The call to moral resistance

Since election day, I’ve read Volker Ullrich’s new biography of Adolf Hitler—all 758 pages of it (not counting endnotes, bibliography, and index). In our current moment, it’s tempting to make comparisons between Hitler and Donald Trump. Both have narcissistic personalities. Their strongest traits are their effective use of rhetoric and propaganda. Each demonstrates impatience with the details of public policy and prefers to rule by edict. The most predictable thing about each of them is their unpredictability.

Further, people continually underestimated both Hitler and Trump. When Hitler came to power in 1933, party members around him thought they could control and contain him. They soon learned otherwise. Three months after becoming chancellor he had pretty well full reins of the government. In the case of Trump, the Republican party establishment underestimated him throughout his campaign. Who would have thought a year ago that he would now be our president?

But we should be careful about making facile comparisons between Hitler and Trump—and not just because we don't know yet how Trump will conduct himself in office. Such comparisons give Trump too much power and can weaken our own response to him. They suggest a certain inevitability that our government will move in an authoritarian direction, if not a totalitarian one. We have to resist any such suggestion, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy.