristics that, as a speechwriter, I picked up on.

• Unity Through Shared Struggle

  • Youngkin invokes Virginia as a “same boat” community, inclusive in tone.

  • Hitler invoked the German nation as a blood-bound destiny, exclusive in definition — unity through ethnic purity, not civic pluralism.

• Moralized Leadership

  • Both position their agenda as moral restoration: Youngkin through faith, parental authority, and constitutional rights; Hitler through “moral rejuvenation” tied to nationalist and racial ideology.

• Mythic Lineage

  • Youngkin connects to Virginia’s founding fathers and civil rights leaders, highly selective in invoking history to establish the legitimacy of his “mandate”.

  • Hitler mythologized German history (Teutonic Knights, Frederick the Great, WWI soldiers) to legitimize Nazi goals.

While Youngkin’s address is within the bounds of standard U.S. political oratory, a few rhetorical tropes overlap with authoritarian populism:

• Framing himself as the embodiment of “the movement” → potential cult-of-personality seed.

• Identifying systemic problems but positioning only his administration as the legitimate fix.

• Emotional appeals to heritage and destiny that could be reinterpreted in exclusionary terms if the definition of “the people” narrows.

The key difference is that Hitler paired these tropes with explicit calls to dismantle democratic institutions and persecute defined groups. Youngkin did not. However, in a post-Trump world? Who’s to say how it will go? My money is not on democratic institutions holding. If you read Youngkin’s speech purely for its architecture — populist movement framing, crisis-to-redemption arc, invocation of history, and moral mission — it shares the form of Hitler’s early speeches.

As a former speechwriter, when I was listening to it, that’s what I picked up on.

There’s a guy who is smart, ambitious, and defeated an entrenched Democrat incumbent, without the “MAGA” stink, but still getting their support.

That guy? He doesn’t smell like ass and French fries. He’s not out quoting Mein Kampf. He’s not out there saying they’re eating ducks and dogs and cats. He doesn’t ramble like a mental patient. He’s not putting up gold leaf on everything, and being excited by nudes on velvet, and raping 12-year-olds, or hanging out with the people who do.

He’s smart. He’s cunning. He’s ambitious.

And he’ll operate in an environment in the next round where all bets are off regarding democratic norms.