As we approach the 2024 presidential election, I thought it would be helpful to set the moment in the context of another election in which democratic structures, the rule of law and an open society were under threat – Germany in 1932.

At this point, little doubt remains that Donald Trump and the current Republican Party are anti-democratic. Trump and his allies proudly announce it. Trump’s Republican Party is an authoritarian party, which checks the boxes on the list of primary fascist characteristics. The most important on the list, for me, are its enthusiastic use of racism as a central political strategy and the escalating threats of violence, which fascists always make real once coming to power.

Let’s compare the current situation in the United States with that of Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic to provide a sense of the context in which the citizens of the United States will potentially dismantle their democratic system.

The first interesting point to note is that the citizens of Weimar Germany were, on the whole, much less enthusiastic in their embrace of fascism than U.S. citizens are today. The electoral highpoint for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came in July 1932, when the party received 37.4% of the vote in parliamentary elections. The subsequent election called in November 1932 saw their share of the vote fall to 33.1%. But a third of the vote was all Hitler needed. With the help of the conservative elite, Hitler translated electoral politics into real power. Systems broke down – and Hitler seized control of the state.

The context for the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) can be framed by three key historical phenomena. The first was the destabilizing effects of the First World War. WWI was a continental trauma. Tens of millions of Europeans were killed or wounded, and the number of German casualties reached 7-8 million people. This suffering led not to victory for Germany. It led to defeat, unconditional surrender, and what was widely perceived as national humiliation.

The second factor relates to the first: the end of WWI brought about not inflation but hyperinflation. The cost of postage for a letter stood at 0.4 marks in 1921. By the end of 1923, postage cost over 1 million marks. The price of a single egg in December 1923 peaked around 320 billion marks. One egg. Hyperinflation was not a hardship or an inconvenience, it destroyed the foundations of the German economy and destabilized German society.

The third factor that sets the end of democracy in Germany in context was the impact of the Great Depression, and most importantly unemployment. By January 1933, over 30% of the German labor force was out of work.

What about the United States today? There has been nothing in recent U.S. history like the destabilizing war Germany waged from 1914 to 1918, nothing even approximating the traumatic effect of seeing 10% of the entire population killed or injured. There have been no major territorial annexations, as happened to Germany as a result of the Paris peace process, and certainly no international humiliation.

Inflation in the United States was high for contemporary standards in 2022, and for a 12-month period was over 7%. Peak inflation during this period was 9.1% in June 2022. Inflation is now at 2.4%. When President Joe Biden took office, U.S. unemployment was at 6.4%. Now it is 4.1%. Does either the inflation story or the unemployment story reach a level comparable to early 1930s Germany? Nowhere close. And yet, according to polling, 46-48% of U.S. voters are set to vote for an anti-democratic, anti-constitutional candidate and party, purportedly on grounds of economic dissatisfaction.

Since the end of WWII, people have often wondered why the Germans would embrace a politics that would lead to unfathomable immorality and, ultimately, to self-destruction. The future question people will ask about the United States in 2024 might well be the following: Why did U.S. voters throw away their democratic society and embrace fascism for no apparent reason?

Once democracies fall, they are extremely hard to rebuild. Authoritarian politics leads invariably to disaster – war, internal repression, corruption and social and political collapse. These violent mechanisms are bound to escalate over time as fascist structures face pressures and challenges.

Fascists manufacture crises. The Nazis had the “Jewish crisis” and the “Bolshevik crisis.” Neither was an actual crisis. They were crises that existed in the fascist imagination and were made “real” through rhetoric and media amplification. Today, we have the “border crisis” and the “immigrant crisis,” which likewise are not actual crises. Again, rhetoric and media have given the imaginary reality – and our corporate media will have much to answer for in their choice to amplify these issues, in their prioritizing of profit over democratic preservation.

Violent political rhetoric – attacking those who “don’t belong” to the imagined fascist project – always turns into actual violence, usually enacted with incredible brutality. The law becomes a thin and pathetic veneer. Institutions rot from the inside; corruption and patronage reign. We see these dynamics before our very eyes. We hear it spoken aloud. Do we care?

If U.S. voters choose the anti-democratic option now, there will be no future choice, no ability to calmly return to the status quo ante. Democratic structures will have to be built again from the ground up. After 1945, Germany was rebuilt in rubble, its territory destroyed and occupied, another 13-15 million Germans killed or wounded. Decades from now, we will require a new generation of founders. They will possess the courage that we don’t have today, the courage to stand up for an ethical and moral society – to defend rather than attack the vulnerable, to push back fascist power, to seek justice, to value equality and freedom.

It is often said that European societies went “sleepwalking” into the catastrophic and pointless First World War. Since contemporary Americans sleep on average less than their European counterparts in 1913, perhaps we need a new metaphor. We are awake at all hours of the day and night. We plunge into fascism with our earbuds in, staring at our phones, counting our likes, calculating our property values, binging Netflix, placing our online sports bets, scrolling and clicking our way to oblivion, walking with our heads bent down.