Time Warp

Recently, I was talking with the sister about the current state of affairs in this country, and I said, quite seriously, that I was concerned that we were becoming Germany of the 30s. She concurred. That keeps nagging me, and I’m not feeling any better about it after having just read a lengthy Billmon diary entry from April 2010 entitled The "Epistemic Closing" of the Conservative Mind
which ends:

The ability of an authoritarian movement to build a powerful false narrative -- and then persuade millions of followers not only to believe it but actively defend it against encroaching reality, even in a more-or-less free society -- was clearly demonstrated in Weimar Germany during the 1920s and ’30s.

[…]

One can hope the peculiarities of time, place and culture explain much, if not all, of the catastrophic success of that previous experiment, which is unlikely to be repeated now.

But I’m not entirely sure it would be the smart way to bet.