Comparisons with Nazi Germany are often too glibly made and always too glibly dismissed. History does not repeat itself, true—I do not expect to see Donald Trump sporting a mustache the width of his nose—but history does show that similar social conditions can produce comparable political effects. With that in mind, it may not be out of bounds to quote from a nearly forgotten book by Nazi turncoat Hermann Rauschning called The Revolution of Nihilism. Published in 1939, and subtitled Warning to the West, the book characterizes Hitlerism as a form of vacuous “dynamism” with “no fixed aims” and “no program at all.” A movement of “utter nihilism,” it is “kept alive in the masses only in the form of permanent pugnacity.”
As early as 1932, Rauschning writes, Hitler was out “to liberate himself from all party doctrines in economic policy, and he did the same in all other fields,” believing that “the things that stir most men and fire their enthusiasm are the rhythm, the new tempo, the activity, that take them out of the humdrum daily life.”
