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I recently came across this video from the NYT. It is titled: "We're experts in Fascism. We're Leaving the U.S."
Not to boo my outgroup too much here (and that's not the point of this), but holy shit this video is bonkers. The logical jumps these people are making, their inability to understand or recognize that they are explicitly not living in a fascist dictatorship when they work for the largest newspaper in the country publishing content about how the leader of the country is a giant fascist. This video is frightening to me for the following reason:
What does the deprogramming effort for all of this eventually look like? Or does it happen?
These people (not necessarily the ones in the video, but the ones who might watch this type of video earnestly) seem convinced that we are living in a society which is comparable in some way to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
I guess I have to stop myself here to check my biases: are we? Just to look at the most obvious thing here, the press, the answer is unequivocally: no, or perhaps even "fuck no, lol".
Or the military? It seems like we have the most powerful military on earth, and are essentially not using it at all.
As far as ICE: ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense, and the response was that the Federal Government largely pulled out of the area (Minnesota) where they were deployed. This is while local residents are doing things like stalking federal law enforcement, setting up various checkpoints, and delaying "rapid response forces" to track their movements.
Would Hitler have tolerated this? Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
Okay I'm talking to myself here: no we are not even remotely close to anything even remotely like a fascist dictatorship. By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
So deprogramming: has there been any serious discussion about what this will look like? It's been on my mind for a little over a year now. Here was the positive realization I had about it: it's not necessary. The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs. This is not part of a larger system of beliefs that all build on top of one another. These ideas are mostly just sitting on their own. They are a collection, not a system.
So this means that deprogramming isn't so much a process of unwinding everything, it's just a matter of installing a new set of ideas. Deprogramming could happen in a few days, for some people it could probably happen in a single episode of John Oliver or Rachel Maddow.
Realistically this was a happy realization to me. Am I wrong to think this?
It was a decade and a half before Nazi Germany, but the Ruhr Uprising set up a left-wing paramilitary that drove the right-wing paramilitaries of 1920 Germany out of town.
The fact that the answer was "no", whereas the Weimar Republic's answer was "well, maybe for a few weeks, tops", was part of the background that let Hitler seize power. Psychologically, fascism is basically what you get when the human sense of disgust goes out of control, and if you want people's disgust reactions to go overboard then the most powerful scenario is a combination of enemies that disgust them and "friends" who normalize going overboard in reaction.
Minnesota is no Ruhr Uprising - the death count is still around "two", not "a thousand" - but it's also not a situation that would have seemed incongruous in Wiemar Germany. It's vastly less significant in scope, but it's not in a different category.
Perhaps what is most different is the bulk of public reaction? The Ruhr Uprising spooked the median German more than its suppression did, and opposition vs support for that suppression was divisive even among leftist factions there. Opposition to current ICE practices, on the other hand, has expanded well past the median American and is still climbing. Some opposition to ICE is still an expression of unthinking disgust, and in particular the sort of anti-border-control protestors who are "reinventing borders from first principles" with Minnesota checkpoints are about as anti-fascist as the "Anti-fascist Protection Rampart" was, but groups becoming fascist while decrying fascism may come out ... weirder ... than historical groups who went fascist deliberately.
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