In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors: One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate; two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe; three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities; four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery; five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy; six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes; seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance; eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town. All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.
In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.
These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright fellowship program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy. All of these measures were in the name of eliminating historical content deemed by the White House to be “woke,” or in the service of “DEI,” both vacuous labels that have come to mean almost anything about race, gender, LGBTQ life, and history. The White House/Heritage Foundation axis has seized the word “patriotic,” as its cloak of legitimacy, and all who care about a pluralistic, meaningful American history must seize it right back. Their initial threats to the Smithsonian, indeed, according to Mike Gonzalez, one of their attack artists, is only the beginning of a long war some within the Heritage Foundation intend to wage until they can depose Lonnie Bunch as the institution’s secretary.