As I’ve said a hundred times, there were also *tons* of Nazi voters who thought that Hitler fella went a bit overboard on the antisemitism but they thought he was good on the economy and also the socialists were scary, and anyway one clearly shouldn’t take him seriously. https://twitter.com/libbyjones715/status/1308993110412849152

That isn’t hyperbole or me reframing the past to fit the present. That is literally how it went.

If you voted for Trump, congratulations: you now know what you would have done in 1930s Germany, and that’s just something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life whether or not you want to admit it to yourself.

Being “low information” doesn’t change that.

Nor does it provide you with an excuse.

You did what you did.

What you *really* don’t have one single goddamn excuse for is doing it a second time.

And honestly, I think we all need to be really clear-eyed about that, no matter how painful it is.

We have to live in the same country with Trump voters. Many of us have to go to work with them. Some of them are members of our families.

Some of them are people we love, people we thought were decent human beings. Some of them are people who were kind and good up until now and may even be that in a lot of ways.

We have to live with them. But we should never forget what they did.

There may be friends and neighbors and members of your family who you now know would have voted for the Nazi party.

That’s really painful and dismaying, but it’s true.

Never forget it.

Never trust those people again.

By the way, this is not moral superiority. This is historical-sociological analysis.

We *all* have to take a step back and consider what we’re doing right now and what it means in the context of the social and historical forces at work.

I’ve been really uncomfortable about that and myself. What I’m doing now. What I would have done then. Is it enough? I often don’t feel like it is. I’m not sure I would have been on the right side of history either.

2020 America is in many ways not a perfect analogue to 1930s Germany. Every historical period and event is distinct.

But it’s very similar.

What you are doing now is probably what you would have done then.

That should give so, so many of us a lot of pause. If it makes you uncomfortable, it should. If you feel like you’re 100% better than someone who voted for Trump just because you don’t like Trump and don’t intend to vote for him, think again.

What I’m saying is that we need to confront these facts:

A) it can happen here
B) it is happening here
C) “what do I do” is actually a really hard question to answer
D) you have agency
E) there are a lot of people in this country who cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

They aren’t evil people, the people who voted for Trump. They’re human like anyone. We can’t exile them to some island somewhere, nor should we. We have to figure out how to live with them.

But when the chips are down, we now know that we can’t trust them.

Don’t forget.

So what we do with them is we do absolutely everything we can to strip power away from the people they vote for and keep that power out of their hands.

We rearrange the system to minimize the harm we can’t trust them to not do.

And if what you’re doing now is what you would have done in Nazi Germany, you should think long and hard about what it says about you if you don’t intend to vote.

There are all kinds of totally legitimate reasons for being so disgusted with Biden, with the Democrats, and with the entire system that you want nothing more than to sit this one out.

But you can’t. Or you can, but please understand what that choice means.

(I’m sympathetic to “I live in a blue state so my vote doesn’t matter, I can protest-sit it out without doing any damage” and I mean I guess but again please pretend you’re in 1930s Germany and say that again and listen to how it sounds)

On the one hand I think that’s true to a degree but on the other hand one of the hardest and most painful things about the truth I’m articulating is that it’s more complicated than that. https://twitter.com/evilangela/status/1309573529377976320