The easy thing for all of us to do is ignore what’s happening in the world around us. After all, there’s only so much control we have as individuals, right?
Not exactly.
Each of us has a voice—and those voices are stronger when combined with others to take a stand on important issues.
A key preamble of The Overlook is to be “Your Voice in the Catskills.” We provide a mirror to tell your stories and to spotlight issues when something is broken and needs to be fixed. Our intent is always to amplify your voice. I regularly hear from friends in our Overlook community about what’s on their minds, what keeps them up at night, and what they’re doing to make a difference.
One thing we can all agree on: We are living in a 24/7 cycle of chaos resulting from the actions of the new Trump administration. To date, the president has issued 150 executive orders in his first 120 days—compared with 220 total during his first term, from 2017 to 2021.
It’s been a maddening period, marked by tariffs that raise consumer prices, mass deportations, broken alliances, sweeping federal budget and workforce cuts, slashed research funding for colleges and universities, the politicization of public institutions, efforts to defund NPR and PBS, and the rollback of transgender rights.
No president has carried out such erratic and dramatic actions in such a short time. Franklin D. Roosevelt took bold action with the New Deal, and Lyndon B. Johnson did the same with the Great Society. But FDR and LBJ pursued their agendas in a more statesmanlike manner—one the American public could better understand.
I had dinner recently at a friend’s home. During the evening conversation, she told me about her growing fear over what’s happening in America. Each night, she reads a narrative about how events unfolded under Adolf Hitler in Germany.
It’s a story of how Hitler cast himself as a victim of the “corrupt” Social Democrats, railed against elites and cultural “degeneracy”, claimed the education system was indoctrinating children, and promised to return Germany to greatness. Some excerpts from her nightly reading include:
- Hitler appointed German oligarchs as his economic advisers. With the working class divided along cultural and ethnic lines, the Nazis shut down unions and banned strikes. Progressives and trade unionists were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps. Corporate profits soared while working-class Germans lived paycheck to paycheck.
- Hitler, who became a billionaire while in office, knew he and his inner circle could get away with it if they constantly had an “enemy within” to blame. A small minority was an easy target. Hitler removed birthright citizenship from Jews and began mass deportations, claiming they were “illegally” in the country.
- He wasted no time dismantling democratic institutions. Loyalty wasn’t just encouraged—it was demanded. Opponents were silenced. Media that questioned him were vilified as “the enemy” and “Marxists.”
- The Nazi regime and its followers collected and burned books they considered “degenerate” or what would be called “woke” today. They targeted books promoting class consciousness. Berlin had a thriving LGBTQ community in the 1920s and even the first transgender clinic. The Nazis burned it to the ground. LGBTQ people were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear triangle badges. Many were killed.
- Nazis saw manhood as under threat by independent women. In 1934, Hitler declared, “A woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children, her house.” Laws protecting women’s rights were repealed, and new ones restricted women to their roles as wives and mothers. Reproductive rights were severely rolled back. Doctors who performed abortions could face the death penalty.
- Despite all this, most Germans didn’t believe the sky was falling. Most went on with their lives—until many of their lives were snuffed out. By the time Hitler’s regime was ended by the Allied Powers, 11 million people had been murdered in the Holocaust, and an estimated 70 million to 85 million died in World War II.
Does this narrative sound familiar?
Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt have documented how democracies slide into autocracies. In a recent New York Times essay, they wrote: “Today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines.” They describe this process as “competitive authoritarianism”—a system where parties still compete in elections, but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., calls the current situation “five-alarm urgent.” He warns that if Democrats don’t get their act together soon, “we might not actually have an election that Democrats can compete in 2026.”
That’s a tough message. But as Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt remind us: “America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible. But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines.”
We cannot afford to act as if the sky isn’t falling. We must ensure America continues on its journey of liberty and justice for all.
Scott Widmeyer is co-founder of The Overlook. Reach him at scott@theoverlooknews.com.
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