Forgetting Fascism: Trump, Orbán, and the Return of Authoritarianism

Memory of the Holocaust warned us to “never forget.” Today, forgetting blinds us to new forms of authoritarianism—legalistic, selective, and creeping closer to home.

Authoritarianism doesn’t need to return in the same form. It only needs us to forget how it came the last time.

I was born in 1945, into a world still thick with Holocaust survivors. Their stories were not abstract history but part of daily life. Traveling with my father through Europe when I was ten, I saw the ruins of war everywhere. In Amsterdam, in what had been Jewish neighborhoods, there were many vacant lots. After they were transported, their houses were torn down for firewood to keep families warm through brutal winters. In Austria, walls were still marked with Toten Judden—“Dead Jews”—scrawled across Stars of David, swastikas painted over the symbols of a vanished community.

We were told to never forget. That vow was not simply to honor the dead; it was about staying alert to what forgetting allows. And yet we are forgetting. Perhaps because we no longer see the bombed-out buildings or hear survivors’ stories, we think of fascism as unrepeatable, locked in the past. We tell ourselves we are in no danger because there are no gas chambers on the horizon. But authoritarianism rarely returns in the same uniform. It adapts to its moment, wearing new masks.

Trump has taken up some of the old repertoire. The rallies, the scapegoating of outsiders, the branding of enemies, the demand for loyalty—these have become the familiar devices of his politics. His language matters: when people are called “vermin” or “traitors,” repression starts to feel less like cruelty and more like necessity. But this is not Nazism reborn. There is no doctrine of racial extermination, no plan for industrial genocide. The danger lies in something closer at hand.

To see it, look to Hungary. Viktor Orbán did not abolish elections, but he tilted the system so far that they no longer represented real choice. He packed the courts, weakened civil society, brought universities to heel, and concentrated the press in loyal hands. Opponents were not murdered in the streets, but they were harassed, bankrupted, or driven into exile. The forms of democracy remained; the substance was gone. That is what “illiberal democracy” means, and Orbán showed the world how to build it.

Trump and his allies are following the same script. He created “Schedule F” in 2020 to strip job protections from career officials; it was revoked, and he has now reinstated it. He pledged to bring the Justice Department under his direct control and has promised to prosecute political opponents. He and his supporters speak openly about “retribution”—not as metaphor, but as a plan to use the levers of the state against his enemies. Orbán consolidated power over more than a decade; Trump intends to do it in four years.

Alarmingly, Trump’s language shows a harsher edge. He pledged to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history, and has already built detention camps, with more under construction. Again he is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he attempted in 2020 but was stopped; now he says he will use it if the “need” arises. By pardoning January 6 rioters, he has effectively legitimized political violence carried out in his name. Here the parallel edges toward Chile under Augusto Pinochet, where selective repression—disappearances, torture, killings—kept a society in check. Trump does not need tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue to attempt something similar. He already commands ICE, DHS, police unions, and allied state legislatures. The risk is a fusion: Orbán’s illiberalism hardened by Pinochet’s readiness to terrorize opponents.

What this looks like in daily life is not speculative. Journalists are tied up in lawsuits and government investigations. Universities are being restructured under political orders, as Florida has already shown. Nonprofits are stripped of tax status for opposing government policy. Immigrant families are confined in detention centers, citizenship revoked for minor paperwork errors, asylum curtailed at the border. Protesters are tracked with digital warrants and charged under sweeping statutes. This is not mass extermination, but selective repression: enough to silence critics, sap movements, and instill fear.

The signs to watch are clear. Emergency powers used against protest. Justice Department prosecutions aimed at political opponents. Detention camps expanded inland. National Guard deployments ordered against demonstrations. Parallel courts—immigration tribunals or military panels—used to sidestep ordinary law. These are not abstractions. They have been proposed, rehearsed, and in some cases already carried out.

Anthropology helps us see the stakes differently. Democracy is not only a system of rules; it is a culture, a way of living together that must be practiced daily. It depends on habits of consent, tolerance, and cooperation. When those habits are eroded—when neighbors are cast as enemies, when the press becomes propaganda, when law serves only one side—the cultural foundation of democracy crumbles even if the institutions remain.

Political ecology adds another layer. Authoritarian movements thrive in conditions of scarcity and disruption. Climate disasters, economic inequality, and mass displacement create the raw material for fear. Leaders like Trump exploit that fear, turning storms, fires, and migration into proof of chaos and invasion. Authoritarianism grows in this soil because it promises order, not freedom, in exchange for obedience.

This is not only an American story. Around the world, liberal democracy is in retreat. More people now live under authoritarian or hybrid regimes than in full democracies. The global norm is shifting, and Trump is part of that larger wave. His project is not an aberration; it is an American version of the same illiberal current running from Hungary to Turkey to Brazil.

The Holocaust taught us that forgetting is perilous. But the lesson is not that history repeats itself in identical form. It is that authoritarianism mutates. Trump is not Hitler, but he does not need to be. He is enough like Orbán to hollow out democracy from within, and his retribution carries a Pinochet edge. Memory is a civic duty not because it seals the past, but because it prepares us to recognize the signs of danger in the present.

Democracy does not usually die with a single blow. It is dismantled step by step, while still wearing its costume. When I was a boy, walking through the ruins of Europe, I thought “never forget” meant remembering the destruction I saw. Now I know it means recognizing the disguises in which authoritarianism returns. That remains our task today.

Suggested Readings

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. New York: Crown, 2023.

Runciman, David. How Democracy Ends. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

V-Dem Institute. Democracy Report 2025: The State of Autocratization Worldwide. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2025.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

Wolf, Eric R. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.