For years now we’ve heard that even moderately conservative Republicans are “far right” and deserving of the “Nazi” label. And Republican presidential candidates routinely are tagged with the “Hitler” label. The only time the label is removed is when the left finds it useful to contrast “good” Republicans with bad. So, for example, the onetime Hitler aspirant George W. Bush became “statesmanlike,” sort of, when it became useful to contrast him with the new boogeyman, Donald Trump.

A more subtle form of this labeling comes in the form of comparing our current situation to that of the Weimar Republic — Germany’s first attempt to create a constitutional democratic republic similar to our own, instituted after World War I in 1919. Despite high hopes, the new republic was troubled throughout its short life, riven by radicalism on both the left and the right, catastrophically failing in the end, and giving way in 1933 to Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship.
When “Weimar America” is brought up, it’s usually by leftist academics or by journalistic “thought leaders.” No, they say, we’re not comparing Mitt Romney or even Donald Trump to Hitler, we’re simply saying that the “far right” is on the march, that the conditions are right for a takeover by “dangerously anti-democratic” forces, already “well-entrenched,” galvanized by “Republican demagogues.” If we don’t marshal a “resistance” — a tendentious term if ever there was one — then we could lose our democracy just as poor Germany long ago lost its own. Get out your “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes, Auschwitz looms.
A lifetime ago I wrote a doctoral dissertation dealing with the political police in Weimar-era Bavaria, an institution that served as one of the direct antecedents (perhaps the most important such antecedent) of the Nazi’s primary tool of oppression, the “Secret State Police,” famously known as the Gestapo. I devoted the better part of a decade to understanding how conditions in the Weimar Republic set the stage for the emergen...