Sometimes protecting your party means drawing a line inside your party.The story of Josef Ganz has been on my mind—not because history repeats itself exactly, and certainly not because today’s DSA is the Nazi Party. It isn’t.
The warning is subtler than that.
Josef Ganz was a Jewish German engineer and automobile visionary. Germany was his country. He initially viewed the new government with enough optimism that he welcomed some of its plans for roads and inexpensive automobiles. Then reality came quickly. In May 1933, the Gestapo arrested him on fabricated accusations. His career was systematically destroyed, his life became endangered, and in June 1934 he fled Germany.
Ganz’s story illustrates something deeply human: we tend to believe tomorrow will still resemble yesterday.
We tell ourselves that the extremists are only talking. The institutions will hold. Reasonable people remain in charge. Surely things cannot go that far.
And perhaps most dangerously: I am a citizen. I belong here. It can’t happen to me.
That is where I see a lesson for America today.
Again, the parallel is not that democratic socialism equals Nazism. The parallel is what can happen when a political movement becomes increasingly radical while the larger political establishment hesitates to confront it.
The Democratic Socialists of America are quite open about wanting fundamental change. Their current constitution says they reject an economic order based on private profit and envision popular control of resources and production and economic planning. Their current program goes considerably further, describing the goal of creating a “democratic socialist republic,” drafting a new constitution, and ultimately building a new society rather than merely reforming the existing one.
Those ideas deserve to be taken seriously precisely because their advocates take them seriously.
My concern is that Democrats have become so afraid of conceding even an inch to Republicans or conservatives that too many seem reluctant to confront radical elements developing within their own coalition.
A healthy Democratic Party ought to be capable of saying: We disagree with Republicans, but this goes too far. These ideas are incompatible with what we believe America should be, and these people do not speak for us.
Republicans should be expected to do exactly the same thing when extremism develops on the right and they have. Republicans have demonstrated that a political movement can draw lines against people who once seemed firmly inside its own camp. Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens and others were once influential voices within the broader Trump coalition. Yet when serious ideological divisions emerged, those relationships fractured—sometimes spectacularly. Republicans did not simply say, “We must defend them because they are on our side.”
That is precisely what I believe Democrats must be willing to do with the radical left. Political parties have an obligation to police their own boundaries. Democrats should not be so afraid of giving Republicans a political victory that they refuse to say plainly when elements within their coalition have gone too far.
Political tribalism becomes dangerous when defeating the opposing party matters more than policing your own side.
That is what Josef Ganz’s story makes me think about.
Ganz had every reason to believe in Germany. He had talent, accomplishments and a German identity. Yet none of those things could protect him once the political environment around him fundamentally changed.
The lesson is not to panic.
The lesson is to pay attention early.
Do not dismiss radicals because their objectives sound impossible. Do not assume institutions automatically preserve themselves. Do not keep moving the line of what is acceptable simply because acknowledging the danger might give your political opponents a talking point.
Sometimes the greatest mistake reasonable people make is assuming that everyone else will eventually become reasonable too.
Josef Ganz learned otherwise.
