They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

I agree with your statements here, and I've been trying to figure out how to have some of these conversations with my Trump-supporter friends.

"He's planning to put migrants in Gitmo." But Gitmo has already existed through red and blue administrations. It's not like it's a brand new concentration camp.

"Look at the laundry list of executive orders." But Biden did a bunch of EOs early on too.

Both sides have done tariffs. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed in a drone strike under Obama.

The Patriot Act and the 100 Mile Border Zone undermined the Fourth Amendment years ago.

We've permitted corruption and insider trading for congresspeople for years.

The fact is, we've had bipartisan "fascism" creeping up on us for decades. I don't even know where to start with root causes, and everything is so damn historically muddy that it's hard to persuade someone who genuinely believes that "Trump & Elon just want less government spending" that they're not using their exceptional powers for good.

> Eventually it means the word nazi lost all of its meaning. And all of its usefulness to defend ourselves.

In my experience, most of the people who get accused of being Nazis do turn out to be actual Nazis. Sometimes they are stupid enough to make overt Nazi gestures (e.g. Elon Musk) which is pretty much the only way the average person will accept that someone is a Nazi. Much more frequently they turn out to agree with Nazi ideas such as ethnic cleansing, but do not do the salute, and people will say they're not really a Nazi because they didn't do the salute.

> Whether it’s Biden’s fault or not is irrelevant

> again, whether that was Trump’s doing or not is irrelevant

For democracy to work, you need voters with a good enough civics education to understand how the different parts of government interact, and a trustworthy media providing factual news so voters can understand the dilemmas their politicians are facing.

If what you're saying is right, and American voters are unable or unwilling to understand how their vote and current events combine to cause certain outcomes, doesn't that mean democracy in the US cannot possibly work?

What you're describing sounds closer to a popularity contest or a sports competition than politics.

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Personally, I believe a major part of this issue is caused by the political system and media landscape of the US.

In a two-party system as in the US, the legislative only represents half the population (as bipartisan efforts are rare), leading to resentment among the other half.

In a mixed-member proportional system[1], as in Germany, New Zealand and many Scandinavian countries, you end up with many more different parties in parliament (Germany currently has 8 [2]). For any law to pass, you need multiple parties to work together, which allows more voters to be represented.

Similarly, while in Germany newspapers and public broadcasters still provide high-quality news (less than 20% of the population distrust the public broadcasters and major newspapers as of June 2024 [3]), in the US the media tried to improve their ratings by replacing factual reporting and analysis with ever more emotional content.

The level of polarization in the US as it is today will lead to a new civil war, or worse, if it continues. How can a democracy continue if the majority of voters cannot even agree on basic facts?

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The perfect example for this is the discussion around the re-categorization of Pluto. Which has no real-world impact on anyone, yet everyone had an immutable opinion on.

The arguments for categorizing Pluto as a dwarf planet were relatively simple: We've found many other objects like Pluto. They're more similar to one another than to the other planets. Some of them are larger and heavier than Pluto. Either our solar system has 17 planets, or it has 8.

But the arguments against re-categorizing Pluto were of a very different nature. People had spent a lot of effort memorizing the planets in school, and didn't want all that effort to be wasted. People were emotionally attached to the way things had been. People preferred the emotional comfort of something that wasn't real, over the inconvenient truth.

One argument is based on logic and scientific fact, the other on emotional attachment to a middle-school understanding of the world.

The Enlightenment once replaced the emotional, religious order of the world with scientific fact and logic. This is the basis the US and modern democracies are based upon.

How did we end up in a situation where half of the political spectrum wants to tear down the very foundation of democracy and replace it with emotion, religion and tradition, medieval concepts we had long left behind?

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1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU

2. https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2021/e...

3. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-repo...