There was only one problem. One country alone (guess who?), America, chose to ignore that lesson — hoping, perhaps, that it was exceptional. Today, sadly, we know that it isn’t. Stagnation did to America in the 2000s precisely what it did to Germany in the 1930s. America repeated the same vicious cycle of democracy imploding into fascism, authoritarianism, hate, and violence — in striking, eerie ways. It’s not a coincidence — it’s causal: America never accepted that poverty has real social costs, and here it is, paying precisely those costs of destabilization, distrust, polarization, and fragility.