Sure, the slippery slope to insanity is real. Germany had an educated society, it wasn’t meant to be possible. I know all that.

But no, I don’t see Nazism happening in America in the 2020s. Because 1930 was not “just like” today. There’s been no recent catastrophic war trauma. There’s no mass unemployment without social insurance. Scientific racism is not the trendy new theory of the day. Millions of people are not talking about minorities the way they openly talked about Jews in the 1920s (quite the opposite: a big section of America is gripped by a quasi-religious fervor which turns minority power dynamics upside down).

And anyway, America is not Germany, and was not Germany even back then. Perhaps something like Italian fascism might have broken through in America without FDR, maybe. But Nazism was never possible in libertarian America, the political culture was just not there. And so it’s certainly not there today.

I am not as ignorant as you think I am, and I see that there’s a big problem. For one, a large minority of young people don’t even claim to care about democracy any more.

But Trumpist Republicans are not “literal nazis” and whatever’s coming is not going look anything like Nazism. At worst it will look like a pale version of what’s already happening in places with less strong liberal traditions than America. For example Brazil, Turkey, Philippines, India, Poland. Whatever you call that, it’s nothing like Nazis or Nazism.

Semi-ontopic addendum: I am disagreeing with you and the other person respectfully and (I hope) thoughtfully, and getting downvoted for my trouble. Downvoting makes my comment less visible. Silencing someone solely for their opinion, is that not a form of the fascism that people here claim to abhor so much? Personally, I never do this to others, and every downvote I get for expressing my view in good faith puts me one step closer to leaving Lemmy, which apparently is no better than that other place after all.