The Same Old Script

The people who helped Adolf Hitler into power weren’t, for the most part, idiots. That’s the detail that keeps lodging in my head whenever I look at what was happening across Europe and America in 2016. They were ordinary people—people who felt abandoned by a political establishment they no longer trusted, who wanted someone to look down on, who’d been handed a future that kept not materializing. They were offered a villain and a savior in a single package and they took the deal. The deal ended in the worst catastrophe in recorded human history.

We like to think we’re insulated from that now. Too educated, too interconnected, too equipped with historical memory to fall for something so legible in retrospect. But the refugee crisis, the economic dread humming beneath every political conversation, the conspiracy theories that found exactly the audience they needed online—none of it arrived announcing itself as a repeat performance. It never does, from inside it.

The mechanisms are identical. The scapegoat. The strongman. The promises aimed at the people who feel the system abandoned them deliberately. The script is the same script; only the costumes changed. And that is precisely why it keeps working—because nobody living through it is comparing their experience to a history textbook. They’re comparing it to last Tuesday.

I don’t know what the right response to that recognition is. But I’m fairly certain it’s something other than what most of us were doing.