As it becomes increasingly clear – barring a miracle – that most Senate Republicans seem poised to excuse a fascist insurrection, certain horrors long past are beginning to impinge on the present.

I don’t mean to suggest that history is perfectly positioned to repeat itself. America has practiced democracy for more than 220 years, whereas Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic died at the age of 14. But hear me out:

In 1923, a fascist crank named Adolf Hitler decided to stage a violent coup against the democratic government. He knew that the majority of Germans were against him, but he didn’t care; he wanted to demonstrate “what a minority can do if it is gripped by a righteous nationalistic drive.” Starting with a speech at a Munich beer hall, he vowed “to restore Germany’s greatness” by marching with his goons all the way to the Berlin capital, where top members of the democratic government would “hang from the lampposts.”

His cultists – most notably, his right-wing militia fighters – weren’t great in number. But they compensated with fervent allegiance to his Big Lie that Germany had not really lost the Great War, that instead Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by socialists, democrats, and Jews who’d stolen its greatness. His rallies were advertised in advance as “gigantic gatherings.” He bellowed that Germany had been “swindled,” and that the Weimar constitution was “illegitimate.” One fan wrote in 1923 that his Munich rallies were intoxicating: “A cheer goes up that lasts for minutes when, full of rage, he skewers the acts of those who govern us.”

He preached that “political agitation must be primitive.” But his march to Berlin didn’t get much farther than the beer hall – it was thwarted by the police – and Hitler was put on trial for treason. But the court slapped him on the wrist, and his jail term was barely a year. Most Germans nevertheless assumed that he and his incipient movement had been quashed forever. They blithely moved on; he and his followers did not. In prison, writing his seminal book, his initial focus (in the words of journalist-historian Peter Ross Range) was “on revenge. With more than four years of grievances to redress against all manner of adversaries, Hitler wanted to attack every establishment figure, left-wing political force, or national government official who’d ever crossed him.”

But Hitler knew that he needed to undermine the Weimar Republic from within. He needed willing accomplices – whether motivated by opportunism or marinated in ignorance, it didn’t matter – who would grease the path to power. Some were true-believing QAnon-type nutjobs who got themselves elected to the Reichstag, ultimately in sufficient numbers to sabotage the legislative process, but many more were cynical or lazy operatives who didn’t take the threat seriously or didn’t care whether it was serious. Ten years after the Beer Hall Putsch, all vestiges of democracy were gone.

As I wrote on the eve of the fateful 2016 election, “it can happen here.” What more evidence do we need? Even after the failed Beer Belly Putsch of 2021, even after the cult leader had gotten people killed, 139 House Republicans and eight Senate Republicans still objected to the certification of the free and fair democratic election. And today, even after the impeachment managers’ devastating presentation of an open-and-shut case, most of the GOP “jurors” are still shoving their heads up their rear apertures.

To quote the philosopher George Santayana (and I know you’ve heard this one before), “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s not uncommon for democracies to be fatally undermined from within – Germany back then, Turkey and Hungary more recently – and we can’t afford to flatter ourselves with the delusion that we’re simply destined to be different.

President Biden is doing his best to demonstrate that democracy can still function and deliver. But we have to do our part, using the ballot box – as we did in 2020 – to crush the incipient enemy before it metastasizes. There is no substitute for eternal vigilance. From this point forward, there can be no rest.