As well-meaning publishers try to navigate the coming storm of state laws against diversity, I hope they'll consider Timothy Snyder's Rule #1 (from his slim book ON TYRANNY).
Yep. The trajectory is most often:
- progressive social change
- cishet conservative anxiety over privilege loss
- rising authoritarians promise return to golden age,
- simplify complex social issues into us/them scapegoating,
- insist on suspension of democratic norms to eliminate threat
I'm going to need some proof for this one.
Hitler's rise was not predicated by progressive social change.
Quite the opposite, it happened in the wake of Germany's impoverishment by the debts imposed in the treaty of Versailles.
a lot of resentments built up over the "cosmopolitanism" of Weimar urban cultural revival of the mid-late 1920s not 100% castigating intellectuals, gay and jewish people, for one
No the scapegoating definitely was part of the Nazi's platform historically.
You can try to clean it up by blaming the national debt incurred by the treaty of Versailles, but there were a great many people in Germany who were willing to work to pay that debt rather than taking the lazy route of
simply deeming it too hard to repay and cancelling the debt through further warfare as the Nazis proposed.
And tempting as that might have seemed to an impoverished people?
Those people could've looked at how the Nazis discriminated against Jewish people and other Germans not part of the Nazi's
"idealized society" and decided that made supporting them not worth the "national glory" the Nazis promised.
It's not as simple as Germany being in debt. If Germans had adhered to other principles than the ones the Nazis proposed, the Nazis could not have risen to power.
