When General George S. Patton served as military governor of postwar Bavaria, he startled the press by comparing Germans who voted for the Nazis to Americans who voted for Republicans or Democrats. Eighty years later, that comparison, once deemed outrageous, makes more sense than most care to admit.

Today’s Democratic Party has become a profoundly destructive force. Its leaders incite violence, wink at assassination attempts, and encourage riots to block the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants — including criminal offenders — the Biden White House imported as future Democratic voters.

As a European historian whose own family fled the Nazis, I recognize the pattern. The difference today is that Democrats enjoy advantages the German totalitarians never had.

In Virginia, Democrats just elected an inexperienced attorney general who once wished death upon a Republican leader and his children. Jay “Two Bullets” Jones, a man with no serious professional experience and a long public record of hate-filled rhetoric, is now the state’s top law enforcement officer. His victory didn’t trouble Virginia’s Democratic establishment. Democrats defended him, celebrated him, and made clear they see nothing disqualifying about open derangement when it serves the cause.

Parallels in power

The point isn’t that the Democratic Party is identical to Hitler’s regime. It’s that its tactics — the deceit, manipulation, and contempt for constitutional limits — echo the methods the Nazis used to dismantle Weimar Germany from within.

As a European historian whose own family fled the Nazis, I recognize the pattern. The difference today is that Democrats enjoy advantages the German totalitarians never had. Even at the height of economic collapse, no more than one-third of German voters supported Hitler’s party. In America, at least half the electorate — and possibly more — backs a party that celebrates political violence, erases gender distinctions, tears down monuments, degrades men, and promotes the mutilation of confused children in the name of “affirmation.”

Many of the Democrats’ most reliable constituencies — college-educated women, black voters, and recent immigrants — embrace the movement’s nihilism without the desperation that once drove Germans to extremism. Their loyalty is ideological, not circumstantial, and that makes the threat more enduring.

How the right lost its nerve

The totalitarian Democrats’ rise owes as much to their ruthlessness as to the right’s failure to resist it. For years, the so-called conservative establishment — especially the Murdoch media — has preached “common ground” and “dialogue.” Its members have treated the left as a legitimate partner even as it dismantled every shared institution. They’ve assured us, wrongly, that the Democratic Party was about to collapse. Their naïve optimism left Republicans unprepared for last week’s electoral debacle.

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Credit: Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

A serious conservative movement would treat the Democrats not as rivals but as a subversive force bent on domination. They control the mainstream media, public education, entertainment, and the bureaucracy. The task is not to appease them but to weaken their grip. That means defunding their institutions, shrinking the administrative state, and cutting federal money to the states and cities run by radical leftists — Virginia, California, New Jersey, Minnesota among them. Washington should stop subsidizing those who despise the nation it governs.

The vapid notion that “we all want the same things for our children” only empowers those who plainly do not. They want to rule, not reconcile.

What must be done

Conservatives must demand fair, transparent elections conducted in designated polling places on Election Day under bipartisan supervision. Voter identification should be federally required — a safeguard, not a surrender of state authority, which has long been diluted anyway.

And before Senate Democrats move to end the filibuster to cement their control, President Trump and his allies should act first. Forget “comity.” The GOP cannot afford another cycle of deference to rules their opponents ignore.

The moment demands moral clarity, not compromise. The Democratic Party is not merely misguided — it has become an organized threat to constitutional government and civil peace. Treating it as anything less will only hasten the day when America wakes to find itself a one-party state.