General Discussion

For much of the twentieth century, authoritarian movements often depended heavily on projecting an image of competence, discipline, and inevitability. They needed the parades, the uniforms, the spectacle, the carefully crafted image. To this day, documentaries about Nazi Germany use footage from the film Triumph of the Will, which was staged to make the Nazis look efficient and organized. They were organized, yes—for the film. The story behind the scenes was often one of chaos, incompetence, and failure.

Failure? Yes, of course, ultimately. But after how many lives were lost?

As historians have pointed out, the reality behind the imagery was often far more chaotic—not just in Germany in the 1930s, but in many other authoritarian regimes. There were rival power centers, bureaucratic infighting, overlapping jurisdictions, contradictory directives, opportunism, corruption, and a great deal of confusion.

What if that appearance of competence isn't as necessary anymore? What if the environment has changed? What if fragmentation itself works? What if constant contradiction, endless controversy, improvisation, norm-breaking, and a flood of conflicting narratives create their own kind of resilience?

Dangerous movements often project competence they do not possess, sometimes through propaganda and spectacle, and sometimes because opponents mistake confidence for capability. But the reverse can also happen. People mistake visible incompetence for harmlessness.

Both are serious errors.

The Trump administration has plainly exhibited genuine incompetence. There have been legal defeats, internal feuds, policy reversals, staffing turmoil, and implementation failures. Those aren't illusions. They're real.

But there is something deeper at work here. We may have inherited from the twentieth century a mental image of what danger is supposed to look like: disciplined, organized, efficient, polished. Perhaps we've become accustomed to reassuring ourselves by saying, "Well, they don't look like that."

The absence of polish doesn't necessarily answer the question. It may simply mean that we don't yet understand the form that power is taking. The fact that something appears chaotic, amateurish, or incompetent doesn't automatically make it harmless any more than the appearance of efficiency makes it inevitable or unstoppable.

Triumph of the Will still makes the Nazis look efficient, nearly a century later, whether they were or not. The Trump administration often looks chaotic and incompetent, which may or may not tell us as much as we think it does about the risks involved.

The image is not the reality.

Being part of the reality-based community also means taking historical context seriously. I have trouble with calls for less vigilance because the last hundred plus years have shown us some of the worst outcomes human societies are capable of producing. Again and again, people reassured themselves that institutions would hold, that norms would constrain behavior, that the people involved were too incompetent, too ridiculous, or too marginal to pose a serious threat. Sometimes those reassurances proved correct. Sometimes they proved catastrophically wrong.

I'm not arguing for panic. Panic and vigilance are not the same thing. I'm not saying the worst outcome is inevitable. I'm saying that history has expanded my sense of what is possible. The lesson I draw from that history is not despair. It's attentiveness. Take threats seriously. Stay engaged. Don't assume that because a danger hasn't fully materialized, it cannot. But don't assume that because a danger exists, the outcome is predetermined.

To me, that's what it means to remain both reality-based and historically informed.