Have you ever looked at the news and noticed a pattern you´ve already seen before? Perhaps some leader using a heroic and salvational speech, or a certain group being blamed for the collapse of an entire system, or even a generation convinced it’s nothing like the one before, and still ending up in the exact same place – if not worse.
“Will we ever learn? We’ve been here before”, sang Harry Styles in “Sign of the Times,” and the feeling behind those words is anything but new. Whether it happens across centuries, battlefields, or halls of government, history tends to come back. And when the past is forgotten, it is rare to return better than before.
Humans have a natural tendency to respond to certain situations in similar ways, driven by primitive, intrinsic emotions and familiar outcomes that span centuries and frontiers. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung discussed on how his patients from different cultures and ages exhibited the exact same archetypes and patterns in dreams and delusions. This led him to propose that, beyond the individual unconscious, there is such a thing as a collective unconscious: a psychic heritage shared by all of humanity, transmitted not culturally but in an almost biological way.
This thesis would explain why society tends to be driven by the same phenomena, such as the cult of personality, the urge to scapegoat someone to carry the burden of their own frustrations, and the delusion that we can outsmart the failures of our predecessors. What’s intriguing is that this instinct seems to hold so much more power over logic than the lessons of history ever did.
WHEN HISTORY WARNS, AND NOBODY LISTENS
An example of this stubborn recurrence is the events of the summer of 1941, during World War Two. In June, the German army launched an invasion of Soviet territory with more than 3 million men, in what became known as “Operation Barbarossa”. The plan was for the operation to be over before winter, but it wasn’t.
The freezing temperatures swept in, and with them, the German advance collapsed. The death toll reached between 800.000 and 1 million soldiers.
This occurrence, however, did not happen only in the 20th century. In 1812, exactly 129 years before Barbarossa, France, too, invaded Russian territory. In the same month of June, with the same goals of finishing before winter, just like the German army, the majority of the French soldiers were destroyed by the cold. Fewer than 100.000 returned.
What is surprising is that the 1812 invasion was extensively documented; the German high command surely knew about it. Operation Barbarossa was not launched in ignorance of the French disaster, but it was carried out in the belief that the outcome would be different, that they would surpass their predecessors. Knowing the past, it turns out, was never quite the same as learning from it.
THE FIRST TIME AS A TRAGEDY, THE SECOND TIME AS A FARCE
As expected, this pattern is also present in social and political contexts. In his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx captured this cyclic dynamic in one of history’s most quoted lines: he writes that history does, in fact, repeat itself, but “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
The tragedy, in Marx’s framing, would be the original. With that, he was referring to Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup, in which he exploited the political instability in France to concentrate power and present himself as the one capable of leading the nation, reinstating much of what the French Revolution had fought to dismantle.
Decades later, his nephew Louis-Napoleon ran the same play during the 1851 French coup d’état (yes, that’s where the term ‘coup’ or ‘state blow’ comes from). He, the then President of the Second Republic, capitalized on a deep political deadlock and a class antagonism to dissolve the Republic and declare himself Emperor. And this was the farce: a hollow parody of his uncle’s original tragedy, using the same script of power grab, but resulting in an absurd imitation.
THE LEADER, THE ENEMY, THE SCRIPT
As we move into the 21st century, the ‘farce’ has been rebranded for a digital, globalized era. Modern political figures didn’t invent these methods; they just refined a script that reached its most dangerous peak during the mid-twentieth century.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Fascist and Nazi regimes meticulously elaborated the use of “internal enemy” and “myth of national restoration” as tools for mass mobilization and concentration of power. They demonstrated, with brutal clarity, how the promise of a glorious past, whether the Roman Empire or an idealized Germanic era, runs on hatred and the systematic persecution of specific communities. Today, the architecture hasn’t changed; only the farce got a new interface.
Few examples make this method, almost like a formula, more visible than the current administration of Donald Trump. “Make America Great Again” wasn’t his invention; Ronald Reagan used it first, in his 1980 campaign. However, in Trump’s hands, the slogan became something else: a promise of return to a golden past that may never have quite existed, packaged with economic nationalism, border sovereignty, a judiciary reshaped in its image. And then, there’s ICE.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created in 2003, in the aftermath of 9/11, with a specific purpose: targeting foreign terrorists, human traffickers, and high-level smugglers -genuine threats to national security-. Yet under the current administration, the mandate has shifted: the stated goal remains to protect the border and clean up the streets, but the target has changed.
The primary targets are now people who crossed the borders without a visa or overstayed one. Not traffickers, not terrorists. What began as a law of enforcement has developed into something else completely.
The Latino community has become the centerpiece of this operation, with an intense racial profiling motivation. People are being detained and harassed, some of whom, after having their documents checked, turned out to hold valid visas. In official statements, they have often been referred to as “illegal aliens” and are being put in conditions that physically and morally strip away basic human dignity.
Analyzing what has unfolded through 2025 and 2026, it is hard to accept that this is limited to a simple border policy. It seems more like a systematic methodology designed to dismantle the dignity of an entire ethnic group. And this story has already been written before.
A SYMBIOTIC EXCHANGE AND THE MEMORY GAP
But no leader can sustain this script alone; they need a fertile ground of a community that has forgotten its past or lacks historical knowledge. The formula of praising a glorious past to make a comeback extends beyond politics, taking roots in social movements and cultural trends as well. Often, this craving for a glorified era arrives disguised as nostalgia, and its followers rarely consider what that past actually meant, or what rights they would be giving up for it.
The rise of the “tradwife” (traditional wife) aesthetic on TikTok is proof of that. Influencers such as Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman, the “Ballerina Farm”, had gathered millions of followers on TikTok with highly aesthetic videos featuring cooking, baking, homemaking, and a glimpse of the ‘young mom’ lifestyle.
Alongside this sits the “trophy wife” trend (over 60k videos tagged on TikTok): young women talk openly about wanting to marry a ‘rich man’ who will financially support them, while they focus on leisure pursuits, such as pilates, manicures, reading, and baking.
While there’s nothing wrong with women choosing family, domestic life, or a quieter rhythm, it is tricky when an aesthetic is built to romanticize an era when women had no power to choose at all. When this is done, they risk giving up the citizenship and hard-won autonomy that our ancestors (such as the suffragettes) fought so much for.
Alongside this trend, a darker, more aggressive movement has taken hold among Gen Z men: the Redpill philosophy. As explored by The Guardian, it stands for the return of male supremacy, social hierarchy, narrative of victimhood, and resentment towards feminist achievements.
The numbers are hard to ignore: according to a study by King’s College London, 31% of Gen Z men agree that a wife should always obey her husband. When such a significant part of a generation sees equality as a personal loss, it provides the social oxygen authoritarianism needs to breathe.
Progress is not linear, nor was it ever guaranteed to be permanent. Brazil offers, perhaps, the most striking example of what happens when a generation forgets.
After the 2022 elections, followers of the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, gathered in front of military headquarters across the country, demanding that the army intervene in politics. They alleged that the results of the voting were altered by fraud, a claim that was not substantiated.
The irony leans on the fact that Brazil lived under a military dictatorship for 21 years (from 1964 to 1985), which began with exactly the kind of coup they were now cheering for. Some groups went even further, calling for the return of the AI-5: the Fifth Institutional Act enacted in 1968, which suspended political rights, enabled arbitrary arrests, and silenced the press.
Some people have simply forgotten. Others have never learned.
AND WILL WE EVER LEARN?
So, will we ever learn? Perhaps the right question is: do we even want to?
We´re looking at two types of historical recurrence: on one hand, the leader who knows the formula by heart and chooses to repeat it because they know it works. On the other hand, citizens who romanticize a past they never lived, embracing aesthetics and ideals without questioning what that era actually cost to those who had no voice in it.
But one cannot exist without the other; the leader who sells the script of a glorious past needs an audience that doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know, what that past may have truly looked like.
Maybe, after reading all of this, it is tempting to believe this cycle is unbreakable; after all, part of it is literally built into our unconscious.
Yet, in awareness, the cycle begins to crack. George Santaya once said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Perhaps, if a society knows the script, it won’t be doomed to repeat farce after farce, as Marx put it.
The point is not if history repeats itself or not, but whether we are willing to study it before deciding if it is worth bringing back -and whether something has cost too much to a group to ever be romanticized.
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The article above was edited and translated by Ana Beatriz Carvalho Sapata.
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