It\u2019s the year 2026, and sometimes it feels as if we\u2019re taking a nice leisurely walk through a Museum of Wretched Ideas.<\/p>\n
Consider what\u2019s happening at home. Tariffs raise prices<\/a> and restrain economic growth, while the federal government embraces both Gilded Age corruption and a version of the spoils system<\/a>.<\/p>\n A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism<\/a>. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view<\/a> of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is \u201csometimes OK<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n And hovering over American culture like a dark cloud is the rise of antisemitism<\/a> on both the left and the right. Once again, ancient slanders are circulating through the culture.<\/p>\n Or consider what is happening abroad. Germany rearms<\/a> to confront the Russian threat. Japan rearms<\/a> to deter China. War rages in Europe and in the Middle East. Threats of territorial expansion haunt the world. Russia is trying to grab Ukraine. China continues to covet Taiwan. And the Trump administration, incredibly enough, has cast its expansionist eyes on Greenland.<\/p>\n When you step back and actually think about it, these trends are confounding. I mean, I can understand the temptation to return to some of the discredited ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas ravaged the world?<\/p>\n What is going on?<\/p>\n The answer lies in part in the interplay between two political sayings that are so oft-repeated that they have become clich\u00e9s. When they should be top of mind, though, they seem to have lost their impact.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the first (and you can probably say it along with me), from George Santayana<\/a> in 1905: \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\u201d We can argue about the precise historical parallels, but the echoes of the past are everywhere.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the second, from Winston Churchill<\/a> in 1947: \u201cIt has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.\u201d<\/p>\n It is no coincidence that authoritarianism is once again appealing to people at a time when two things are happening at once. Liberal democracies are struggling to meet the needs of a substantial portion of their citizens, and entire generations have come of age with no living memory of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th Century.<\/p>\n In other words, millions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as \u201cthe worst form of government\u201d without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of \u201cexcept all those other forms that have been tried.\u201d<\/p>\n So even fascism and communism \u2014 for some people, at least \u2014 are no longer avatars of atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don\u2019t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects.<\/p>\n They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.<\/p>\n In this ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified \u2014 perhaps even a bit daring and romantic \u2014 unless you\u2019ve lived through, say, the riots that swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent, deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.<\/p>\n The compromises and restraints of diplomacy, which can often mean granting painful concessions to terrible regimes, can seem like a fool\u2019s errand, unless you\u2019ve witnessed the indescribable horrors of world wars.<\/p>\n I\u2019m reluctant to draw exact matches between current and past events. Should we compare Vladimir Putin\u2019s ambitions in Ukraine with Hitler\u2019s partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938? Or with Stalin\u2019s Winter War against Finland at the outset of World War II? Or maybe it\u2019s more reminiscent of the instability of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.<\/p>\n As for the rise of antisemitism, are we approaching a dangerous spectrum that ranges from the Dreyfus Affair to Kristallnacht?<\/p>\n But debating the precise analogues can obscure the underlying truth \u2014 we are heading backward, toward the great crimes and mistakes of the past. We know what happens when militarily aggressive great powers seek more territory. We know what happens when a culture indulges \u2014 and promotes \u2014 conspiracy theories about Jews. We know that even the most utopian forms of authoritarianism devolve into regimes of grinding oppression and profound corruption. Some are always more equal than others.<\/p>\n In 2024, I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, \u201cWhy American Politics Went Insane.\u201d At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to radicalization.<\/p>\n When the Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity and power. We were, in the words of the former French foreign minister Hubert V\u00e9drine, the \u201chyperpower.\u201d<\/p>\n I began with \u201cThe End of History,\u201d to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama\u2019s misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning<\/a> near the end:<\/p>\n If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier gen\u00aderation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and pros\u00adperity, and against democracy.<\/p>\n That is exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25 comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow citizens are morally bad<\/a>. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship<\/a> (when you support your party primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in American politics.<\/p>\n This drives us apart. Ever increasing numbers of American citizens live in one-party states or so-called blowout counties<\/a>, where one side or the other wins presidential elections by 50 points or more.<\/p>\n And what happens when people of like mind gather together? The law of group polarization<\/a>, first applied to political decision making by the law professor and author Cass Sunstein in 1999, teaches us that when like-minded people deliberate, they become more extreme.<\/p>\n Create a monoculture, and red becomes deep red. Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even the capacity to understand each other\u2019s lives and thoughts.<\/p>\n If I taught the class over again, though, I\u2019d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The problem isn\u2019t just that we\u2019re at each other\u2019s throats; it\u2019s that we\u2019re turning to the worst of recent history\u2019s alternative ideas in response.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no experience with real fascism and actual communism.<\/p>\n When experience ends, education has to begin. You can\u2019t just know what the Holocaust was; you also have to understand the Holodomor. The phrase \u201cthe guns of August\u201d should mean something to you, and when you see every great power press on the military gas \u2014 with no one pumping the brakes \u2014 that should trigger the most urgent concern.<\/p>\n Few things are demonstrating that what\u2019s old is new again more than the rising tide of antisemitism. How many times must ancient lies be debunked? Must it happen every generation, for thousands of years?<\/p>\n So now we face a test. Can we educate ourselves away from disaster? Is there enough knowledge left to penetrate not just the minds, but also the hearts, of people who are deeply discontented?<\/p>\n