On the Origins of the Continuous Deterioration of the U.S.: A Personal Reflection

Whenever American friends visited us in Berlin during Donald Trump’s first term in the years between 2017 and 2020, I greeted them at the door of our apartment with a resounding “welcome to freedom.” 

At the time, that remark was admittedly made more in ironic fashion.  After all, in the post-war era, American soldiers and diplomats had played a pivotal role in preserving the freedom of (West) Berliners. 

Then came Trump

Now that Donald Trump is back in office, I continue to use these three words at our apartment door to greet visitors from Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in the United States. However, by now these words have rapidly taken on much more of a tragic than an ironic dimension. 

When I moved from Germany to the United States some decades ago, such a turn of events was completely unimaginable.  But when I recently read Sebastian Haffner’s “Memoirs of a German, 1918 to 1934,” I was awestruck when his autobiographical report turned to the years 1933 and 1934. 

The author describes the takeover of the Nazis, which he experienced first-hand as a young law school graduate in Berlin at the time. To escape the Nazis, he subsequently emigrated to London and, most significantly, later on became known as the author of the 1979 book “The Meaning of Hitler.”

Infiltrating the fabric of everyday life

Since my time in German high schools, I was well aware of the images of the era — with Nazi storm troopers parading down Berlin streets to mark their takeover of power.

What Haffner describes beyond that is the osmotic way in which the Nazis inserted themselves into the fabric of daily life in Germany. 

A country that, just a moment ago, had been at the pinnacle of contemporary science, art and culture, all of a sudden slipped into accepting a despotic regime that increasingly tightened the screws more and more. 

Uncanny parallels

That was the moment in my reading of the book where I arrived at a very unpleasant realization. Until the return into office of Donald Trump in January 2025, the United States had similarly been at the pinnacle of contemporary science — as well as a country with a very strong civil society. 

Now, a few months into the second Trump presidency, the world realizes that the template for what is going on in the United States today is not just the ignominious Project 2025 or how Viktor Orban neutered Hungary. Rather, it is a replay of how everyday Germans over nine decades earlier tipped from authoritarian rule into dictatorship.

Already, references are being made to how the biggest science push in U.S. history was due to the expulsion of many Jewish scientists from Germany at the time.

Now, the talk about scientists leaving is beginning to repeat itself, this time away from a United States that is turning anti-science and anti-liberty — and pro-hate, if not civil war. 

Ignoring the warning signs

The important point to realize is that the signs of the civic deterioration in the United States that is manifesting itself today have been visible for at least 15 years. Donald Trump, much like the AfD in Germany, is the beneficiary, but not the originator of these developments.

I vividly remember a dinner among friends in our neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The couples gathered around the dinner table had known each other ever since their respective children had been three or four years of age and were now off to college.

When the discussion turned to issues that were already back then clearly tearing at the seams of a cohesive society, one father, partner at a top law firm, had this to say when asked about his views: “I don’t really have an opinion on any of that. I just want to be known as the best lawyer on the East Coast working on behalf of private equity and hedge fund clients.”

Mind you, this was a group of liberal Democrats. It goes without saying that before law school all of them had gone to the finest liberal art colleges in the United States. Even so, there was a distinct lack of courage to address key questions of civic life.

Soon after, the conversation turned to the latest movies…

A turning point

For me personally, this was a turning point. I realized that my time in the United States would come to an end before long.

There evidently is a price to be paid when a society, particularly its liberal elites, begin to opt out quite literally. In various ways, that is precisely what happened in the United States over the past two-and-a-half decades. And it is what happened in Berlin around 1933 and 1934.

Democrats shot themselves in the foot

The economic and tax policies of the Clinton and Obama administrations were such that any reasonable European, independent of party affiliation, would ask himself or herself why it would even need Republicans in politics, given that the Democrats in and by themselves already did so much to protect the material interests of high-income earners. 

Instead, Democrats committed the grave error of focusing way too much on identity politics. At best, this was a highly imperfect substitute for failing to improve the economic lot of the American working class.  

This disastrous move virtually single-handedly delivered blue-collar Americans into the hands of the Republicans.  They were Donald Trump‘s for the picking.

The primary lesson in all this? 

Even very advanced countries, such as Weimar Germany was at the time or the United States was until January 2025, can deteriorate with a great deal of rapidity — if and when civil society in various ways opts out or silences itself in other ways. 

If anybody had ever told us that one day we would come to see the presidency of Ronald Reagan, by comparison, as one of law and order as well as reason and a modicum of integrity, until the last few weeks we would have declared such a person as being obviously insane. But here we are.