As for the question you posed, it's quite clear that you can always find willing executioners. You can mobilize people to commit mass murder, even if those people are themselves not highly ideological. This is the unfortunate lesson of history. [...]
Both yes and no. One on the hand, neither Europe nor the United States has anything like the economic catastrophe of 1929-’33. In Germany in 1932, for example, 25 to 30 percent of the population was unemployed. In the United States today, while there are pockets of devastation, you don't see comparable numbers. It's slightly worse in Europe, however, where you have a nagging 10 percent unemployment in several regions. So Europe today is certainly closer to the Europe of 1932 than the United States, which I think is in a very different economic situation.
Remember also that the great looming menace in the early and midcentury period wasn't Islamic jihadism but the Bolshevik Revolution. In both cases, though, there was a country or a movement around which horrific scenarios could be imagined, and so there was a dire threat that seemingly justified any means to deal with it. [...]
Look, there are plenty of alarming parallels here. Consider what Hitler was offering his coalition of discontents. He was going to end political gridlock, which we have thanks in large part to a Republican Congress that ensured Obama couldn't do a thing. We've had not the kind of economic collapse that Germany suffered, but we've had pockets of it. We've had sustained economic stress and an uneven distribution of prosperity. The people on the wrong end of this clearly gravitated toward Trump.
There's also this sense of cultural decadence, the feeling that the old traditional values are being eroded and therefore we have to make America great again. This is the brilliance of Trump's slogan — it's a perfect conduit for nostalgia.
Lastly, Trump, like Hitler, taps into this sense of humiliation on the global stage. This notion that we're "losing" and everyone's taking advantage of us is very powerful. It's mostly bullshit when you look closely at the facts, but that doesn't matter. The appeal is potent.
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