When Fascism Comes to America
I just finished watching the film Nuremberg, a 2025 film co-produced and directed by James Vanderbilt. The movie is based on the 2013 book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, and follows U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) who is seeking to carry out an assignment to investigate the personalities and monitor the mental status of Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and other high-ranking Nazis in preparation for and during the Nuremberg trials. It is a good movie, though not great movie, but I do suggest watching it.
What interested me most while watching this film were two things. The first was the visceral reaction I had to the real footage of the Holocaust survivors. As the movie moves into a scene where the Nuremberg trial judges will see the films taken from the various captured camps, I knew what these judges would witness. Most of us have seen many times these photos and films made by the military at these camps. But I forget each time I see them, how badly I will be affected. The brain is a marvelous thing. It can take truly horrible incidents and scenes and make them a bit less vibrant and terrifying. It’s a way for the brain to cope with living in an often violent world. But when you see these scenes and images of the camp survivors and the dead, you cannot help but be torn in two once again. By the end of this scene in the movie, I had tears in my eyes. My brain may blunt the sharp edges of trauma over time, but all it takes is to see the horror again to turn those blunt edges back into razor blades.
As I continued to watch the movie, I remarked that all these Nazis, these evil men, were just men. Most had families with wives they loved and children to whom they were devoted. They thought that what they were doing was the best for Germany and, of course, for themselves. Somehow, they convinced themselves that killing 6 million Jews, and untold numbers of LGBTQ+ individuals, Romani, disabled people, and political dissidents was their path forward to greatness. They knew, Hitler knew and said, that what Germany needed was a common enemy to hold his country together, to give them a mission to bring back German excellence. Hitler chose the Jewish people as this enemy, people who made up only 1% of German population at the time. The Nazis used people to achieve a political goal, not just used them but destroyed them throughout Europe. And in a sickening way, it worked. Germany nearly won World War 2.
These men, these family men, did not look evil. They had no horns, no evil grins like in comic books. They were just average men. But when the chance came for power and prestige, they did the unthinkable to try and achieve it. They did things that we thought could never happen here in the United States.
I admit that I do not understand the Nazis. And naively, I thought I would never have to, since what happened then could never happen here. I believed that the Nazis and their Holocaust occurred in the past, and people would have learned where authoritarian/fascism takes a society.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published the book entitled It Can’t Happen Here. The book, written during the rise of fascism in Europe, followed a demagogue, who was elected President of the United States after fomenting fear and promoting a return to patriotism and “traditional” values. He took unilateral control of the government and imposed totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force. Thus he begins his reign of his new, great society. But in this new, great American society, Congress loses its power, dissidents are incarcerated in concentration camps, and women and people of color lose many of their rights.
Sounds familiar? I hope so. Just look at today’s news to see Sinclair Lewis’ prediction in action. Lewis once said that not only could fascism come to the United States, it was inevitable.
So here we are right now in the United States at the intersection of the movie, Nuremberg, and the book, It Can’t Happen Here. And daily we see normal people: family members, co-workers, and neighbors, who think that the average-looking men and women that now sit atop our government are not evil because, just as in Nazi Germany, these people look just like they do and want to bring the country back to some imagined glory.
To achieve their glory and prestige, today’s administration took pages out of Hitler’s and Lewis’ play-books. They need an ‘other’, an outcast society within our society to keep the citizens riled up and motivated. Trump has had many ‘others’ to choose from: immigrants, DEI, women, and transgender people, all whom have recently lost rights in our society. There are concentration camps in many states that representatives from Congress cannot visit, and where an untold number of people have died. We have ICE, the paramilitary wing of Trump’s forces, whose job is to scare the population of this country into compliance.
It is early days yet, in Trump’s reign. It can happen here. It will happen here if we let it. We know Trump’s tactics can work because we have seen them work in numerous countries throughout the world. But, and most importantly, I remember that there is also hope. We did see and learn from history. Many of us know where this path will lead, and we do not want to go there. So we protest and write our legislators. We sue. Lawyers and judges still continue to fight to maintain the Rule of Law.
In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Nuremburg, Howie, the psychiatrist’s translator said this in regards to the Nazi regime: “Do you wanna know why it happened here? Because people let it happen. Cause they didn’t stand up until it was too late.”
I shall do my best to not let it happen here, to stand up before it’s too late, and so many others are doing their part far better than I. People by the thousands stood up in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, and all over the United States.
“It Will Not Happen Here!” I remind myself as the movie ended. I do not wish to live in a world devised by Hitler and the Nazis, nor in the pages of Sinclair Lewis’ book. Yes, there are evil people in this country, people who look just like everyone else, and say they want the very best for the citizens. They wave the flag while denigrating the people that make up this country. They say, “Make America Great Again”, and then do the very opposite. They say that they support the people, but then terrorize them with paramilitary troops and lock them into concentration camps. They pass bills that restrict the rights of women, people of color, disabled people, and LGBTQ+ people. And now they start wars in foreign countries so that we do not notice how bad our country really is and in hopes that a war will reignite the will of the American people.
But a vast majority of Americans see those in charge at the White House for who and what they are. They want power and prestige, and they are willing to get their power and prestige by standing on the backs of their own people. We are at a time of a possible inflection point. Soon elections will take place. And if the American people succeed, we, too, might have our own version of the Nuremberg trials.
“But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional…American Liberty.“
- Sinclair Lewis – It Can’t Happen Here
“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism”“…
- Professor Halford E. Luccock of the Divinity School of Yale University – 1938
“Fascism would come to this country, but it would appear in another guise. It would come wrapped in the flag claiming to be a savior of democracy.“
- Rev. Huey Long, 1970
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