Yesterday I watched a clip from the film Nuremberg, where US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek) asks Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe) why he supported Adolf Hitler. Göring responds with, “He made us feel German again.” The clip is being used on social media to draw a false equivalency between Hitler’s regime and Donald Trump’s presidency, suggesting that the slogan “Make America great again” expresses an authoritarian sentiment, thus drawing a parallel between National Socialism and America First.
In this essay, I argue that the parallel is not only mistaken but also, and more importantly, obscures the reality that the Trump presidency represents the opposite of what National Socialism stood for. “America First” does not signal the rise of authoritarianism in the United States; rather, the slogan “Make America Great Again” is a rallying cry to fully restore the constitutional framework the Founders designed following the American Revolution—and Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party defended in the Civil War—to guard against the emergence of totalitarianism in the New World.
By all accounts, Nuremberg is emotionally compelling, but such historical dramatizations blend history with dramatic interpretation in ways that warrant careful scrutiny. The conversations it draws on are most often associated with Gilbert, who interviewed leading Nazi defendants, including Göring, during the Trials. Gilbert later published these interactions in the Nuremberg Diary.
Often referred to as “transcripts,” these writings are not verbatim records in the modern sense, but are, instead, based on notes and, mostly, reconstructed memory. Thus, the accounts are shaped by Gilbert’s recollections, guided by motivated reasoning. As such, while they may be regarded as having some value, they must also be understood as imperfect sources. The Nuremberg Diary is a memoir, not documentary evidence.
But it’s worse than that in the case of Nuremberg. The phrasing—“He made us feel German again”—is not reliably attested in Gilbert’s material. To be sure, Göring did speak about themes such as national pride and the appeal of Hitler, but his actual remarks were typically ambiguous and self-serving. The line in the film is charitably understood as a screenwriter’s condensation of a broader idea: that Hitler’s movement resonated with a sense of wounded German identity. It is dramatically effective, but historically simplified and hardly literal.
But should we even regard the line charitably? The modern resonance of that line explains why it has circulated widely, and perhaps why it was not a moment of artistic license but was written to hand audiences a moment that felt real to use against the America First movement. We’re talking about Hollywood, after all.
It was inevitable that some viewers would interpret the line as an implicit commentary on Trump and his campaign slogan. Whether or not the filmmakers intended such a parallel is, of course, difficult to establish without explicit statements from them. Historical films often aim to feel relevant, and themes like identity, national revival, and political persuasion are not unique to any era; a line that captures those themes succinctly echoes across contexts without being tied to a specific modern figure. However, in this case, suspicion about the timing of the film’s release is reasonable.
The way the line is used in public discourse illustrates how history can be repurposed as propaganda. On social media in particular, complex historical situations are often reduced to quick analogies that reinforce present-day viewpoints. Comparisons between Nazi Germany and modern ostensible democratic societies highlight certain recurring political dynamics, such as populist rhetoric or appeals to national identity. At the same time, they also obscure critical differences, including the aftermath of World War I, the instability of the Weimar Republic, the specific ideological framework of Nazism, and the deep time of German civilization. Nuremberg feels engineered for the quick analogy.
I discuss all that in this essay. But I do more than this. Readers need to understand that what allusions to Hitler either intend or function to do is obscure the totalitarian ambition and restructuring of the West to which America First stands opposed and seeks to halt and reverse. The progressive charge to “Save Democracy!” is not about upholding democratic institutions but rather is a propaganda slogan to advance the project of transnational corporate power, which has largely negated the democratic republic established by the Founding Fathers, replacing it with an unelected administrative state that elites and their functionaries govern via a comprehensive technocratic control apparatus.
The notion that the sentiment “Trump makes us feel American again” is inherently authoritarian—and that Americans should feel shame for such a response—reflects an effort to disrupt the natural inclination of a people to take pride in their country and to preserve their national community. In advancing a transnational corporate project, elites seek to disarm Americans of what they regard as their most essential sources of collective will: nationalism and patriotism.
This tactic can succeed only if a deeper ideological foundation makes the comparison seem plausible—a foundation shaped by the restructuring of the American polity and the broader Western context. That many Americans view such a clip and draw the parallel, whether intended or not, indicates that this foundation is already in place. It is this administered form of life that I analyze in this essay.
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Socialization under technocratic control and government dependency is the deep ideological foundation for Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) and the hyperbolic claims of authoritarianism. To suppose that tens of millions of people—along with cultural and political elites—could pivot overnight from admiring Donald Trump to viewing him as the embodiment of evil without a comprehensive organizing frame already built into mass consciousness and the institutional apparatus is implausible. Anybody who lived during the rise of Trump and plugged into the popular sphere, a journey from a liberal businessman from Queens to a global celebrity, remembers how the American public used to regard him.
That structure is not part of the original American design but rather the result of a gradual, revolutionary transformation in the mode of production—its forces and relations—and its attendant superstructure of culture, ideology, and law, all of which reach deep into the base, reshaping it and altering its intended trajectory. This transformation is evident in the rise of the administrative state and, more broadly, an administered form of life, which has fostered a mass consciousness that diminishes individualism and constrains liberty.
I have addressed this in several essays on this platform. To summarize here, a survey of history shows that the United States was founded on principles of economic nationalism and limited government, with an executive branch that consolidated administrative, military, and prosecutorial powers in a single office—the Presidency. The Constitution outlines no administrative state; on the contrary, the governing structure of the Republic is explicitly designed to prevent the emergence of unelected power antithetical to the popular will and to liberal freedoms.
The constitutional foundation was disrupted by the emergence of the corporate state and progressive praxis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prepared by the judiciary and fully institutionalized under Franklin Roosevelt’s four-term presidency, his unprecedented tenure affording him ample time to fundamentally alter the American polity. As a consequence, Americans now live in what German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno described as an “administered world.” The Democratic Party is the chief political representative of this world, joined by Republicans who, in the wake of the New Deal, abandoned the party Lincoln had courageously and uncompromisingly led during the Civil War.
In his 1969 essay “Resignation,” building on German sociologist Max Weber’s analysis of rationalization and the inexorable advance of bureaucratic domination in his landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Adorno observes the administered world (verwaltete Welt) carries in it “the tendency to strangle all spontaneity, or at least to channel it into pseudo-activities.” This diagnosis captures Adorno’s pessimism about late-modern society, where bureaucratic administration—extending Weber’s “iron cage of rationality” into every sphere of life—suppresses authentic action and genuine human freedom, what Weber conceptualizes as “individually differentiated conduct.”
Under these conditions, spontaneity, the unpredictable and creative impulse essential to true emancipation or resistance, is either outright crushed or redirected into harmless, simulated forms of engagement, such as consumerist hobbies and managed protest, which mimic agency without threatening the system (we find the operators manuals in such early twentieth century works as Edward Bernay’s Propaganda and Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, the technique described respectively as “engineering consent” and “manufaturing consent”). Seeing through the ruse of small-scale activism as revolutionary,
Adorno warns that such efforts reinforce the administered totality by offering illusory outlets for discontent, thereby preventing the kind of radical transformation needed to break free from domination. In this context, resignation is not mere defeatism but a sober recognition that premature or unreflective action risks becoming complicit with the very structures it purports to challenge, underscoring Adorno’s insistence on the priority of critical thought over impulsive praxis in an era of near-total control.
With the rise of the administrative state and its attendant culture, the constitutional order has been effectively abrogated. America’s sense-making institutions—cultural, educational, and journalistic—have indoctrinated generations in progressive ideology, reinforcing the alteration of consciousness that the deeper transformation provokes. As Antonio Gramsci describes in his Prison Notebooks, a new social logic has been installed in the public mind, and this new logic is taken as common sense.
The basis of mass support for the administrative state is the warp that, in the minds of millions, transforms a liberal businessman from Queens whom they once adored into the second coming of Hitler. Comfortable in their simulated forms of engagement, these Americans are terrified of losing the security the administrative state appears to provide. Trump’s restoration project threatens the sense of security that has ensnared them. They experience, as Erich Fromm famously put it in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, “the fear of freedom.” They do not wish to admit this to themselves, of course. It is a necessary illusion, as Lippmann characterized it. So they confuse their administered lives with democracy.
Adorno and Fromm are describing the psychological mechanism by which modern individuals, overwhelmed by the burdens of genuine autonomy and responsibility in a post-traditional world, unconsciously surrender their individuality to powerful external authorities—be they bureaucratic systems, charismatic leaders, or the comforting routines of mass society. In the American context, this flight manifests not as submission to a dictator but as apparent voluntary immersion in the administered world: the corporate-managed consumerism, regulatory protections, technocratic governance, and welfare entitlements that promise stability and predictability in exchange for diminished self-determination.
The result is a paradoxical attachment—people cling fiercely to the very structures that erode their agency, experiencing any challenge to the administrative state, such as efforts to restore limited government or personal sovereignty, not as liberation but as an existential threat that would force them to confront the anxiety of real freedom.
This deep-seated fear, pushed into the unconscious mind, masked as principled defense of “democracy,” explains the intense emotional backlash against disruptions of the status quo. What is labeled authoritarianism is, at root, a projection of their own longing to remain sheltered within the administered order rather than to reclaim the uncertainties—and possibilities—of a freer, more self-reliant republic. As Sigmund Freud would put it, they seek the protection of the father and the womb of the mother. Freedom and reason having escaped Weber’s iron cage, captivity comes with the wish for illusions, and with it a tolerance for a myriad of delusions.
As the foregoing demonstrates, over the course of the twentieth century, Americans have come to embrace managerialism and the social welfare state, perceiving them as the essence of democracy and the good life. Accordingly, when activists take to the streets to oppose efforts to dismantle the administrative state, chanting “This is what democracy looks like,” they genuinely mean it. Yet in doing so, they substitute real agency with Adorno’s concept of pseudo-activity, experiencing empowerment and significance primarily at the level of street-level performance. This reflects the social psychology of those whom Eric Hoffer describes in his landmark book The True Believer. Such an agent, if he has any tangible effect, rarely advances justice; instead, he tends to reinforce the injustices imposed by corporate power.
Pseudo-activity is evident, for example, in protests against immigration control. An authentic proletarian response, by contrast, would oppose mass immigration because an influx of cheap foreign labor displaces native-born workers and depresses wages. Beyond this, large-scale immigration strains public infrastructure and weakens social cohesion and national culture. Rather than standing with the interests of working families, the protesters—despite their anticapitalist rhetoric—align instead with the forces that facilitate the importation of foreign labor, namely the corporate elite.
Today, classical liberalism and authentic individualism, as well as the organic interests of the working man in the West, have been sidelined, and corporate statism has become hegemonic. Administrative rule enjoys mass support, and Trump’s efforts to return America to its original constitutional scheme—and the Republican Party to its Lincoln-era roots—are paradoxically decried as authoritarianism.
Such behavior is that of the committed adherent to a religion. Progressivism is indeed quasireligious, and, as Karl Marx put it in his 1843 essay “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “[t]his state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.” Our task is to right the image and show the truth of that world.
To wax pessimistic for a moment, the problem may be deeper than this. I already alluded to this, but it’s worth elaborating on the point Freud makes in his lengthy 1927 essay, “The Future of an Illusion,” which argues that religious beliefs are fundamentally human constructions developed to satisfy psychological needs rather than to reflect objective truths. Here, religion is understood as a system of ideas that provides comfort against the dangers, suffering, and uncertainties, much like a parental figure protects a child. Freud maintained that while religion may promote moral behavior and social cohesion, it also restricts intellectual freedom and the development of reason. Therefore, we should regard the beneficent side of religion as tools potentially used for malevolent ends. Freud optimistically predicted that as human knowledge, rational thinking, and scientific understanding advance, these illusions would gradually lose their hold on society, giving way to a more rational and secular worldview. But, as I have shown in numerous essays, these, too, have been weaponized by the administrative state and its attendant technocratic apparatus.
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In light of the paradox of authoritarianism, and since the reclamation is portrayed as a return to it, it is worth noting that we see something similar in the mass support among Germans for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, albeit in that case, the long-term institutionalization of this order was disrupted by a global hot war. Here, we may separate the signal from the noise of Nuremberg.
To be sure, corporate and financial elites played a major role in Hitler’s rise—even as he, like Roosevelt (who described them as “economic royalists”), criticized the financial elite. But to lay this entirely at the feet of financial power is at best an incomplete account. The dismantling of the Weimar Republic occurred amid a mass political movement rooted in persistent antisemitism and the deformation of the Protestant ethic, the latter occurring in the context of corporate personhood.
It is useful to note here that both Marx and Weber suggest a connection between the Protestant ethic and what the latter describes as the practical rationalism of Judaism. I address Marx’s take on the matter in my last essay, Epic City and The Muslim Problem: Confronting the Presence of Exceptional Doctrine in American Society. As I have shown in other essays (e.g., Anticipating Weber. Revisiting Marx and the “Jewish Question”), Marx anticipates Weber’s observations in The Protestant Ethic. Moreover, in his work Ancient Judaism, Weber finds Judaism to be of fundamental significance for the development of the Occident, standing at a turning point in the religious evolution from the Orient to the West. The ethical rationalism of Judaism became a crucial foundation for later Western religious development.
We see a parallel impulse today on the progressive left in the loathing directed at Israel and Jews. Observers of street-level actions in America today, and more broadly in the West, have witnessed this sentiment on display, although I suspect it went unrecognized by many. The deep cultural ground of antisemitism can no longer be ignored. Nor can we ignore that these actions represent popular support for the corporate state—indeed, organized by corporate power, financially and logistically. Likewise, the Nazi Party also drew on substantial popular support, and this support was also, to a significant degree, rooted in antisemitism.
The Nazi regime’s durability cannot be explained solely by the mobilization of a committed minority; it relied on the broad equanimity—or at least accommodation—of a much larger segment of the population. Passivity toward corporate statism today stems not only from the tens of millions who believe in it (even if they don’t know they do), but also from the many millions more who fear supporting the project to reclaim America because of what would happen to them if they did. They are told that their longing for America as it was conceived is itself a manifestation of authoritarian sentiment. Their nostalgia is portrayed as atavistic. The patriot has been transformed in the minds of millions into a racist.
The current military intervention in Iran is a case in point. Progressives do not see the action as striking a blow against Islamic ambition—Islam has become, despite its obvious ambitions and horrors, beloved by many on the left, hellbent on signaling virtue—but action taken at the behest of Israel. It is, once more, the Jews pulling the strings of geopolitical developments.
We see latent antisemitism in the media’s consternation over how to exploit Joe Kent’s resignation from the Trump Administration to drive a wedge between factions of the America First movement. Kent, who served as National Counterterrorism Center director, suggested yesterday on the Tucker Carlson Show that he was blocked from investigating the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. While Kent did not explicitly name perpetrators, his comments implied that foreign-aligned operatives, principally Israeli operatives embedded in the US intelligence and political apparatuses, were involved in shaping or limiting the investigation. How shall the media proceed in weaponizing Kent’s resignation? They certainly won’t acknowledge that America First is purging antisemites from its movement.
It is well understood that entrenched antisemitic dispositions within German society provided fertile ground for the regime’s popularity and the acceptance of its racial policies. This cultural explanation is even more persuasive when integrated with other factors: the regime’s coercive and surveillance capacities, the incremental normalization of exclusion of patriotic voices (while warping the terms of patriotism), the obscuring effects of wartime conditions, and the powerful roles of material incentives, social conformity, and moral adaptation. Here are the parallels to be elevated.
These elements explain why Hitler’s rule rested not on elite imposition alone, nor on ideological zeal, but on a convergence of popular support, structural pressures, and a widespread willingness to accommodate or ignore the regime’s unfolding project.
This is the situation we confront in the United States, now decades into its development. While Hitler’s technocratic project failed, Roosevelt’s project succeeded, and the normalization of administrative rule inverted mass perception of totalitarianism. World War II cleared the way for a more thoroughgoing paradigm of administrative rule, one, as we have seen, internalized by a large segment of the American populace. Crucially, for the US, this consolidation of forces occurred in the context of a global cold war, which did not disrupt the long-term normalization of technocratic rule. In a very real sense, denazification of Europe opened the way for a dissimulated state corporatism, one wearing a progressive face.
American political scientist Sheldon Wolin captures this development in his 2008 Democracy, Inc., in which he analyzes the hegemony of managed democracy, warning of the “specter of inverted totalitarianism.” His analysis, written in the context of the Second Persian Gulf War, concerned the administration of George W. Bush; however, the continuation of the neoliberal and neoconservative consensus proves that this is an enduring condition. Moreover, an analysis of the decades preceding Bush shows us that the specter Sheldon identifies appeared long before Bush and Dick Cheney assumed control of the system. Neoliberalism emerges from corporate state logic, and neoconservatism is a rebranding of Cold War progressivism.
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America under Trump has made major strides in reclaiming the Republic and the American System. But all this will be lost if Democrats regain Congress and prevent reclamation. This is why the progressive left is in full meltdown over legislation, for example, the SAVE Act currently being debated in the Senate, and executive action securing our elections and restoring national sovereignty. If Democrats lose 2026, the managed decline of America, and more broadly the nation-state in the West, an engineered decline organized by the transnational corporate elite and defended by tens of millions of Americans who no longer believe in the West, may be derailed.
TDS and panic over MAGA authoritarianism are thus explained by the rise of the corporate person and the administrative state. It has disordered mass consciousness so profoundly that elites can flip a switch and turn tens of millions against their own interests and their fellow citizens. It even has people returning to Jewish cabal theory to explain world events. This situation is not the result of mass stupidity. Many highly intelligent people have been swept up in mass hysteria. It is the result of decades of ideological indoctrination and practical life in an administered world.
Ultimately, the power of that scene in Nuremberg lies less in its literal accuracy than in its ability to distill a historical theme into a memorable moment that can be repurposed to obscure the present moment and the historical trajectory that undergirds it. Understanding the gap between dramatization and documented history—and between historical analogy and present reality—is essential for interpreting both the film and the conversations it has sparked.
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As I was writing this, I considered objections to the analogy between Progressivism and National Socialism. I have explained why progressivism parallels National Socialism in several essays describing the rise of what I have called the New Fascism. Progressives object because they assume what I debunked in this essay: that America First and National Socialism are parallel, and this must be grasped if we are to save democracy. Their attention to historical matters is guided by the problem of motivated reasoning. The fact that the Weimar Republic exhibits certain parallels to American progressivism has led them to misinterpret the presidency of Donald Trump as analogous to Hitler’s rise, rather than as a rejection of the corporate state.
The Weimar Republic expanded the welfare state through family support measures and public housing initiatives. Urban centers such as Berlin became hubs of artistic innovation, modernist experimentation (exemplified by the Bauhaus), and sexual openness, including challenges to traditional gender roles. This is the context that valorized the medical atrocities performed by Magnus Hirshfeld and Erwin Gohrbandt, which I have extensively covered in previous essays (see, e.g., The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Medical Atrocities Then and Now: The Dark Continuity of Gender Affirming Care).
Like the United States, Weimar progressivism was cosmopolitan and elite-driven, often clashing with rural conservatism. Both contexts experienced backlash fueled by economic crises, perceived cultural overreach, and political polarization, contributing to instability. However, where Weimar’s fragility led to collapse, American progressivism adapted within a more stable institutional framework.
Moreover, Germany under the Wilhelmine Empire (1871–1918) was fundamentally unlike the pre-Progressive Era United States in its core economic, political, and social features. Imperial Germany was a semi-authoritarian constitutional monarchy with a powerful centralized executive (the Kaiser and chancellor like Bismarck, whose social welfarism blunted the socialist call for more thoroughgoing societal transformation), a weak Reichstag parliament lacking full control over budgets or ministers, and significant influence from the military aristocracy and Prussian bureaucracy—far from America’s decentralized, anti-monarchical ethos.
The dissimilarity becomes even more dramatic when we deepen the historical frame. Before the Wilhelmie Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1871) was an absolute monarchy under the House of Hohenzollern until the Revolutions of 1848 forced a shift to a semi-constitutional monarchy. Even after 1850, when a constitution was imposed, real power remained centralized in the king, who appointed ministers, controlled the military, and ruled by decree in crises. (This was the historical context for the Jewish question I addressed in my last essay.)
These differences, and the analysis presented in the previous sections, make clear why the competing analogy suggesting that the emergence of Trump parallels the rise of Hitler collapses under scrutiny. Hitler emerged from a political culture shaped by centuries of centralized authority, weak parliamentary constraints, and a fragile experiment in mass democracy that lacked deep institutional roots. In establishing a one-party state, National Socialism exploited the interwar experiment with democracy, such as it was, to reassert centralized authority under diminished parliamentary limits. By contrast, Trump’s project aims to restore a constitutional order that balances power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches—a balance disrupted by the expansion of administrative authority.
Both moments represent a return to something, but what they seek to return to is entirely different. Hitler sought to return to Empire. Trump seeks the restoration of a Republic. What appears superficially similar—mass politics, populist rhetoric, and resistance to elite progressive consensus—rests on fundamentally different historical and institutional foundations. The comparison, therefore, obscures more than it reveals: it mistakes analogous surface phenomena for equivalent structures and historical trajectories and, in doing so, misidentifies the character of the present moment.
freedom and reason 