When does a country change?

Not when tanks roll down the boulevard. Not when a constitution is ceremonially torn apart. Those moments come later, if they come at all. The change I’m thinking of is quieter. It arrives without announcement. It settles into habits, into tone, into the background noise of daily life — the things we stop remarking on because they no longer feel new.

I didn’t plan to write about this. But after watching HBO’s The Plot Against America, I found it difficult to return to whatever I had been doing before. The story lingered in a way that felt physical. I kept replaying scenes while doing other things — washing dishes, answering emails — as if some unresolved question had been left open and refused to close.

Several times I paused the episode. I was binge-watching, but I stood up anyway — not because I needed anything, but because sitting still had become uncomfortable.

What unsettled me wasn’t fear exactly. It was familiarity.

I watched the series as a Swedish immigrant living in the United States, someone who grew up with Europe’s twentieth-century lessons woven into school curricula and dinner-table conversations. I know, at least in outline, how authoritarianism takes hold. But seeing it unfold so patiently, so plausibly, unsettled me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The unease didn’t come from spectacle. It came from how ordinary everything felt.

At some point, another story surfaced — Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, and István Szabó’s film adaptation. Different country. Different decade. The same slow corrosion.

Together, these works kept circling a question I couldn’t quite set aside: how does a free society talk itself into not noticing what is happening?

I’m not writing to predict catastrophe, nor to insist that history is repeating itself. I’m writing out of a quieter concern — about how the unthinkable becomes tolerable, and how decent people adjust without ever deciding to.

The Seduction of Normalcy

The Plot Against America imagines a United States that doesn’t collapse through violence, but drifts through choice. Charles Lindbergh — a beloved aviator, a national hero, and an admirer of Nazi Germany — defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 under the reassuring banner of “America First.” He promises peace. He promises stability. Above all, he promises to keep America out of Europe’s wars.

Many........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)