"Who Goes Nazi?" in 1941 and 2025

Lessons from a mid-war Harper's article on how quotidian authoritarianism always is

History doesn’t always repeat, but it echoes and rhymes.

Earlier this year, I chanced upon a well-known article from 1941 that didn’t surprise me, so much as bother me in a way that took me months to resolve for myself.

It didn’t surprise me because I’d already read (twice!) Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945 (1955), which …