Just as you argue that we shouldn’t place the cause on one man, we shouldn’t place nazism in one period of time. All facets of nazism are always functioning, to a degree, throughout time, in all nations. What differs among nations is to what degree they’re enforcing their sense of “belonging” and killing those who threaten their self-esteem or security.

Trump is no Hitler. However, many developments in post WWI Germany are growing, very slowly, in the U.S. Crudely put, millions of Chinese and Russian workers have humiliated their U.S. warrior/factory counter-parts.

Chinese factory owners buy U.S. luxury apartment and exotic cars. Iraq vets get to kill themselves with opiods. U.S. factory workers drive by homes taken away from them when they couldn’t make mortgage payments. Like Germany, the U.S. has large number of people looking for someone to make “demands” of them, as you so smartly pointed out.

Like Germany, American citizens believe democracy or elections will somehow fix it. I don’t believe it will this time. They’ll find a scapegoat. They’ll be pulverized. They’ll be demonized so no one asks, ‘hey, maybe we should take in those people in the world who aren’t really against us?’

As for the idea that Americans are better people. That makes me laugh (or cry?). Every day, our tax dollars pay for weapons that have been killing thousands of innocent men, women and children in the Middle East for decades. Every day, a child in Yemen dies or loses a limb from one of our bombs, made with tax dollars at Raytheon. Where is the pushback on that? After 4 years the Times did an in-depth story.

Don’t you find it amazing how well such brutal killing is accepted? It’s just the way the world works. We’re no different than the German public in Hitler’s time. Or any nation! For the most part, the public always knows the government is hurting non-citizens but sleeps easier knowing it’s harder for people to attack, or weaken you, when they’re being killed faster than what they might do to you.

In the period of the World Wars, if the rest of the world took the Jews in, either before, during, or even 4 years after WWII (!) then maybe most would not have died. Today, do we taken in the people we bomb in the Middle East? Or those we economically bankrupt in South America? No. All the evil you see in Nazi Germany is alive, strong and well as I write this.

When nations take in refugees, it never lasts long.

The reason people don’t want to think about it is they know, we all know, the answer. We all have a little bit of Hitler in us. We all have a stupid idea of how to fix things through hard work and commitment to our ideals.

How do we change this? We can’t. The best we can do is keep it to a minimum. Even that seems impossible when these forces gather steam.

We have to get to work. We have lunch dates.