It was a time of historic change, and society was buckling under the stress. There had been a war, then a deadly pandemic. Economic crisis was constant: Racing inflation, unemployment and changes in technology provoked extreme economic insecurity.
But a leader emerged who understood the fear and humiliation felt by his public. He validated their rage and focused blame on a scapegoat. He pledged to make the nation whole again, to return it to its rightful glory. Much of the population, suffering so profoundly from the shock of loss and change and insecurity, embraced the leader as a sort of messiah. They accepted political violence, even welcomed it, and they turned away from democracy.
The scenario is historically accurate, but to which country does it apply? Italy in 1923? Germany in 1933? Or the United States today, nine weeks before the presidential election?
The answer, according to some UC Berkeley scholars, is that the scenario applies generally to all three: Italy during the rise of Benito Mussolini, Germany as Adolph Hitler maneuvered his way into power, and the United States, deeply polarized and tense as the MAGA movement led by former president Donald Trump moves to reclaim the White House.
None of the scholars forecast an imminent turn to autocracy in the U.S., and all were careful to say the U.S. experience today is in important ways different from devastating conditions that preceded the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and ‘30s. But in a series of interviews, experts who have studied the political and economic history of Europe traced dramatic and deeply troubling parallels between that era a century ago and this fraught American moment.