There were all kinds of Nazis… and each of them has an equivalent in the MAGA movement.
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Republicans are understandably a bit sensitive when the current MAGA regime is compared to the Nazis.
But if the jackboot fits…
By the way, it would probably be more accurate to say that most Republicans are a bit sensitive about the comparison, but some of them seem to view it as a badge of honor.
But we’ll get to Stephen Miller soon enough.
In any case, we, and many others, including scores of people who study this stuff for a living, believe that there are a striking number of parallels between the early days of the Nazis in the 1930s and those of the current administration.
Those who reject such comparisons argue (correctly) that the Second Trumpire has not committed the same atrocities as the Third Reich, and that the only global conflict it has initiated is a trade war.
That’s true.
However, the Nazis didn’t start building concentration camps right away, and they didn’t invade Poland for more than six years.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the US would ever attack or annex one of its neighbors (or another NATO ally) or round up millions of people… oh, wait, the latter is actually a stated goal of this administration and we wouldn’t rule out the former. After all, Donald Trump doesn’t.
The millions of evangelical Christians who are betraying every value they claim to hold would make excellent “keep your head down and occasionally betray a Jew” type of Nazis.
By those measures, MAGA is even ahead of the curve.
However, this column isn’t about ideological similarities or the use of the same playbook to cement power by trying to bully others and undermine or pervert the rule of law.
It’s about the people doing these things.
Back in the Germany of the early 1930s, there were all types of supporters of Adolf Hitler. Some wanted to make Germany great again and erase the stain of the country’s loss in the Great War of 1914-18. Some wanted to make money. Some only wanted power. Some were sociopaths. Some simply liked waving flags and being part of something.
Some wanted to have somebody to blame for things that didn’t go well in their lives. Some just wanted to be left alone. Some just watched too much Fox News read too much Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the Nazi Party.
Some were evil monsters.
What they all had in common is that they were Nazis.
Sure, there were different types of Nazis with different degrees of culpability. Not all of them knew about all the terrible things their government did, and not all of them would have endorsed them if they had. But they knew to look away and not ask too many questions.
Then you have your bootlickers like Marco Rubio. These are people willing to latch on to any movement if that means they have access to power and can advance their own career. MAGA is full of them because Trump uniquely enables such individuals(more on that later).
There is a MAGA equivalent for all of them.
The millions of evangelical Christians who are betraying every value they claim to hold would make excellent “keep your head down and occasionally betray a Jew” type of Nazis.
The same with moderately xenophobic or racist low- and middle-class Americans who think that “others” are to blame for their struggling to make ends meet.
The whole system doesn’t work without them because an authoritarian regime (initially) does need a critical mass of supporters.
Then you have your bootlickers like Marco Rubio. These are people willing to latch on to any movement if that means they have access to power and can advance their own career. MAGA is full of them because Trump uniquely enables such individuals(more on that later).
Next are those who want to get rich off the Trump regime. This group includes tech bros who don’t want anybody to tell them what to do and also oligarchs who will never get enough (looking at you, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg).
Similarly, the Third Reich had its fair share of industrialists who initially thought that they could control Hitler, before they found out that he was using them.
Everyone in these groups are willing and voluntary participants in the regime.
That is not true for others, like the law firms that made deals with Trump or news organizations who are altering their coverage for fear of repercussions. They were merely the first to submit to a power that they were unwilling to fight.
Speaking of jurists, an authoritarian takeover works best if you have some measure of control over the judiciary, so you need people like Samuel Alito, Pam Bondi, Ed Martin, and countless others.
If you mash up those three, you get a pretty good approximation of feared Nazi judge Roland Freisler.
And, of course, you need boots on the ground because those Jews/immigrants aren’t going to round up themselves (not even in exchange for free flights).
That’s where those masked ICE agents come into the picture (and the cops who are “maintaining order” while injustices are committed in plain sight).
Any federal agent who is a party to these arrests — (as well as the cops who are either doing nothing or aiding and abetting them—) should take a long, hard look in the mirror… because what they are seeing is somebody who would have made a damn fine concentration camp guard.
If you have seen videos of their work, e.g., dragging women through the streets, it’s easy to imagine them in SS uniforms.
And, if you defend them by saying that they are just “enforcing the laws,” keep in mind that this was the excuse a lot of Nazis used after the end of World War II.
There are a couple of problems with that argument.
First, there are the laws themselves. Yes, the SS was (also) “enforcing the law,” but that law was, for example, the “Reich Citizenship Law” or the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” which outlawed marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
Unquestioningly, that was “the law,” but it was discriminatory and unjust.
And then there is the way in which those laws are enforced. It’s possible to arrest somebody, let’s say a young female college student who once wrote an op-ed and is a threat to no one, without slapping cuffs on her and without needing half a dozen masked goons for the job.
Because once you do that, it’s no longer about making an arrest, it’s about sending a message.
In addition, it appears as though ICE agents in many cases are lacking the proper warrants for these arrests, which makes their actions state-sanctioned abductions.
Any federal agent who is a party to these arrests — as well as the cops who are either doing nothing or aiding and abetting them — should take a long, hard look in the mirror… because what they are seeing is somebody who would have made a damn fine concentration camp guard.
In the next installment of this series, we will look at some of the people giving the orders, writing the laws, and engineering the programs that treat some people as though they are less than human. These were the real villains of the Third Reich… and they are the real villains of MAGA.
