Warnings and Lessons from the Struggle Against Trumpism

Germany is facing the prospect of rightwing extremism in power. Time to push back hard against the narratives that have undermined the democratic response in the U.S.

By Thomas Zimmer, September 5, 2026

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Germany is staring into the abyss. In Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, one of the country’s 16 states, the far-right AfD, the parliamentary arm of German rightwing extremism, is polling at over 40 percent. For the first time since the Nazi dictatorship was defeated in 1945, a rightwing extremist party might control a state government. This is a real caesura in German post-war history.  

Founded in 2013, the AfD quickly evolved from what was initially mainstream-rightwing-to-reactionary territory into a far-right party that fully rejects liberal democracy and is undoubtedly the political home of Germany’s rightwing extremists. In the American public discourse, the AfD is often referred to as Germany’s Neo-Nazi party. The best “defense” one could plausibly come up with on behalf of the AfD is that, technically, many of the AfD politicians aren’t Neo-Nazis themselves, although some leading party figures certainly have strong ties into the Neo-Nazi scene and the AfD is all too happy to tolerate those connections as well as the fact that the country’s Neo-Nazis certainly see the AfD as their party. So, technically, the AfD is best described as a coalition between national-conservative reactionaries and seething extremists (very much including Neo-Nazis) that is defined by anti-Muslim sentiment, an escalating anti-immigration stance, and an aggressive ethno-nationalism; it is also increasingly focused on raging against any social and cultural progress of recent decades. The feminists, the environmentalists, the lefty students, queer people – they are all on the AfD’s enemy list.

(With those “qualifications” in mind, go ahead and call it Germany’s Neo-Nazi party.)

What is about to happen in Saxony-Anhalt – and to a slightly lesser degree in another election in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern two weeks later – does not come as a surprise to anybody. Across east Germany, the AfD has long had the support of one third or more of the voting public. Exactly two years ago, it emerged as the strongest party in a state election for the first time when it received almost 33 percent of the vote in Thuringia. While the party is still significantly stronger in the east, the problem is not at all confined to the territory of the former GDR. In the general election in late February 2025, it received 20.8 percent of the vote, coming in second behind the conservatives. In state elections in two states in the southwest of the country earlier this year, the AfD got close to 20 percent in both Baden-Wuerttemberg as well as Rhineland-Palatinate. It is currently polling at around 27 to 30 percent nationwide – as clearly the strongest party, trailed by the conservative CDU/CSU at around 20 percent and everyone else at or below 15 percent.

And yet, the situation in Saxony-Anhalt is still qualitatively different. If the polls are to be believed, the AfD has about twice the support of the next strongest party, the conservative CDU – there are about 20 percentage points between them. Most importantly, there is even a chance the AfD might win an outright majority of seats in the state parliament, which would allow it to run the state alone, without a coalition partner. Germany is facing the prospect of rightwing extremism in power. It is watershed moment in the country’s postwar history.

For the past decade, I have observed, studied, and commented on rightwing extremism in the United States. Everything I do professionally revolves around the question of how to situate Trumpism in the broader context of U.S. history and how to explain its rise within the Republican Party; since January 2025, I have focused on covering the Trumpist assault on the political system, the civil rights order, and the very idea of democratic self-government – on what happens when rightwing extremists get to wield power.

Since my family and I returned to Germany a little over a year ago, I have constantly been asked what Germany might learn from the situation that has been unfolding in the United States? I generally hesitate to offer “lessons.” I try hard to stick to my areas of expertise, and German politics is not really among them. I also don’t believe there are any clearcut recipes to be had, certainly no magic bullet to “solve” the problem.

But unless something wholly unforeseen happens on Sunday, the question of how to handle the AfD, how to act and react, will acquire an entirely different level of urgency. Everyone – politicians, the media, civil society institutions, clubs, churches, business leaders, and individual citizens alike – will feel the weight of having to come up with an answer to that question much more immediately and forcefully.

When extremists take power, what is needed is an immediate, collective response from democratic forces on all levels – political leaders, civic society institutions, and the people on the ground. This kind of comprehensive mobilization – or broad democratic immune response, if you will – is exactly what didn’t happen, certainly not initially, in the United States after Trump won the 2024 election. Instead, a climate of accommodation and complicity took hold of the country’s political and media elite as well as its leading civic institutions: A pervasive tendency to acquiesce and preemptively obey rather than oppose and resist characterized the elite response to MAGA’s victory.

Societal resistance has certainly hardened since the summer of 2025, especially – the Trumpists are now confronted with a broad mobilization from below (even if the response from America’s institutions continues to be highly uneven, at best). But the lack of a quick, comprehensive, collective response early on allowed the MAGA regime to cause tremendous damage and lasting harm.

MAGA’s rise, and especially the period from the 2024 presidential election into the first few months of Trumpism in power, offers a cautionary tale. It should serve as a key reference point for anyone in Germany and elsewhere who grapples with the question of how to handle a far-right party or movement that has taken or is about to take power.

There are many reasons why the immediate response to the threat of a radicalized MAGA movement returning to power was so inadequate. Crucial among them was the fact that the question of how to react was being discussed amidst an engineered intellectual and political climate that actively privileged a position of acquiescence. The major narratives coming out of the 2024 election all strongly suggested that the only reasonable thing to do was to accommodate the incoming MAGA regime: The 2024 election was a referendum that revealed the “will of the people”! America has undergone a major “realignment” and a “rightward shift”! If so many people vote for Trump and his movement, how could they possibly be so bad? Doesn’t MAGA actually have some good ideas? Shouldn’t we seek common ground? Besides, liberal democracy is weak, defeated – you gotta face reality!

Such assertions, or variations thereof, dominated the discussion about the state of American politics and society after the 2024 election. They had been circulating for years, of course, shaping the discourse in the United States since at least the moment it became clear that a significant portion of the Republican base was lusting for Trump as their leader. But amidst the shock and outrage over the result of the 2024 election, such arguments and ideas developed a different kind of force. They felt almost self-evidently true – and pushing back required a significant act of defiance.

These pervasive narratives of MAGA strength and legitimacy as opposed to democratic decline significantly undermined the response to Trumpism. They helped justify cynicism and paralysis, create the impression that resistance was “cringe,” illegitimate, and futile, and presented accommodation and acquiescence as the only reasonable course of action.

As Germany is facing the prospect of rightwing extremism in power, let us make sure to notice and recognize these narratives, understand how they have hampered the resistance and why they are so insidiously misleading. Consider this a warning and a plea for action. To everyone in the United States, where these anti-democratic narratives are still pervasive. And to everyone in Germany, where they are about to go into overdrive.

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Don’t perpetuate the rightwing “will of the people” propaganda

Far-right movements and parties everywhere build their claim to power on the assertion that they represent the “will of the people.” They may not have the support of a numerical majority, but they profess to be speaking for those who “really” count, those who are part of what is best described by the German term “Volk”: Those who embody the supposed “essence” of the nation.

Unfortunately, mainstream voices in politics and the media across the “West” have often covered the rise of rightwing “populism” by perpetuating such nationalistic essentialism. In the United States, they have amplified this ideology of “real Americanism.” Because Trump channels the Volk, he is to be given wide latitude; as he supposedly embodies a populist uprising of “regular folks,” his message is to be amplified; the will of the true people must not be impeded. Who wants to bring the hammer down on the tribune of “real America”?

After the 2024 election, the mainstream commentariat collectively decided that “the people” had spoken: They were with Trump! If you’ll recall, the result was actually very close. Trump won with a narrow 1.5-point margin in the popular vote. And yet, the idea that America had experienced a political “earthquake” (Opens in a new window) that demanded far-reaching interpretations became gospel almost immediately. Within days, the country’s leading newspapers and most influential commentators attempted to outdo each other with ever more sweeping narratives, mostly built on vastly inadequate, unreliable data – and a whole lot of personal preference. Trump’s victory, we were confidently told, was the result of lasting societal shifts (Opens in a new window) and signaled a profound reordering of American politics, an “American realignment” (Opens in a new window) – perhaps even the end of political liberalism (Opens in a new window) and the beginning of a permanent Trumpist era in U.S. history.

Such grandiose notions relied on an interpretation of the 2024 presidential contest as not just an election, but an “ideological referendum,” (Opens in a new window) as Ross Douthat, then still occupying his perch as America’s number one “respectable” conservative pundit in the New York Times proudly (and without offering even a shred of empirical evidence) proclaimed. That is precisely the idea that animates the MAGA regime: Trump was installed by a referendum revealing the one true “will of the people.” 

We must fight such assertions tooth and nail.

How do we do that? First, by insisting on the actual numbers in the face of whatever grand narrative the commentariat will offer. That may sound banal. But remember how quickly the actual election results were ignored, how rapidly the discourse settled on the idea that Trump had achieved an overwhelming victory. Such ideas are lingering. Last September, for instance, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein suggested (Opens in a new window) it was time for mainstream America to redraw the line that demarcates the respectable and acceptable from that which is not, to stop drawing a line that designated Donald Trump as beyond the pale. He built his case on a rather curious interpretation of the past two presidential elections: According to Klein, Trump “lost sort of narrowly in ‘20” – that was a 4.5-point win for Joe Biden; but Democrats “got our asses handed to us” in 2024 – which was just a 1.5-point loss. That’s a rather tendentious way of characterizing the data, isn’t it? The insinuation is clear: Forget the numbers, “the people” are with Trump and liberals had no right to declare the people’s choice unacceptable, to oppose the people’s tribune.

Secondly, we must fight back against “will of the people” propaganda by insisting that elections are not ideological referenda. This is simply not how people make their choices in the voting booth.

I want to be very clear: I despise the idea of the noble Trump/AfD voter who cannot – must not! – be blamed for their political choices. I resent the expectation that we all reach for exculpatory explanations, no matter how implausible, to preserve their innocence, to sanitize them as “regular folks” who can do no wrong. Perhaps they didn’t really mean it! They were deceived by cunning demagogues! They are forced to vote for the extremists because of economic desperation and because arrogant liberals were being so mean! Stop it. Have a little respect for these voters. I mean this sincerely: We ought to take them seriously, grant them agency. And that means we can hold them accountable for their political choices.

However, acknowledging this is still not the same as arguing that everyone who voted for Trump is an extremist who is fully on board with what the hardcore MAGA ideologues want to do to America. We must accept that there is a significant percentage of the population that supports ethno-nationalist ideas and is staunchly opposed to the vision of a pluralistic, gender-egalitarian democratic society. There are those who believe a dose of Trumpian extremism is exactly what this country needs right now.

There are also a lot of people who, at the very least, did not consider Trump’s open promise of instituting a white nationalist purge and erecting a vindictive autocracy a deal-breaker. While not considering themselves rightwing extremists, they are giving themselves permission to make common cause with the extreme Right by either prioritizing a very narrowly defined self-interest (tax breaks!) – or by telling themselves radical measures are needed against what is supposedly the real, more acute threat: “the Left.”

But there is also a third group that voted for Trump based on a vague combination of “vibes,” a generalized frustration with the system (and Democrats as the party in charge as well as the “system party”), and a hefty dose of ignorance and disbelief, either unaware of what the Trumpists were really planning or convinced that they wouldn’t be able to implement it anyway. In fact, the election outcome was determined by relatively small shifts among a rather small group of people whose vote choices are overwhelmingly shaped by a general sense of frustration with “the system.” The Right’s project appeals to a widespread sense of discontent and disaffection – to those who may feel that any revolution is better than maintaining the status quo.

Let me repeat that my point is certainly not to sanitize the political choices of rightwing voters. But when election results are presented as “ideological referenda” in service of the assertion that Trump / the AfD embody the “will of the people” and are therefore owed deference and respect, we need to push back.

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Push back against the normalization of extremism

A tendency to obscure the radicalization of the Right, to normalize and legitimize rightwing extremism is a pervasive feature of the Trump era – it is one of its core pathologies.

After the 2024 election, America experienced a wave of almost panicked, frantic attempts to justify accommodation and acquiescence with the incoming MAGA regime. The notion that any sort of confrontational approach had failed and indeed contributed directly to Trump’s victory was widely presented as self-evidently true. From there, commentators jumped to the conclusion that the only “reasonable” response was to stop resisting entirely and switch to friendly coexistence instead. A similar tendency is currently characterizing the German discussions around the so-called “firewall” against the AfD, a term that has come to signify the refusal of all other parties to cooperate with the AfD and, in a broader sense, to treat the AfD as a “normal” political opponent.

There is a defeatist streak underlying these discussions, and it will only get more influential every time the AfD achieves a good election result. They are everywhere! They are so strong! The only thing left to do is to try and become friends with them! “We are going to have to live here with one another,” (Opens in a new window) New York Times columnist Ezra Klein declared about a year ago. I bring him up as an example again because he has one of the most influential liberal platforms in the world – and because he can serve as something of a barometer for where elite liberal sentiment stands. On the surface, Klein’s plea is awfully banal: Yes, we obviously all understand that the millions of people who support rightwing extremism are quite unlikely to suddenly disappear. But as a statement of political intent, Klein’s argument was a disaster: A form of defeatist accommodationism, presented as the voice of reason and unity. In practice, it has led Klein to use his significant platform to stage friendly conversations with rightwingers who he presents as amiable and reasonable. “Look here,” Klein seems to be saying, “let me show you how we can all have a friendly competition and agree to disagree.” Earlier this summer, he invited none other than Christopher Rufo (Opens in a new window) for one of these non-confrontational chats, one of the stars of the new-right intellectual scene. Rufo’s rise was fueled by conspiracy theories about leftist radicals supposedly dominating all the institutions of American life. No one has been more successful (Opens in a new window) at laundering rightwing extremism and making it palatable for polite society. And Ezra Klein is now helping him.

Normalizing discourses, Part I: “If they have mass support, they can’t be that bad”

No one likes to think of what they are doing as accommodating extremism. The pervasive calls to acquiesce are therefore inevitably accompanied by normalizing discourses that present the rightwing extremists as something other than what they obviously are. One such narrative relies on the notion that the fact that these movements and parties receive mass support somehow proves that they cannot be so bad / dangerous / evil to begin with.

Arguments of that kind have always surrounded the rise of rightwing “populism.” But such voices are about to get a whole lot louder in Germany. Already in May, for instance, Torsten Albig, the former Minister-President of the state of Schleswig-Holstein and, until he retired from politics to earn loads of money as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, a high-ranking social democrat, offered his “argument” (Opens in a new window) for why the Social Democratic Party should actually move past the refusal to cooperate with the AfD: “If 30 percent of the people vote for this party, we can’t continue to pretend they are the spawn of the devil.” 

Mass appeal not only as a justification to normalize rightwing extremism but presented as “proof” that the rightwing extremists couldn’t possibly be all that bad in the first place. It is an insidious, dangerous argument – and one that has often been offered in defense of Donald Trump and his voters. Remember when many a member of the polite society commentariat (Opens in a new window) reacted with indignation to Joe Biden calling MAGA “semi-fascism” (Opens in a new window) before the 2022 midterm elections? The mere suggestion that something extreme, something sort-of-fascist-ish, could have mass appeal in the United States was treated as a scandal (Opens in a new window), an outrageous gaffe, peak liberal arrogance. 

If we take a step back for a second, the notion that if a political movement garners mass support, it can’t possibly be extremism, incompatible with democratic self-government, or beyond the pale in a broader cultural and societal sense is utterly implausible and historically illiterate. History is full of authoritarian movements that had mass appeal (it feels quite discouraging that German politicians apparently need a reminder that the Nazis, to mention the obvious example, were supported by anywhere from 30 to 40 per cent of the German population when they rose to power in the early 1930s).

Because Donald Trump has the support of millions of Americans, he can’t possibly be a dangerous extremist (Opens in a new window), his ascent was never a real threat (Opens in a new window) to the survival of the Republic… It’s an argument so facile, so implausible, so ahistoric that the only question worth asking is why it has any credibility at all among people who are otherwise smart and well-informed. 

In any case, beware of this apologist sleight of hand: Since the mainstream discourse stipulates that extremism must be “fringe,” anything that has broad support is reflexively sanitized as not extremism. If extremism is not defined by its ideological and political substance, but as “something on the margins,” then the minute it becomes mainstream within the Republican Party or garners the support of a significant portion of the population, it ceases to be regarded as extremism. And just like that, not only do extremist ideas and policies get automatically legitimized - by definition, the Republican Party, regardless of how substantively extreme, also gets treated as “normal” simply because it ain’t fringe, because it’s supported by almost half the country. The same dynamic applies to the AfD. Let’s not fall for it.

Normalizing discourses, Part II: “Democratic minimalism”

There are many such normalizing assertions, and I’d like to highlight one more because it may not be quite as easily recognizable as some others – and that is an idea that is sometimes presented as “democratic minimalism.” When the AfD emerges victorious from elections, the voices of those who identify the threat to German democracy not with the rightwing extremists, but with those protesting them, mobilizing against them, will get louder, they will get amplified by mainstream outlets, in TV talk shows, newspapers, and political podcasts. Don’t you see, these voices will tell us, that it is the protesters who don’t respect democracy, since they (supposedly) refuse to accept the results of a democratic election?

Such notions have accompanied MAGA’s rise for a long time. One prominent voice in the camp of those who opposed what they diagnosed as liberal or leftwing “alarmism” has been Shadi Hamid: After the 2022 midterm elections, he successfully leveraged his reflexive anti-“alarmism” into a position as a columnist and a member of the Editorial Board at the Washington Post. Hamid declared that liberals should finally stop indulging the “great moral panic” (Opens in a new window) of pretending that democracy was under assault from the MAGA Right. He offered what he called “democratic minimalism” as an alternative framework. “Democracy,” Hamid argued (Opens in a new window), “is a mechanism for regulating conflict through elections. It requires no commitment to specific substantive ends.” It should therefore be “de-coupled from the liberal and progressive outcomes that liberals and progressives think it should produce,” and instead conceptualized as “a system and means of governing and rotating power with no prejudice to substantive ideological outcomes.”

In essence, Hamid demanded we regard democracy as just a set of procedures, not as something that entails any substantive commitments. In practical terms, this would reduce democracy to, first and foremost, elections – and since there are, in this understanding, by definition no bad outcomes resulting from democratic procedures, any election result would therefore also have to be considered good from a democratic point of view. Put differently, if Americans make Trump president via an election or Germans put the AfD in charge of a state government, then that is not only something all (small-d) democrats need to accept, but they ought to consider it a normatively positive democratic outcome.

The problem with such an approach of stripping substantive commitments away and leaving only procedures in place is that it reduces “democracy” to something that has not been accepted as democratic – and certainly not as a “liberal democracy” – in decades. Democracy does not just mean elections. In today’s widely accepted parlance, this means a system of equality before the law, in which all citizens have a right to participate in the political process as equals; a system playing by majoritarian principles, in which all sides clearly renounce violence and agree to respecting the rules as laid out in the constitution; a pluralistic system seeking negotiation and compromise between differing interests in which the status of the individual is not determined by what they look like, what they identify as, who they pray to, who their parents were, or how much wealth they have accumulated. An election outcome that threatens that system – because it empowers forces that are explicitly vowing to undermine it, that are at war with the very idea of a pluralistic society of equals and instead committed to a vision of a hierarchical ethnostate – is therefore very much not good for democracy. Can we please refuse to play willfully naïve?

Resist the temptation to “find common ground”

One of the more infuriating developments after Trump’s victory in November 2024 was prominent Democratic politicians professing publicly that they were totally willing – perhaps even excited! – to find common ground and work with the incoming MAGA regime.

A few days after the election, Colorado governor Jared Polis, for instance, took to ex-Twitter (Opens in a new window) to declare he was “excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint Robert Kennedy Jr.” to be the next head of the Department of Health and Human Services. That may surprise you, considering that RFK is a conspiratorial extremist who has since done enormous harm in that position. Ah, but let Jared Polis – a Democratic governor, it bears repeating – explain to you that he was really looking forward “to partnering with him (RFK) to truly make America healthy again” by “shaking up HHS and FDA” and “taking on big pharma.”

Around the same time, Delaware Senator Chris Coons went on Fox News (Opens in a new window) to praise Elon Musk’s plans for a not-actually-a-department “Department of Government Efficiency.” It should have been obvious from the start that Musk would completely devastate state capacity and dramatically harm Americans as well as people around the globe (primarily by dismantling USAID) in a multitude of ways. But Chris Coons knew better: “They could save tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars depending on how it’s structured and what they do. This could be a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.”

The simplest lesson here is to never, under any circumstance, help legitimize and enable paranoid conspiracy-addicted extremists like Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Unfortunately, however, whenever extremists win elections, mainstream politicians and civic society institutions almost instinctively gravitate towards this sort of “common ground” accommodationism. They are incentivized to signal their willingness to “move past political differences,” to focus on solutions rather than petty partisan squabbles. The two cases I have outlined are so instructive because they demonstrate how “finding common ground” with extremists relies on indulging an utterly misleading idea of what it actually is they want to do, it rests on a form of denialism regarding the actual political project they are pursuing. The basic move is always the same: Go through the myriad of grievances and isolate a claim or a target that, in a vacuum, is worthy of critique; then present that decontextualized critique as something anyone should be able to get behind: Don’t we all agree that the pharmaceutical industry needs to be reined in? Or that there is need to reform the administrative state? And just like that: Extremism is portrayed as defined by good questions and legitimate concerns – while the actual political project that is being advanced is reduced to a mere footnote, as if it was an unfortunate side plot.

An example from Germany might be the AfD’s attack on public service broadcasting (Opens in a new window). Is that system perfect and everything it produces great? Absolutely not. But the AfD is obviously not searching for ways to improve the quality of public broadcasting. They view it as an instrument of “indoctrination and propaganda,” (Opens in a new window) all part of the grand leftist, anti-German conspiracy across all spheres of life they seek to vanquish. There is no common ground to be had with conspiratorial extremists, even if they happen to hate certain things you also dislike. These are not good faith actors. Focus on their actual political project – not on some isolated snippets that make them sound sincere and reasonable.

Don’t give in to shock and defeatism

“Rightwing populism on the rise.” “Liberal democracy in crisis.”

These narratives have dominated the political discussion – and the subjective perception! – on either side of the Atlantic for well over a decade now. Unfortunately, it is empirically correct that far-right parties and movements in the “West” are stronger today than at any previous point since the end of the Second World War. But as near-ubiquitous master narratives of our time, these crisis discourses are still problematic. There is a risk they might turn into self-fulfilling prophecies that only help the extremists. Because those on the Far Right want us to believe that their triumph is inevitable, that resistance is ultimately futile. And whenever they come out of an election with a strong result, too many people who shape the mainstream discourse are all too willing to indulge such notions.

But we must not give in to either cynicism or defeatism. Let us instead resist the temptation to perpetuate rightwing assertions of liberal democracy’s supposedly inevitable fall. Let’s not buy into the idea that democracy is destined to surrender to the Far Right. I admit it is a difficult challenge to strike the right balance between articulating clearly that liberal democracy is under acute threat – and needlessly perpetuating the Far Right’s assertions of strength and dominance.

But remember: Societal resistance against Trump has hardened, and the MAGAfied Republican Party is likely going to lose Congress in November. In April, Hungarians managed to vote Viktor Orbán out even though he’d had over a decade to warp the system and fortify his authoritarian power. Nothing about these people is inevitable.

It is indeed happening here

How bad could it possibly get?

It is difficult to imagine that things really could get significantly worse. In conversations with people over here in Germany I often get the sense that even those who are appalled at the prospect of the AfD holding power struggle to imagine that the democratic republic might actually be at risk.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, MAGA’s rise was consistently greeted by a pervasive sense that “It cannot happen here!” Or not anymore, anyway. This perception was the result of a rather disastrous mix of a deep-seated mythology of American exceptionalism, progress gospel, lack of political understanding, and (willful) historical ignorance.

The exceptionalism myth holds that Americans are essentially immune to authoritarianism of any kind – the “soul of the nation” won’t allow it, or the country’s DNA, or the freedom-loving national character… The political mainstream has generally – or at least rhetorically – moved to a slightly more nuanced understanding of the American story. But exceptionalism lingers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been approached by American media with a request to talk about the threat of authoritarianism because “You, as a German” understand what “We,” because of America’s supposedly stable democratic tradition, can only struggle to grasp.

Many Americans, I have found, are convinced that Germans suffer no such “It cannot happen here” delusions – that they understand it can happen anywhere, because it did, after all, happen in Germany. If only it were so. During the first Trump administration, the notion that there is something to be “learned from the Germans” rose to prominence in the American mainstream discourse: Germans, political philosopher Susan Neiman declared in a 2019 book (Opens in a new window) that became a massive bestseller, had figured out how to draw the right lessons from the Nazi past, how to “work through” their experience in a way that basically immunized the country against rightwing extremism. That is indeed what (Wes-) Germany built its post-war identity on: The idea that “we” are so great at handling the Nazi past that whatever happened before 1945 may never happen again. It became its own form of an exceptionalist founding myth. And much like the American version, it has undermined the democratic struggle. Hard to prepare for rightwing extremism in power while you are clinging to the idea that this can’t really be happening in your country… 

On either side of the Atlantic, a self-satisfied, willfully naïve, and dangerously unimaginative complacency has for too long hampered the democratic response to the radicalizing threat of rightwing authoritarianism. We must recalibrate what we expect going forward. “They are not going to go that far” has been proven wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. As we are trying to navigate what is happening around us, we must force ourselves to widen our horizon of expectations far beyond what is comfortable. The political conflict isn’t over, nor is the outcome determined, or democracy destined to be extinguished for good. But we should have discarded whatever notion of “It cannot happen here” was still floating around a long time ago.

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