History Rhymes
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. We are currently watching that sage bit of wisdom ring true, though on the national stage instead of the international stage. The 47th President of the United States has not so cordially invited the American public to gather a front row seat to a vulgar, haphazard, and charmless replay of the decade preceding the second world war.
The decades of appeasement before WWII
The 1930s were marked by France and Britain hand-wringing in the face of the growing threat of Adolf Hitler’s meteoric rise to power in Germany. The international community watched, alarmed, as Germany grew more radical, rearmed itself and withdrew from international conferences. Britain and France took no action as Germany absorbed Austria in 1938. That same year, Britain brokered the Munich Agreement, which capitulated to Hitler’s demand to annex the Sudetenland region of then Czechoslovakia. Emboldened by what he saw as weakness in concession, Hitler continued his rampage, sparking WWII the following year, with the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. For the rest of the century and into the next, history and political science classes across the globe taught of the failure of appeasement, highlighting the dangers of conceding to authoritarian regimes in the hopes of maintaining peace. We proclaimed ‘never again’ far and wide. Well, ‘Never’ is here and ‘Again’ is currently spreading up and down the West Coast.
As soon as he took office, 47 began to withdraw the US from international agreements, treaties, and organizations, as if global partnerships were campaign promises: meant to be broken. The WHO, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and other carefully crafted and negotiated international organizations, specifically created to prevent more WWII scale international conflicts. Overriding the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom, Tina Kotek, and JB Pritzker the President sent National Guard troops storming into their cities to provide a threatening presence to activists and non-profit organizations peacefully protesting 47’s mass deportations. These actions bypassed state authority and sparked immediate backlash from California leaders. But despite legal challenges and judicial blocks, Trump ordered 200 Oregon National Guard soldiers to be deployed, claiming that this move protects “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists”, despite Oregon’s Governor and AG insisting there is no crisis.
Appeasement to Trump
The 1930s were marked by democratic powers hesitating to confront authoritarian aggression, hoping that small concessions might buy peace. But each concession only emboldened Hitler to push further, until his expansion could no longer be ignored. The same pattern is visible today. Trump, like other authoritarians before him, thrives on testing limits. He labels opponents “terrorists,” deploys troops against civilians, and strips away international commitments, not because he faces resistance, but precisely because he senses weakness in response. What appeasement looked like in the 1930s, turning a blind eye to the annexation of Austria or the Sudetenland, looks today like shrugging at ICE raids, campus crackdowns, or the federalization of the National Guard. Each act normalizes the next. The danger isn’t in one policy or one speech, but in the cumulative effect of tolerating authoritarian overreach in the hope it will stop on its own. History tells us it never does.
America’s checks and balances have systematically collapsed over the last eight months, as various institutions, organizations, and industries have capitulated to 47’s demands of loyalty. Prominent law firms and Ivy League institutions have agreed to pay millions of dollars to be able to continue operating in the face of attacks by the Trump White House. In the 1930s, European leaders justified concession after concession to Hitler as the price of stability, convincing themselves that appeasement was prudence. Today, a similar dynamic is playing out at home: judges who look the other way, legislators who remain silent to protect their reelection efforts, or university leaders who prioritize donor appeasement over student rights. Each time an institution shrugs at the abuse of power, it signals to the authoritarian that the next escalation will meet little resistance. Just as the failure to check Germany’s early aggressions opened the door to catastrophe, the failure of our own institutions to enforce limits on executive power is normalizing authoritarian tactics under the guise of security.
