Economist and former New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman has called for a post-Trump “deMAGAfication” of America, and left no mystery about the comparison he was making. “And I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the ‘denazification’ that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany.” Krugman remained vague about the nature of this “thorough purging,” but said it should include “not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.”

Today’s left – secular, post-Christian, postmodern and postcolonial, untethered from faith, tradition or national feeling – has few moral intuitions other than “Do not be Hitler.” The end result of such a worldview, naturally, has been to make Hitler omnipresent in political life. Nazism lurks in the soul of every politician one dislikes and every political reversal is a step towards a second Kristallnacht or a new Auschwitz.

Nixon, Bush and even Mitt Romney drew farcical comparisons to Hitler in their time, but the age of Donald Trump has sent hysterics to new, permanently elevated heights. Two weeks after the 2020 election, DNC member David Atkins said his party needed to “deprogram 75 million people” who had voted for Trump, evoking Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as direct comparisons. In a 2022 speech, Joe Biden characterized MAGA as “semi-fascist.” Krugman’s bluster shows that more and more progressives are perfectly fine dropping the “semi.” But is it bluster? Perhaps not. If the Democrats do win in 2028, round two of deMAGAfication is likely to be far more extensive than the first. Despite the chatter in November 2020, and........

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