According to the history of Weimar Germany, this seems nothing like that, though. They enforced their views with guns. We reinforce our views with protests. Yes, there are some crazy folks with guns, but that's different than the politicians themselves having a personal military that they use to purge opponents.

However, I'd love a deep historical perspective – it would be fascinating if there were parallels to be drawn. But, are there any?

The historical comparison is not that great. About half of the American population is not unemployed and at the risk of starving. Most of the production of food and resources is not being sent to nearby countries in the form of payments for a lost war. There is no hyperinflation that is causing a massive drop in living standards.

In the Weimar Republic, KPD and NSDAP parties representation in the Bundestag, as distinct parties with relatively large representations.

In 1932, the KPD had 360k members, 5m+ votes, and 14-17% of the electorate. From 1928, the KPD was basically the Stalin party. They believed that the SPD (most analogous to modern-day "Democrats" in USA) were fascist, let alone the NSDAP.

There is no modern equivalent to the KPD in contemporary American politics. The most left-leaning elected officials in the Bundestag-equivalent would have been SPD members. The fringe militant people on the left in the USA do not have any political representation at the federal level, mostly because they do not exist in meaningful numbers, certainly not anywhere approaching 10-17%.

I think that 10-17% might exist on the right (it is probably closer to 5%), but especially after this year, it will become clear that the Republican Party (more analogous to the CDU, historically) is not their party.

If history is cyclical, Trump will form his equivalent of the DNVP shortly, which will not be radical enough for the people storming the Capitol today. This election and transfer of power might be the American Dolchstoß moment, in retrospect. I really hope we've learned.

Who are the two fringe groups? By citing Weimar Germany, and then going into "two fringe groups", you are putting Anti-Nazi organizations on the same moral level as Nazis. You do see the problem with that right?

The left he/she is referring were not anti-nazi, they were pro-communist, and almost uniformly pro-soviet groups that argued that the ruling social democratic government had betrayed the working class.

The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.

Yup. Remember during the rise of Hitler, he was able to consolidate power because the CENTRIST government at the time agreed to work with Hitler to achieve short-term political objectives.

Well, now... To be fair the Weimar Republic was a political turmoil. It is not like the Nazis had "gas the Jews" in their party programme. They established themselves over 10 years, and due to the instability f any political coalition in the government they were able to maneuver themselves into a position where they could force events forward.

People seem to think the Nazi party showed up on the stairs of the parliament demanding genocide and war. In reality it was a 14 year progression of bad options, political turmoil and very hard choices to defend extremely weak coalitions. Were those choices good? Obviously not. Can we judge them after the fact? I would say no.

Maybe it wasn't in the party program, but everyone knew what SA violence meant and Hitler had been pretty explicit about his views of the racial supremacy of the Germans and what he thought should be done to the Jews in particular as far back as Mein Kampf.

Maybe if the NSDAP had campaigned with "we want to gas all the Jews" they wouldn't have won so many votes, but nobody can say that NSDAP voters could have been ignorant of the general tendency. In fact, I think this kind of "we couldn't have known what would happen" is IMHO revisionism.

The truth is that, while everything about economic depression, the political instability of the system, the KPD and SPD being unable to cooperate, etc., were important factors, it remains true that a large segment of the German population were totally OK with ideas of German imperialism, revanchism and anti-semitism, otherwise Hitler's rise to power would never had happened.

I completely agree. What I wanted to convey was that I do not think the events leading up to Hitler becoming Kansler can be easily summarised.

The simplified story of the nazi rise to rule removes one of the most important lessons that can be learned from it: the watchfulness required to protect democracy.

We don't need to watch out for the big step because those will be easily.spotted anyway, but for the many, many small ones.

The two fringe groups were not Nazis and anti-nazis. They were Nazis and communists. The communists had their own agenda, they were not simply anti-nazi.

There was also a large group of more centrist liberals that were more focused on stuff like trade unions and public sector unions. Hitler realized he could work with this group as long as he agreed to meet their short-term political goals.

And to your point, the KPD, along with their militant wing Antifaschistische Aktion, attacked the SPD far more aggressively than they attacked the Nazis.

When both extremes are saying that the other side should face death or life imprisonment as well as anyone that defends that extremist, what those groups actually stand for becomes irrelevant.