What concerns me is that this long rightward swing is happening in the absence of any serious crises.
When the OG Nazis came to power, Germany was in terrible shape. They had lost a catastrophic war and were still being ground under the victors' boot heels, at least in the citizenry's own estimation. Never mind 12% inflation, it went as high as 12 digits in the years leading up to 1933. It's hard to blame them for latching onto someone promising to "Make Germany Great Again," and it's not surprising that they didn't feel an incentive to quibble over the details.
In the past election, US voters treated the price of eggs as an emergency of similar scope. That's about all that was going on. Eggs. Eggs were too expensive. They're even more expensive now, of course, but try telling Fox News addicts that. Can you imagine what things would be like in America -- the quality of the leaders we'd be electing -- if we were facing what Germany faced in the 1930s?
I think that it's partly the manifestation of a cultural trauma response to Obama's election, and mostly white, mostly rural Americans feeling alienated and misdirecting their anger at the effects of globalism and their loss of demographic and cultural hegemony. That aspect of it, at least, was well documented as far back as 2016. Now we've got Musk and the whole neo-reactionary dark enlightenment set cranking it up to 11, because they see a path to power.
A lot of the crisis is manufactured. Remember we live in a post-truth age - many people construct their subjective realities from platforms which have been feeding them conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda for years. They believe Biden created COVID with the CCP. They believe hordes of rapists and killers have been swarming over the southern border. They believe the purpose of DEI and "wokeness" is white male genocide. They have been convinced that America is in the same position that Germans believed they were in was prior to the Nazis, having soaked up so many neo-nazi memes and so much agitprop specifically to make it seem reasonable when the "Nazis" do take over.
When the OG Nazis came to power, Germany was in terrible shape. They had lost a catastrophic war and were still being ground under the victors' boot heels, at least in the citizenry's own estimation. Never mind 12% inflation, it went as high as 12 digits in the years leading up to 1933. It's hard to blame them for latching onto someone promising to "Make Germany Great Again," and it's not surprising that they didn't feel an incentive to quibble over the details.
In the past election, US voters treated the price of eggs as an emergency of similar scope. That's about all that was going on. Eggs. Eggs were too expensive. They're even more expensive now, of course, but try telling Fox News addicts that. Can you imagine what things would be like in America -- the quality of the leaders we'd be electing -- if we were facing what Germany faced in the 1930s?