Photograph Source: Office of Military Government for Germany, United States – Public Domain

The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer

– James Baldwin         

The legacy of Nuremberg is with us once again, less as a reminder of the power of the legal system to punish those who enabled and enacted the horrors of Nazi Germany than as a warning that the spirit of Nuremberg must be reclaimed as a moral and political imperative. That spirit matters at a time when the Supreme Court is increasingly turning the law into an instrument of reactionary concentrated power, desecrating morality, crippling the foundations of democracy, and reproducing the worst dimensions of gangster capitalism. Nuremberg made clear that judges and other officials cannot use the authority of law to cover up and legitimate actions that are morally depraved and politically destructive. Its lesson for the present is stark: when law is emptied of justice and used to normalize cruelty, annihilate democratic rights, and place concentrated power beyond accountability, legality itself becomes a weapon in the destruction of democracy. The reactionary Court has become part of a political order whose governing ethos increasingly resembles what Jeet Heer, writing of Trump, calls being “besotted by the romance of gangsterism.”

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to expand the use of its citizenship-verification database is more than another dispute over how elections should be administered. By a 6–3 vote, the Court lifted a lower-court order blocking the Department of Homeland Security from using an expanded version of the SAVE database, now linked to Social Security records, to assist states in checking voter eligibility. The danger is hardly abstract. As Stephen Prager reports in Common Dreams, the database contains known errors, raising the possibility that “many eligible voters may be at risk of having their voter registration wrongfully cancelled just weeks before midterm” elections.

The immediate electoral consequences may nevertheless be limited: federal law generally prohibits systematic removals from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. That safeguard does not eliminate the risks of erroneous removals or the privacy concerns raised by the plaintiffs, but it constrains the scale of systematic voter purges in the weeks immediately preceding the election. The ruling does not require states to use the system, and the underlying legal dispute remains unresolved, though the Court signaled its preliminary view of the merits, stating that the challengers’ claims “likely lack merit” and that it would likely reverse the district court’s finding that the administration had violated federal law.

Nor has the Court simply rubber-stamped every administration effort to rewrite election rules: earlier this month, it blocked Trump’s attempt to impose sweeping new restrictions on mail voting before the midterms. The significance of the latest ruling therefore lies not in claiming that every decision moves in the same authoritarian direction, but in confronting what happens when the nation’s highest court repeatedly removes barriers to concentrated power, strengthens an increasingly authoritarian presidency, and provides legal cover for a political project that attacks voting rights, intensifies racial exclusion, and aligns the machinery of the state with white-nationalist politics. What is being placed at risk is not simply constitutional restraint, but democracy itself.

Yet the significance of these decisions cannot be grasped if they are treated simply as isolated legal disputes. Walter Benjamin’s notion of “profane illumination” offers another way of reading them: the particular can suddenly illuminate the larger social forces condensed within it. As AK Thompson, drawing on Benjamin, argues, particular events can alert us to “the broader social process from which [they] derive.” Read in this way, the Court’s rulings are not merely discrete constitutional decisions. They are fragments of a larger political transformation in which concentrated executive power, racial exclusion, the political power of wealth, attacks on voting rights, and the weakening of democratic restraints increasingly converge. The task is not to claim that every ruling is fascist, but to recognize what these decisions illuminate when viewed together: the emergence of a political order in which democratic institutions are increasingly reorganized to serve authoritarian ends. Fascism becomes visible not simply in a single spectacular act, but in the accumulation of institutional changes that make concentrated power appear lawful, ordinary, and legitimate.

The danger becomes clearer when law itself ceases to restrain authoritarian power and begins to legitimate it. That is why Germany in 1933 matters—not as a historical equivalent, but as a warning about what happens when legality itself is turned against democracy.

The  comparison with Hitler’s Enabling Act of March 1933 must therefore be made carefully. The situations are not equivalent. Passed amid intimidation, political repression, and the exclusion of Communist deputies, the Enabling Act allowed Hitler’s government to make laws without parliamentary approval, even when they violated the Weimar Constitution. It did not merely weaken German democracy. It supplied the legal machinery for destroying it.

The point lies not in equating the two moments but in recognizing a political mechanism. Fascism does not need to abolish the law to seize and weaponize its authority. The Nazis captured courts, the civil service,........

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