Living Through It: Chilling Lessons on the Rise of Authoritarianism

We often wonder how people went along with regimes like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Watching America in 2025, it’s suddenly much easier to understand.

Authoritarianism doesn’t happen all at once.

In hindsight we have the totality of their actions to judge. “I wouldn’t have supported the Holocaust, obviously.” But the Holocaust started in 1941, eight years after the Nazis took power. What ended in mass murder started as boycotts of Jewish businesses and ramped up from there. Concentration camps were originally about isolating “criminals” and “undesirables” from society. The killing started later.

We’re three months into the second Trump administration, and they’ve done horrible things, including threatening media with “substantial punishment” for coverage and sending people without a trial to brutal prison camps in El Salvador that they say they can’t get anyone back from. But we genuinely don’t know how far they’ll go, and each successive step might not seem like that big of a leap compared to the last.

Repression always comes with a story.

It’s easy to oppose these historical regimes when almost all of the mainstream modern material on them you’re consuming is negative. But living through it, especially within those countries, would have meant a completely different information diet.

Fox News frames the El Salvador extrajudicial renditions as “thank you, Trump, for getting rid of these awful criminals — can you believe Democrats support criminals?”. This is insane. The whole point of due process is to determine whether people are criminals and to give them a predictable punishment as determined by the law.

Seeing people fall for this in real time, it’s a lot easier to see how people could have supported repression of Kulaks in the Soviet Union, for example. “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for finally dealing with these greedy peasants hoarding grain — can you believe the counter-revolutionaries still defend them?”

People have lives outside of politics.

Reading history books, your focus is naturally going to be on historical events. But people living through these times had lives: families, jobs, and other obligations. Many of them didn’t want to “get involved in politics”. It’s easy to criticize them for this but there’s no objective answer to how much you’re “obligated” to get involved or sacrifice when, let’s say, you have a new baby or an elderly parent to take care of.

But very bad things can happen when enough people opt out of “politics”.

I’m not trying to argue here that Trump is going to be as bad as Hitler or Stalin. Likely a better comparison is Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia, although again, history is still happening so we just don’t know.

But watching the rise of the most authoritarian U.S. administration of my lifetime — and how many Americans support it or don’t care — has been a chilling lesson in how past brutal regimes got away with it: (1) They ramp up the repression over time, (2) they control enough of the information space that the justifications seem at least plausible, and (3) they rely on people tuning out and just trying to live their lives.