Howie's daily column is powered by Lyric Kitchen · Bar
Duluth likes to think of itself as different. Smaller. More grounded. Too weathered, too practical, too neighborly to lose its footing the way bigger places do. We shovel each other’s sidewalks. We nod at strangers in winter. We trust the election judges who show up every November in wool sweaters and sensible shoes because they always have. We assume the system will keep humming along because it always has.
But spend a little time lately listening — really listening — to how people talk about politics in coffee shops along Lake Avenue, in the back rows at City Hall, or standing in line at the grocery store when the temperature drops to ten below and patience runs thin. There’s a new edge there. More suspicion. Less grace. More certainty that the other side isn’t just wrong, but dangerous. Not the sound of collapse. Something quieter. The sound of civic habits wearing thin.
America has never been very good at learning from history without either panicking or pretending it doesn’t apply. Mention Germany in the 1930s and the conversation derails immediately. Someone reaches for the nuclear analogy. Someone else rolls their eyes and shuts it down. End of discussion. Which is convenient, because the real lesson isn’t about goose-stepping villains or obvious evil. It’s about what happens before that — when democracies grow exhausted.
The Germany that matters here wasn’t already lost. It was the weary democracy that came first — the Weimar Republic — where elections still happened, courts still functioned, newspapers still published, and almost none of it felt legitimate anymore. People didn’t wake up wanting authoritarianism. They woke up tired. Tired of chaos. Tired of humiliation. Tired of politics that felt like permanent trench warfare. They stopped believing the system deserved their patience.
That part should feel familiar.
Germany didn’t abandon democracy because people hated freedom. It abandoned democracy because too many people decided freedom wasn’t working. They wanted strength. Clarity. Someone to break the stalemate and punish the people they blamed for it. When that figure arrived, power didn’t change hands through violence. It happened legally. Procedurally. Almost politely. The guardrails didn’t collapse all at once. They were leaned on, mocked, stepped around — until they stopped meaning anything at all.
Duluth is not Weimar Germany. The United States is not on the brink of dictatorship. Anyone saying otherwise is selling fear. But that doesn’t mean the warning signs are imaginary.
For Jewish communities especially, Germany’s democratic collapse is not an abstraction or a classroom exercise, but the beginning of a lived historical trauma — which is precisely why careless analogies do more harm than good.
Democracies don’t fail when institutions disappear. They fail when people decide institutions no longer deserve respect.
Listen to the language now — not just from politicians, but from neighbors. Courts are corrupt unless they rule the “right” way. Journalists are enemies if they ask the wrong questions. Elections are legitimate only if our side wins. Political opponents aren’t misguided — they’re traitors, invaders, existential threats. That language didn’t originate in Germany, and it doesn’t belong to one party here. But history is clear about what happens when it becomes normal.
Authoritarianism never arrives announcing itself as tyranny. It shows up calling itself common sense. It promises to fix what democracy supposedly broke. It asks for trust “just this once.” Emergency measures become habits. Norm-breaking becomes refreshing. Cruelty gets rebranded as toughness. And every step feels survivable because the last one didn’t end the world.
Duluth has long taken pride in boring competence. In institutions that didn’t need cheerleading because they simply worked. In the radical idea that losing an election didn’t mean the end of the city or the country. That muscle memory is weakening. You can feel it at City Hall, where every debate feels existential. You can feel it online, where bad faith is assumed before words are read. You can feel it in winter conversations that turn sharp faster than they used to, when patience used to be part of the culture.
This is how democracies grow fragile. Not through coups. Through habits. Through language. Through the steady erosion of restraint. Through the belief that rules only matter when they’re convenient.
History isn’t asking Duluth to panic. It’s asking us to pay attention.
Are we still willing to lose elections without trying to burn down the system? Are we still willing to accept court rulings we don’t like because the alternative is worse? Are we still able to see neighbors as neighbors instead of avatars in a national culture war imported wholesale from cable news and social media?
Here is the uncomfortable truth: the guardrails don’t protect themselves. They rely on habits — patience, respect, restraint — that disappear quietly. Once they’re gone, they don’t come back just because we decide we miss them.
Germany learned that too late. We don’t have that excuse.
Duluth isn’t special because it’s immune to history. It’s special because it has the chance to learn from it — early, locally, quietly — before the floor starts creaking any louder.
History isn’t pointing a finger at this city. It’s holding up a mirror.
And it’s asking a simple question, right now, in real time: are we still willing to live by the rules we inherited — even when we’re angry, even when we’re losing, even when breaking them would feel good?
That’s the test. It always has been.
And it’s being administered every day, in small moments — at City Hall, on Lake Avenue, in winter conversations between neighbors — in a place that still wants to believe democracy is more than a slogan.
