2025, or The Administrative Art of Persona Non Grata
Facing a world in which the extraordinary will become ordinary, and the ordinary may become impossible
In October 1933, a Jewish business owner in Berlin still believed he could weather the storm. His import company remained profitable, despite new regulations. His children still attended school, though they sat increasingly isolated. His family maintained their savings account, not yet knowing that their financial autonomy would soon be stripped away through a maze of bureaucratic measures designed to make survival—let alone escape—nearly impossible.
This methodical destruction of normal life, documented in haunting detail by historians Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus in their landmark 2001 work Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, reveals the true machinery of authoritarian control.
“WITH THE Nazi seizure of power, Germany turned its Jewish community into official pariahs. The Nazi government—through indoctrination, bribery, and coercion—transformed antisemitic prejudices into a mass movement and official state policy.
Despite the confusing, momentary lulls in persecution and the shifts in some policies at the top, Jewish daily life gradually became enveloped by lawlessness, ostracism, and a loss of rights. As Jews went about their lives, most grew increasingly aware of the uneven yet steady growth of hostility and danger around them but remained confused about where it was going or whether it would stop.”
p. 66
The evil intellect of such systems lies not in dramatic displays of power, but in the quiet strangulation of ordinary existence through bureaucratic warfare.
The path to this bureaucratic strangulation began deceptively.
When Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, many Germans (including many Jews) initially dismissed him as a temporary phenomenon. He had come to power legally, after all, in a coalition government where conservatives believed they could control him.
His Nazi Party had actually lost votes in the previous election.
“Still, for most Jews daily life consisted of the commonplace—trying to make a living, nurturing their families, and achieving at school—activities that continued at least until November 1938. They tried to lead “normal” lives while experiencing outward oppression and inward disorientation, tension, and frustration. They tried to cope with practical solutions, sometimes burying themselves in the details.”
p. 66
Even after the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties and the Enabling Act granted Hitler dictatorial powers in March 1933, many still clung to the belief that Germany's strong democratic institutions and constitutional traditions would prevail. This illusion of temporary crisis allowed the regime to begin its systematic program of persecution through seemingly routine administrative measures.
“On the national policy level, the status of Jews deteriorated irregularly and unpredictably, but on a steady decline from 1933 to 1938. On the individual, experiential level, the lives of Jewish women and families were affected unevenly. There were many mixed signals and complicated situations to which individuals responded with hope, fear, or confusion.”
p. 66
The regime's first major legal assault came swiftly. On April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service expelled Jews from government positions, establishing the legal framework for systematic discrimination. This seemingly mundane measure, presented as a mere administrative reform, became a template for what followed. Within months, Jewish doctors lost insurance contracts, Jewish lawyers found themselves banned from courtrooms, and Jewish professors were removed from their lecterns.
“Called the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service to avoid the impression that the Nazis were tampering, this law had enormous implications. It not only applied to the federal civil service, but also reached down to the village level. It pertained to all kinds of officials, judges, the police, university professors, and schoolteachers. The public was told that the law aimed at “the elimination of Jewish and Marxist elements.”
Millions of people were affected by the notorious questionnaires about family background that were part of the law, and follow-up investigations dragged on, guaranteeing lots of snooping. Informers rushed in to settle old scores or to gain some personal advantage from the process.
p. 7
Much like today's authoritarians, who often come to power through democratic means before dismantling democracy from within, the Nazi regime understood that bureaucratic warfare could be more effective than immediate violence. Consider the Reich Flight Tax (“Reichsfluchtsteuer”), initially established in 1931 to prevent capital flight during the Depression.
By 1934, the Nazi regime had transformed this mundane financial regulation into a weapon, requiring Jews who wished to leave Germany to surrender up to 90% of their assets. Yet, this was only the beginning. By 1937, the regime had constructed an impenetrable web of financial regulations: currency exchanges which only allowed Jews to access a small fraction of the value of their money, property transfer restrictions that made relocation virtually impossible, and professional licenses revoked with surgical precision.
The parallels to modern authoritarian strategies such as “Project 2025” are impossible to ignore.
Today's aspiring autocrats understand that you don't need to build walls to trap people; you simply need to make movement impossible through bureaucratic means. You don't need to openly declare certain groups as enemies; you simply need to make their daily existence increasingly untenable through seemingly neutral regulations and selective enforcement. Modern authoritarians have learned that the path to power doesn't require immediate, visible violence. Instead, they begin with administrative persecution: selective tax audits, mysterious denial of routine permits, sudden regulatory investigations, financial restrictions disguised as security measures.
Each action appears legitimate in isolation. Together, they form a net that slowly tightens around targeted groups.
“Frequently it was an outsider, someone who had been out of the country for a couple of years, who could detect the increasing danger which those within the country, who had gradually become accustomed to daily restrictions, no longer saw as clearly.”
p. 70
By late 1938, even after Kristallnacht's very public violence, many German Jews found themselves in an impossible situation: they wanted desperately to leave, but had been so thoroughly stripped of resources that emigration was financially impossible.
Those who could still afford to flee faced another cruel reality: at the Évian Conference in July 1938, called specifically to address the refugee crisis, 32 nations gathered in France to discuss the plight of Germany's Jews. One by one, their representatives rose to offer eloquent expressions of sympathy… and one by one, they refused to raise their immigration quotas. The American delegate noted that even their current quota of 27,370 remained unfilled, despite the crisis. Britain spoke of limited capacity in Palestine. Brazil declared it had no racial problem and did not wish to import one.
This theater of concern masked a deadly indifference. The world's democracies became willing accomplices. This lethal combination of internal strangulation through bureaucratic means and external abandonment through diplomatic cowardice created a perfect trap. The targeted groups became increasingly desperate to escape while simultaneously losing the means to do so. Their very desperation was then used as propaganda against them, painted as proof of their undesirability–and I am further disturbed to make the observation that today's warning signs mirror this historical pattern with precision.
Today's political rhetoric contains echoes of these historical patterns that should have given us pause prior to re-electing Donald Trump.
When leaders openly promise to use administrative powers to target specific groups, we must recognize these statements not just as campaign promises, but as potential blueprints. While such threats are still in the beginning stages of implementation, history teaches us that bureaucratic persecution rarely arrives without warning.
What makes this approach so dangerous is its plausible deniability. If implemented, each restriction could be justified with seemingly reasonable explanations: national security, economic necessity, law and order. It's only when viewed as a whole that the pattern becomes clear: a systematic effort to make life untenable for targeted groups while maintaining a veneer of legitimate governance.
The Jewish experience in pre-war Germany teaches us that the most dangerous period isn't the final act of violence, it is the quiet preparation which precedes it. During this time, society is gradually conditioned to accept the unacceptable.
The extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the ordinary becomes impossible1.
The lesson for modern democracies is clear: The defense of freedom requires vigilance not just against obvious threats, but against the quiet erosion of ordinary life through bureaucratic means. When any group in society finds itself trapped in an ever-tightening web of administrative restrictions, finding themselves unable to work, travel, or exist without constant fear, we should see it as a key signal that democracy itself is in danger.
By 1939, our Berlin businessman understood too late the true meaning of each "routine" regulation he had faced. His import license, canceled. His bank accounts, restricted. His passport, confiscated. His children's school, now closed to them. The visas to safer countries his wife had finally convinced him to try and obtain, denied. That string of seemingly survivable bureaucratic cuts had formed a noose. He could now see clearly what had been true all along: each small regulation, each minor restriction, each seemingly reasonable requirement had been part of a larger design.
We have the benefit of his hindsight.
Today, when we see any group in society being slowly enmeshed in administrative restrictions, we must recognize these patterns for what they are: the first quiet steps toward making the ordinary impossible.
After all, the death of democracy rarely announces itself with fanfare. It arrives quietly, in the form of a thousand bureaucratic cuts, each one seemingly survivable until, suddenly, that Berlin businessman's story becomes our own.
My phrase draws inspiration from Marion A. Kaplan's chapter "When the Ordinary Became Extraordinary: German Jews Reacting to Nazi Persecution, 1933-1939" in Gellately and Stoltzfus's Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2001). The concept also echoes Hannah Arendt's discussion of the "banality of evil" in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), where she explores how extraordinary crimes become normalized through bureaucratic processes. The transformation of normal life into an impossibility was a defining feature of Nazi persecution, as detailed in Victor Klemperer's diaries, I Will Bear Witness (1995), which documented the day-by-day erosion of ordinary existence for German Jews. Kaplan's research particularly emphasizes how Jewish families, especially women, attempted to maintain normalcy even as the mechanisms of persecution systematically dismantled their ability to live ordinary lives.