A good rule of thumb is that once you start making a point to Hitler-comparing some brutal politician to Hitler or some evil movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but not ending) war to be genocide compared to the Holocaust – you’ve lost the plot. A simple but extreme comparison is the first resort of the unthinking alarmist.
To this we have to add an argument to Orbánthat is, the view that Trump’s administration is like that of the creeping, almost unstoppable, and irreversible dictator Viktor Orbán. In this view, the Hungarian prime minister’s version of illegal democracy was coming to America, and it would probably win—in fact, it might already have won. Following Orbán’s defeat in the April 12 election, in a country whose experience of electoral democracy is recent and whose authoritarian past is indeed dark, the argument to Orbán looks very weak.
Working dictators usually don’t lose elections, and when they do, they deny it and hold on to power anyway. Real fascists—not just pretenders—send out squads of hooded thugs to beat unionists, expel loudmouthed professors, make uncooperative journalists drink castor oil, and if necessary arrange fatal accidents for their opponents, when they don’t just order them to be shot in the street. Orbán, fearsome and uncontroversial though he was, failed all those attempts. He was just a rude, greedy, corrupt and unprincipled Russian shilling. Good riddance to bad garbage, one might say.
But there is a great thing worth pondering, especially for those who saw in the future of America Orbán’s Hungary or even now the United States. My sample is not strictly scientific, but I have long observed that my American friends, steeped in our history and institutions, have been more optimistic (or at least, pessimistic) about America’s future than those who are primarily European.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s call the last group Comparativists. They pray for storm troopers, Mussolini, and the erosion and collapse of democratic government; their situation is that of Cicero at the end of the Roman Republic. Americans are more likely to say, as a good friend — a noted soldier, historian, and white southerner — recently told me, It’s bad, really, but look, until the Civil Rights Act took hold, we weren’t a full democracy – and that was 80 years ago..
Or more bluntly, as a Black co-worker reported her father saying, “Honey, I’ve seen worse. I lived through Jim Crow.” Americans love their country less for being fully aware of the dark side of American history, including slavery (of course), the Trail of Tears, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the mass murders of the 20th century, the bloodshed at Homestead and the Pullman strike, the violence in the coal fields, the anti-China laws, for the Japanese invasion of the Japanese camp in Palmer’s illegal beginnings. The Second War, and many Red Scares.
Americans are also well aware of the lawless and dangerous characters of American history: traitors like Aaron Burr and John B. Floyd, not to mention every American Army officer—West Pointers, most of them—who enlisted to fight rebellion and slavery. And let’s not forget the “destroyers of mass wealth,” as Theodore Roosevelt called them, including Henry Ford, the violent anti-Semitic criminal who overshadows Elon Musk, or innocent people like Huey Long, whom Franklin D. Roosevelt thought was the most dangerous man in America.
The point is not that Americans think this is a bad country and it always has been. Instead, they know the dark side of his politics more intuitively and more deeply than those who give up completely. But the Americans also, I believe, understand the potential of this country better.
They are not surprised by how a constitutional system crafted by reform—whose 18th-century origins they do not sniff at, and whose authors do not despise, even slaveholders among them—has restrained the worst impulses of the Trump administration. They are disgusted by the brutality of the immigration police who are rampaging but are not surprised by the way its compliance has been blocked, by the courts, or by state legislatures that restrict laws against immigrants under pressure from business and church groups, or by the people of Minneapolis to rise up and force the administration to back down.
Knowing little about J. Edgar Hoover’s dirty work for Democratic presidents, Americans are, if anything, relieved that Kash Patel very low efficiency than the founder of the FBI—too insecure, too drunk, and out of touch with the organization he’s supposed to lead. (Patel has denied all this, and has filed a case against him Atlantic for his reporting on his leadership.) Americans hate the retaliatory prosecution of President Trump’s political opponents, but note with satisfaction that these cases are routinely thrown out of court by tyrannical judges, many of whom were appointed by Republicans, including Trump himself. They are not surprised that the Supreme Court, some of whose members play judicial philosophies they reject, has overturned Trump on taxes, and will probably do so on birthright citizenship.
They recognize, too, the charm of federalism and the continuing freedom of the press. State police, even in red states, don’t shut down newspapers or radio stations. Jeff Bezos has not turned around Washington Post within the governing body. New York TimesJournalists, including cutting-edge ones, are not followed by scarred men in leather jackets with stilts. Editors of AtlanticI’m told, don’t be afraid to knock at 2 am on the front door.
No Trump Youth movement with uniforms, “Horst Wessel Song,” and midnight torchlight parades. Trump doesn’t have Leni Riefenstahl, it’s stupid fake intelligence memes that make him look funny. And unlike Ernst Röhm, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other disgruntled Trumpers were not gunned down during the Night of the Long Knives. In fact, some of the more hawkish members of the Trump movement, such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, have been more vocal in their condemnation of the corrupt president than many of his progressive critics.
Trump has a narrow but deep political mind, including an instinct to detect and hunt down weaknesses and vulnerabilities. But it’s not enough to be smart enough to choose capable allies, or to avoid stupid fights he can’t win, like declaring the pope soft on crime (or, in Vice President Vance’s version, theologically inappropriate). Nor does the president have the organization and skill to run a midterm election, despite his own wishes and the worst of many pessimists.
The increased fear, in some cases, the fear of many of Trump’s opponents has rendered them ineffective. Fraudulent Trump as America’s Mussolini relieves his opponents of the responsibility of figuring out who opened the door to the emergence of this evil and dangerous man—how the Democratic Party lost the appetite and trust of traditional states; why academic institutions, especially universities, became objects of ridicule and contempt; and why false claims that the system is “rigged” against large swathes of the working and middle class seemed plausible to tens of millions of Americans.
Trump has caused, and will cause, damage to the political establishment, to our code of public conduct, and to the integrity of officials and institutions, as well as misery and financial loss to many who do not deserve it. There will be a heavy load of repair work to be done. But he will not overthrow the Great Republic.
Americans have something else going for them that pessimistic Comparators don’t: faith in America’s resilience and, unpopular though that word may be, exceptionalism. They know what it means to have a nation built by immigrants from all sides, conceived in freedom, as Abraham Lincoln put it, and committed to the proposition that we are all created equal. They know that America has never fully lived up to its aspirations—indeed, it has often fallen far short of them—but that aspirations remain, and they rest on encouraging truths. They know that despite the mistakes and crimes that blotted out the country’s history, there is plenty to celebrate as the 250th anniversary of our independence continues. And they know, deep in their bones, that the good parts of the American story aren’t over — not by a long shot.
