Gleichschaltung was the process of the Nazi Party taking control over all aspects of pre-WWII Germany, initiated some 92 years ago.

The Nazis started with the Civil Service, issuing the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service on April 7, 1933. This act legalized removing anyone of non-Aryan descent from the Civil Service. In the judicial system, this act removed any judges who were deemed noncompliant with Nazi laws or principles.

This act was reinforced by the German Civil Service code of Jan. 26, 1937, which retired any judges or judicial official who would not intervene in cases and rule in favor of the Nazis. The People’s Court, a court created by the Nazis in April 1934, with judges chosen specifically for their Nazi beliefs, replaced the Supreme Court. Once legislation, i.e., the Enabling Law, was in place, the Nazis could bypass the Reichstag and rule by decree — seemingly creating laws that stabilized Germany and got rid of its “internal enemies.”

To take control of “cultural policy,” the Nazis appointed Joseph Goebbels as minister for public engagement and propaganda on March 13, 1933.

Does any of this seem familiar?

Limiting women’s rights, gender discrimination, censorship of the press, abandonment of world health, mass deportations, sexism, racism, xenophobia, constraining the university, installing objectively unqualified cabinet level advisors, debriding the federal government, declaring the intention to grab huge chunks of foreign soil in the face of treaty, tradition and sovereignty. And with every vindictive executive order, the rank-and-file seem to howl with glee, driving and reaffirming the process.

An editor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Craig Chamberlain, urged back in 2014 that we need to be careful how we interpret human behavior. If it is extreme, is it because people are somehow exquisitely vulnerable to being seduced or brainwashed? Or is it more complicated? How have we lost our capacity for critical, evidence-based thought? Or perhaps we never acquired that skill.

We wonder why we were not more astonished in the 1930s as the Nazis came to power. The psycho-social, cultural, economic and historical forces that shape national behavior cannot yet individually or collectively explain the magnitude and the legacies of what happened.

Are there other issues today that we neglect but that our grandchildren will think more problematic — perhaps the fact that illegal immigrants test our empathy, that our wildly excessive and utterly maladaptive prison population does not attract our attention? These are not issues that compare in any way to the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe, but they are issues that may be strident markers of our apparent psychic numbing or even selective blindness today.

In the end, we might do well to stand with the poet Emily Dickinson, who urged us not to lose our sense of alarm, of dismay, of shock. Let us be strong enough to see clearly so we may confront our flaws honestly — and with a renewed humanitarian agenda.