You’re expressing all the same dark imaginings I’ve been having. We sheltered Americans have always thought such things only happened in faraway, God-forsaken places like Beirut and Sarajevo. Not in the exceptional, God-blessed United States of America. Such complacency only facilitates and hastens the coming catastrophe.

Friends to whom I speak these thoughts smugly dismiss them as overwrought, alarmist hyperbole. But the alarm is real, and the threat is not exaggerated. It has become an accepted truism that any comparison to Hitler’s Germany automatically invalidates any further discussion. But the resemblances are too plain to ignore. We are closer than anyone wants to admit to Kristallnacht and Buchenwald.

America is not immune to the dire consequences of human folly. There was a time when I could not have imagined I would witness the demise of the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; and yet it happened. The United States of America is no more immortal than Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.

What haunts me above all else is the sense of powerlessness. The tide of history is already in motion, and I fear no power on Earth can hold it back. The groundwork is already being laid for a quasi-constitutional putsch. We peace-loving liberals will be no match for the zeal and ferocity of the latter-day brownshirts armed with 21st-century weaponry.

My only solace is that I probably won’t live long enough to see the worst of it. But I tremble for my children and grandchildren, whose lives will be blighted by the dark times to come. Perhaps my friends are right, and this is all nothing but a nightmare fantasy; I will happily eat my words with relish and gusto. But I fear that chance will not come. May history prove me wrong.