Hey, McFly!

So anyway, my questions: is such a comparison between the mid-30s and now in any way instructive or enlightening?

The short answer is yes.

It's a little more complicated than that, though. Hitler would have been just another beerhall denizen if there had not been a world-wide economic crisis after WWI. The Great Depression hit the whole of what we call the West pretty hard, and clobbered the Soviet Union (which was having other issues as well), but Germany and the US got hammered a lot harder than the UK and France. The US ultimately had great size, resources, and a tradition of innovation going for it and pulled out of the tailspin, though it was a little scary there for a while. But Germany's fairly recent national incorporation (the nation we recognize as Germany only dates from 1870, and tied its founding to militarism rather than any transcending cultural or political issue), even more recent republican institutions (the first German republic was a direct result of the Kaiser's defeat), and the burden of war reparations was a triple-threat that made the German republic too fragile to withstand the pressures of nationalist extremism in the face of crushing economic disaster.

Those special circumstances aren't exactly reflected now.

The cycles that I'm especially aware of are the economic cycle and the internal American cycle of awakening, reaction, crisis and resolution.

The economic cycle is resembling the late '20s quite a bit -- and I'm not the only one who has noticed this -- which gives cause for concern.

The American cycle is more controversial, but has been traced credibly from the Elizabethan colonizing effort by Bob Strauss and Neil Howe. We would be at the cusp of the transition between reaction and crisis about now, and need to be careful. To jump too soon could result in a catastophe, and we have done it before: we call it the Civil War.

Paying attention to the lessons of history is important because of the insight it can give us into the patterns of our own behavior rather than trying to project the future from a comparison of two disparate adversaries' behaviors to one another.

Nationalist extremists and religious fundamentalists are working on completely different psychological and social models. Americans past and present have a lot in common with each other.

Regards--
Mary Anne