Honestly, this is how it always is when people are looking back at the rise of an authoritarian regime.

It got so bad and it was so clear long before it got bad that it was going to get very bad, why didn’t any of you stop him? https://twitter.com/natcassidy/status/1246843998842556416

Well, in significant part because people didn’t want to believe it was getting so bad, and also they were effectively indoctrinated into a narrative in which he wasn’t to blame, and also a lot of them actually felt like they were benefitting.

And also a lot of them were more afraid and hateful of an outgroup that posed them absolutely no threat whatsoever.

This is *constantly happening*, it’s a thing human beings do.

What absolutely fucking blows my mind, even though on an intellectual level I *do* understand how it happens, is that there are a significant number of people in this country who still do not understand how bad it is. Almost 10k people are dead and they still don’t get it.

And they still don’t see the pattern we’re following and how perfectly we’re following. They just really do not understand. I don’t see how that’s possible. I know it’s possible but I also can’t get my head around it.

We could end up with a million Americans dead and they’ll be left standing in the wreckage wondering how it happened, wondering who’s really to blame.

I know this is likely because I know history.

After the fall of the Nazi regime there were a lotta Germans who were like “yeah in retrospect that was pretty bad but I dunno, I don’t really know how it happened, shrug”

I forget who said this and it was a while ago and I’m paraphrasing but I will never forget the tweet that laid it out perfectly: “what happened is a smart competent Black man became president and white folks lost their damn minds.”

True story: there is an enduring revisionist narrative out of Germany that a lot of the Wehrmacht weren’t ideological Nazis when in fact we have reams of documents that prove otherwise. They were basically all fucking Nazis. All of them. https://twitter.com/dj_ir0ngruve/status/1246859073372348417?s=21 https://twitter.com/dj_ir0ngruve/status/1246859073372348417

Other true story: Much is made of the military plot to kill Hitler and the men who tried to do it are often painted as heroes but if they hadn’t started fearing that they were getting into a war they couldn’t win they probably wouldn’t have done jack shit.

Hitler was transparently terrible, people knew he was genocidal, no one really wanted WWII, and yet most people were pretty much okay with him. They were okay enough to go along with it, anyway.

Germany has never fully confronted this fact.

I have a very hard time thinking of any country which has gone through something along those lines that has ever truly confronted the complicity and collaboration of the majority of their own populace. We won’t do it either.

This is an absolutely terrible time to know history and a terrible time to be a social scientist and an unbelievably terrible time to be a social scientist with a focus in history and politics and it’s an unending nightmare to be a social scientist who did a dissertation on Nazis

This is why I spend the majority of my days right now playing with fake submarines