Perhaps the most infuriating accusation spewed by leftists over the years has been to equate Republican Presidents with Hitler and their followers as fascists, or more recently, as a “basket of deplorables” who are “irredeemable.” Such charges are drenched with the intellectual dyslexia that dominates classrooms, newsrooms, and entertainment chat rooms where reductio ad Hitlerum rhetoric (Leo Strauss’s phrase) displaces reasoned argument. In fact, America’s leftists see fascists everywhere except among their own ranks. Thus, Barack Obama’s pen and phone dictates, IRS perfidies, EPA commands, Supreme Court interpretive travesties of statutes and the constitution, elite media’s blinkered broadcasting proclivities, and leftie-inspired mob actions are all invisible by leftist standards; only Republicans and their ilk on the “right” constitute dangers to America.

This is all preposterous, of course, and especially galling to Americans who are committed to constitutional government but find themselves constantly accused of favoring policies that are exactly the opposite of what they believe. America’s leftists would do well to explore historical analogues to their own views and actions before blithely continuing autopilot recriminations against anyone who opposes well-known elite orthodoxy. Such digging certainly unearths the likes of Marx, Mao, Alinsky, and most recently, Castro, but more disturbingly, investigators find themselves marching on a path laid by Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Göring, along with the leader who inspired them all. Before this thought ignites a supernova of exploding heads that will destroy the universe, consider the following progression that defined Germany’s experience between the world wars — grievance culture, identity politics, statism — and offer comments about left-wing political habits today.

The grievance culture in Germany between the wars is of course one of the most thoroughly probed subjects in modern times. The overriding point is that the German experience was based on something very real and deadly serious involving the entire population — huge loses in lives, territory, savings, civil peace, ravages of the Great Depression — which culminated in establishing Hitler’s regime. Germany’s grievance culture was existentially threatening and demanded immediate action.