Here's an excerpt from They Thought They Were Free, a book about the mindset of ordinary Germans experiencing the rise of the Nazi Government:
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
...
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
March 31, 2025: "Democrats’ approval remains at low point: Poll" - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/5224072-de...
April 4, 2025: "President Donald Trump's approval rating has risen by 5 percentage points among Democrats, according to new polling" - https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update...
So how is all the raucous handwringing helping?
NYT (Apr 23, 2025): "Trump’s Approval Rating Has Been Falling Steadily, Polling Average Shows" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/us/politics/trump-approva...
> Newsweek (Apr 25, 2025): "President Donald Trump's approval rating on immigration is steadily declining, according to numerous polls." https://www.newsweek.com/trump-approval-rating-immigration-f...
Pew Research (April 23, 2025): "Trump’s Job Rating Drops, Key Policies Draw Majority Disapproval as He Nears 100 Days" https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/04/23/trumps-job-r...
Trump just started his term, but it doesn’t seem to be the incremental approach allegedly used by the Nazis.
He is, to quote his former advisor, “flooding the zone with sh*t.” A gigantic burst of terribleness, doing a thousand things at once, leaving everyone disoriented.
That’s quite different from the “every day a little worse approach.”
I suspect the next four years will be gigantic bursts of terribleness, followed by long periods of relief it wasn’t “as bad as it seeemed at first.”
There is no moment of egregious violation. It never comes. Even when the state is clearly totalitarian there were Germans holding out hope that Germany would lose the war. As if that was their final straw.
The salami is purposefully sliced thin enough that one slice on it's own will never provoke enough outrage. How do you hope to oppose that?
Why re-use a strategy that, when we tried it, led to Nazi Germany? Do we expect it to succeed this time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_the_Formation_of_P...
You want to have all the political capital left when that law happens, instead of wasting it defending rotten scraps. Wasting so much energy and political capacity on scraps means there is no energy left when the big things hits, that is exactly where your current strategy is taking you.
> Why re-use a strategy that, when we tried it, led to Nazi Germany? Do we expect it to succeed this time?
People killed Nazis before they came to power, they weren't using legal or nice strategies as defense back then either. That was the wrong way, it only increased support for the Nazis.
We should hold back, let the authoritarians do their thing, until there is critical support against an authoritarian power grab and then act when we have overwhelming strength?
Don't fight back when the terrain favors your enemy even if it is your land, you fight where you can win. War isn't won by who holds the most land, but by who defeats the enemy troops. You need to build support from the people, not do things that lose support.
And no, even the people who watches Fox News do not want USA to become a fascist state, they like their democracy.
It happened in Germany and could happen in USA.
They absolutely do not. We know that.
They are cultists. They will cut off their own foot if it means a "lib" loses his leg.
I find that both right and left media tend to say the same things about the other side. It's a bit wild when you first realize it, when you hear your exact arguments about the others being said by the others about you.
Finding common ground is always the best path. Determine where the actual differences are beyond the meme propaganda, and you may be able to better connect with other world views.
The left tends to be more likely to be correct, however (speaking as someone who identifies with neither.) This isn't a matter of opinion; polls have repeatedly found that Fox News viewers, for example, are less well-informed than people who consume no news at all.
"BSAB" thinking doesn't work. No good reasons remain for pretending that it does. One side is objectively and consistently bad for America... but they are better at herding dull-witted people to the polls, so they are winning.
But detachment isn’t a moral stance; it’s a luxury belief from a world where the system mostly worked. Today, one side has abandoned the rules entirely. Neutrality isn't wisdom anymore. Neutrality is abdication.
"Both sides are bad" was an optimization for an environment that doesn't exist anymore: shared facts, rational actors, institutional guardrails. We live in the failure modes now: information war, procedural collapse, manufactured resentment.
We aren't floating above it. We’re being crushed by it. And the longer we cling to detached cleverness, the more we surrender to people who act without waiting for certainty.
Yes, action without clarity is dangerous. Yes, there are wrong moves that make collapse worse. But paralysis, waiting, hoping, optimizing forever for a world that already ended kills just the same. It only feels cleaner on the way down.
They already moved. We're still here, swirling the last drops of neutrality in our glasses, mistaking abdication for wisdom, even as the last undergirders of the state give way beneath us.
I also see lunacy in terms of economic policies, especially those pushed by progressives like AOC. The party seems a bit too socialist for me, though I appreciate the push for individual liberties when they embrace more classically liberal positions.
January 6, and Trump's subsequent pardon of the rioters, cost you every last drop of the moral authority you need in order to say things like that.
Yes, there is lunacy on the left that does not sleep... but at least their breed of idiot means well. Historically, when you pit the misguided motivations of an AOC against the active malevolence of a Trump, the latter usually beat the former handily. And as usual, when elephants fight, the mice get trampled.
I don't think Jan 6 was good in the slightest. Idiots idioting. But at least those idiots were idioting against federal property and not the property of private citizens - again, both are very bad and inexcusable in my book; I'm just clarifying why I didn't include Jan 6.
Thank you for the insightful discussion.
Really big conditional. A huge amount love fascism, in terms of sharing the same values and desires. How can they resist the allure: "we'll give you everything you want, and you won't even have to work for it by convincing others you're right, because we'll crush those who oppose us".
As long as they believe they'll always be the ones in power (see the crushing dissent part), they see that as a dream come true. Just look at how conservatives have openly opposed due process and judicial checks and balances over the executive branch lately*.
* – Which country am I discussing here? Could be a few lately!
"Don't struggle -- only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."
If fighting back helps your enemy, don't just pause and not fight back. Change the state of the system so that the most effective thing -- fighting back -- is viable.
Get inside their OODA loop. Change the rhythm of things so that it suits your needs and not theirs.
That law was enacted after they thought they had the power to do it, not before as with every salami slicing action. If they think there will be a response, they back off while they continue to slice.
You talk about political capital like it's in a bank account just waiting to be spent, while political capital is being lost through inaction itself, especially in people seeing that it's more rational to run than fight.
Schumer's strategy to wait for 40% unpopularity didn't save any political capital, just the opposite, it demoralized everyone on his side, destroyed resolve, and shattered solidarity.
What is the difference between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_the_Formation_of_P... and https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/trump-actblu...
Intent is already declared, time passes which allows power to consolidate. When would it be easier to act, after several months of power consolidation?
You are crazy if you don't see the difference...
It's not a difference in goal, it's a difference in level of power consolidation. They would already have enacted that law if they thought they had the power to do it, the fact that they haven't means that they think it would cause a response they couldn't win against. As soon as they think they can win, they will do it.
So by not acting now, you ensure that that law is a possibility later.
What do you mean "act now"? Do you want more people to go out and key tesla cars? You think that is going to make fascism less likely? No, stuff like that only strengthens fascism.
People fought Hitler at every turn in his rise to power often using less than legal means and violence, that only made him stronger.
> Imagine I have a neighboring country who's land I want. They have 10,000 citizens, but I only have 5,000 bullets. I have a bullet factory that produces 1,000 bullets a month. Do I invade them right now or do I wait at least 5 months?
Except that country is selling you the bullets, and they say they need to produce more bullets to win even though you just buy them.
My advice: Stop selling bullets to your enemy.
Your response: But they have so many bullets, we need to make more to defend ourselves, and of course we can't stop selling bullets since that will crash our market!
Like, each of those positions are fine in themselves, but the combination is devastating.
If I didn't believe in you then I wouldn't explain these things, I do it since I think things can change for the better.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-appro...
So we can conclude that all that disparagement of Trump increases his support, or why else would it increase so much? The main thing that decreases support for Trump is when Trump does things like the tariffs, or all the insane stuff he has done so far.
Approval dropping a bit due to Trump doing insane things isn't thanks to Democrats, that is his own fault. You want them to shoot them in the foot like that, like press hard on the insane tariffs etc, don't press on these issues where it is easy to defend him.
Depending on which poll series you look at, it's at or a little below his support an equal time into his first term and either following a similar trajectory or dropping faster. It's true that it is still above most of the rest of his first term because his support dropped throughout the term, and it is a quarter of a year into a four year term.
> So we can conclude that all that disparagement of Trump increases his support, or why else would it increase so much?
It increased, insofar as it did, only when he was out of office. What seems to increase his support is him not having his hands on the levers of power.
Building a personal army and pissing in the woods whilst you drill and prepare for civil war 2.0 electric boogaloo would be an overreaction, this is a strongly worded letter against arresting judges. This is the absolute minimum anyone could possibly be expected to do.
The point of that excerpt is that there is not and likely will never be one single unifying objectionable action that provokes people into acting and we will slow walk our way into atrocity through inaction.
The argument being made is that it will continually get worse every single day. Every action will slowly become more egregious. A judge arrested politically, but for cause, today will be a judge arrested without cause tomorrow, but we will have adapted to see judges being arrested for blatantly political reasons as a new norm.
The facts and nuance will change faster than we can adapt and while we pontificate on whether this is the one that's worth it, the next bad thing will have already happened. More power will have been consolidated.
Taking in the truth requires action, so anything that lets people stay in denial or bury their heads is clung to in order to protect mental health. Eventually it will be too late, and you will wonder when you should have acted knowing you are no longer able to.
So all I am saying, stop hurting yourself, that only help your enemies. It is not me hurting you, it is you hurting you. This was how the Democrats lost the election, it wasn't Trump that won it was Democrats that lost it by hurting themselves over and over.
In the face of obvious fascism those who would be "turned against" their fellows by dint of honest and justified alarm are already "against" them now. They can only be opposed not convinced. They are either honest villains or live virtually entirely in their fantasy wholly disconnected from reality.