Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
“…Not Hitler, But Still Kinda Like Hitler”

“…Not Hitler, But Still Kinda Like Hitler”

Last updated on: January 31, 2017 at 1:51 am by Chris Gehrz

“…Not Hitler, But Still Kinda Like Hitler” 2017-01-31T01:51:56-04:00 Chris Gehrz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

You might have noticed a theme here in the days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. First, I mentioned the political prisoners of Dachau in a post opposing Donald Trump’s call for “total allegiance” to America. Then the anti-Nazi resistance of the White Rose in a follow-up last Tuesday. Two days later, guest blogger Jonathan Couser reflected on the lessons of Detlev Peukert’s Inside Nazi Germany to suggest how Christians can engage in vigilance and, if necessary, resistance during what our friend John Fea has called “the age of Trump.”

Not all of our readers have appreciated such attempts to explore the contemporary relevance of this particular chapter in German history. One commenter felt, for example, that my “total allegiance” post was “cogent, but rings with the hyperbole of much else I’ve read… The call is to careful observation not quick accusation; this piece is the latter and only that.” In particular, he or she (no full name was given) wanted me to refrain from likening Trump to Hitler.

It’s a critique I take seriously. In October 2012, I used my own blog to criticize partisans on both sides of that election for making reckless Nazi analogies. “Probably to a fault,” I wrote last May, in one of my first lengthy posts on Trump’s candidacy, “my training as a 20th century European historian who spends a lot of time teaching about the Holocaust leaves me averse to any attempt to interject Hitler into American political debate.”

Even when they don’t concern Nazism, I tend to share Alex Williamson’s general reservations about the allure of historical analogies:

Appeals to history are wickedly hard to resist. For one thing, they’re almost always good politics. The most effective historical analogies condemn and canonize all at once, turning policy debates into morality plays and draping candidates with ersatz seriousness…. Historical comparisons also serve a more essential function by allowing human beings to safely encounter and organize a world in flux. Experience and previous categories help us evaluate new threats and opportunities while protecting us from information overload. History appears to tame epistemological chaos.

Like him, I fear that “historical parallels are crude and imperfect tools for making sense of the present,” tempting us to “make false comparisons on the basis of distorted information or neglected facts, warping the past (and present) to our particular ends.” Leaning too heavily on analogies, concludes Williamson, tends to “[peddle] certainty and solace… beguiling but dangerous promises about what will happen next.”

I still think that’s usually true. And yet, I’ve come to believe that it would be irresponsible of those historians who study National Socialism and other types of fascism not to warn of the potential for history rhyming, if not repeating, in this Age of Trump.

Embed from Getty Images

Trump = not Hitler
but still kinda like Hitler

So wrote a commenter at my own blog last week. Knowing his politics, I suspect he was striving for sarcasm. But I don’t think it’s far off. Trump is both unlike Adolf Hitler and like him, and it’s worth thinking about the similarities and differences.

“Not Hitler…”

Like Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich, “I think the differences are still greater than the similarities.” Even beyond obvious personal differences in age, background, and personality, there are all sorts of pertinent non-parallels, and we should be grateful for them. Donald Trump does not take office while the head of an organized ideological movement possessing its own paramilitary force. Those of us private citizens who dissent do not risk loss of life, liberty, or employment. And I still think (as I wrote last week) that the structures of this democratic republic will prove to be more durable than those constructed at Weimar.

Most importantly: for all the harm he can potentially do to people here and abroad, Donald Trump does not come to office bent on pursuing a world war that killed 3% of the world population. For all of the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia that attended his candidacy and are already evident in his presidency, he is not remotely likely to become the mastermind of the mass murder of eleven million people whom he views as subhuman.

So let me be clear: I’m reluctantly willing to pursue the explanatory value of limited analogies to Nazi Germany — but not to the Holocaust. As another Trump critic tweeted recently:

https://twitter.com/TobinGrant/status/824046449256185856

But if it’s inappropriate to push the Hitler/Trump analogy too far, it’s would be unwise not to consider it at all.

“…But Still Kinda Like Hitler”

First, to insist that “it can’t happen here” — with “it” standing in for a dismaying array of troubling scenarios that don’t begin to approach the evil of the Shoah — is to indulge in the hubris of American exceptionalism. Such thinking implicitly denies the reality of sin and elevates a human system from the level of an inevitably flawed “experiment in liberty” to that of a divine order. In the hands of this president or some other leader, it’s entirely possible that our political system could devolve into something closer to fascism than democracy.

(“We have a tremendous danger because we can go the authoritarian route . . . or we can move toward a free and open society.” So said conservative fundraiser Charles Koch on Sunday afternoon, after officials of his political network condemned the Trump administration’s controversial travel ban.)

Second, we should acknowledge that there is some value to drawing historical parallels. Historical thinking may be contingent, but not so contingent that it’s impossible to see patterns repeating across time. Historical thinking may be complex, but not so complex that we should ignore simple explanations staring us in the face.

If I can be so bold as to tweak scripture, there is nothing entirely new under the sun. Unless you believe that all humans and their societies are fundamentally unlike and disconnected from each other, what has been is to some extent what will be, and at least some of what has been done will be done again.

Andrew Jackson biographer Jon Meacham rejected Trump’s self-comparison with Jackson in an interview last Friday

But third, within the experience of this particular nation, the Trump phenomenon is so novel that we should look to other histories for help in understanding. While our 45th president might liken himself to #7 on that list, and others might suggest #37, much of what we’ve seen in his campaign, his transition, and the early days of his administration is not normal.

To the joy of supporters fed up with the status quo and the horror of opponents across the political spectrum, Donald Trump is breaking with American political traditions large and small. While some historians would interpret his presidency as part of an older pattern of crises, we should also consider the possibility that *other countries’ histories can help us understand this moment in our own national story.

I can’t help feeling foolish whenever my mind turns to the German experience under Hitler, or even to the Italian one under Mussolini (which some have found to be the more apt analogy). But it would be even more foolish for those of us who study National Socialism and other forms of European fascism to turn a blind eye to “unpleasant parallels” when they present themselves. An American president who calls for “total allegiance” to a nation and acts to exclude newcomers from that community, who promotes unilateralism and autarky in order to restore a supposed loss of national greatness, who evinces a casual disdain for truth and a petty intolerance of criticism, who curries the favor of white nationalists and trusts their counsel, who seeks to place his nation’s hopes not in the deliberate functioning of a constitutional system but in the rash actions of a single powerful egomaniac… such a leader is inviting these historical analogies.

And he’s also prompting us to compare the response of the peoples being governed. A good example here is Richard Kauffman’s recent “Call to Moral Resistance” in The Christian Century. While he agreed that “we should be careful about making facile comparisons between Hitler and Trump,” Kauffman did think that Americans “can learn… from the German people’s responses to Hitler—particularly during the early years when they might have been able to do something about his rise to power.” That’s one of the lessons of Jonathan Couser’s guest post: that while there was dissent when Hitler took power, it remained too passive and easily coopted to “[amount] to an effective resistance.”

At this point, we should still temper these comparisons with conditional language. “[I]f we find ourselves be governed by ‘an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct,'” I wrote last Tuesday, then my White Rose analogy of last week would be especially relevant. Couser wrote that “in the worst-case scenario that” Trump et al. prove to be fascists, then “the most important thing a free society will need to oppose them is organization.”

But historical analogies that once sounded like hyperbole and “quick accusation” to the ears of this typically cautious historian are increasingly sounding like a necessary variety of “careful observation.”

*I very much hope I’m off base with this whole post. But if I’m wrong, I suspect that my error is not to warn of a potential slide into authoritarianism under Trump, but to seek analogies from the 20th century history I know best, rather than looking to more recent parallels. With an eye to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum warns readers of The Atlantic that “What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites….The lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.”

Previous Post

January 30, 2017

Birth and Eating as Resistance Movements

Next Post

February 1, 2017 A Report from the Women's March on Washington

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which major biblical covenant is first introduced in Genesis?

Select your answer to see how you score.

New Covenant Mosaic Covenant Abrahamic Covenant Davidic Covenant