On Others’ Comparisons of Trump Voters to Nazis

OK, fellow white people*, if you really want, let’s talk about Nazis.

(*People of colour, it’s not that you can’t read this, it’s that you probably already know way better than I could ever put it. But you shouldn’t have to dredge up the emotional energy to confront and educate even more of our ignorance. So.)

From the age of six onward, most of the history I learned at my Jewish day school was about the Holocaust. There are a lot of reasons why this makes me unhappy, but every so often, I am grateful for the most important lesson it taught me:

You don’t have to be evil to do evil.

After one of the most powerful nations in the world elected a man who publicly supports racism, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, ableism, and just about every other -ism there is, I keep reading messages in our media and theirs about what the majority of white people who voted for him aren’t.

Racist. Xenophobic. Homophobic.

Charitably, what the people saying this mean is that many white people who voted for Trump did so in spite of, not because of his bigotry. They refer to economic disenfranchisement. The dismissal of rural concerns by the urban privileged. The aging baby boomers. All true.

Therefore, they conclude, marginalized people should forgive/try to reconcile with/have faith in them, because these people aren’t “Nazis.”

Okay.

So… what exactly do they think actual Nazis were like? How do they think Hitler got a third of the country to vote for him?

We like to tell ourselves the story that it’s because Germans in the 1930s were monsters — the kind of monsters that these white Trump voters aren’t. That their anti-Semitism and homophobia and white supremacism overcame any self-interest or human compassion. They wanted to hurt the people they hated, that was all.

Except that wasn’t all. Germany was a nation, guess what, economically disenfranchised by its leaders, who’d been forced to accept a hugely disadvantageous treaty at the end of the First World War. Inflation was so rampant that the value of money could literally decimate before your next payday, and it was cheaper to burn cash than wood. Like, it was so bad that you had to spend money right when you got it to lose as little buying power as possible.

The tragedy of Hitler’s rise to power and support from ordinary Germans was exactly that: that they were ordinary. People who were scared of not having anything for the future. People angry that a war they had no choice about fighting had robbed them of their way of life. People with families to feed.

People whose fear and rage drew them to Hitler’s charismatic promises to make Germany great again, instead of the laughingstock loser among nations.

People whose hope led them to overlook his bigotry.

When we maintain that our family, our friends, our neighbours aren’t Nazis, what we really mean is that they’re not evil. And I believe it.

But neither were Nazis. Nazis had kids they loved and spoiled. Nazis scraped and saved to be able to surprise their spouses with a bouquet of roses. Nazis invited their lonely coworkers to holiday dinners and quietly helped out the family down the street struggling to make ends meet and were good friends to all their neighbours. Until the day they weren’t.

Some Nazis were scared and went along with what seemed like the best way to break out of the untenable status quo.

Some Nazis never believed Hitler would or could really do all the things he threatened.

And so many Nazis were loved by people who could never imagine that their father, brother, sister, mother, cousin could ever hurt another person. Because they couldn’t and didn’t.

Hurt the people close enough to think that.

That’s why our white love for the white people around us can mean that they are three-dimensional living, hurting, human beings with legitimate fears and grievances without excusing any of us from the fact that if we support someone whose platform is built on racism, we have done something racist.

That’s why it’s up to people who suffer from racism to tell us whose actions are racist and up to us not to be surprised and indignant when they point to people who can be compassionate and kind and who have problems of their own, even if those people are us.

That’s why, as smugly satisfying as it is to make spittle-flecked Herrenvolk the cannon-fodder in our war games and the stand-in for irredeemable monsters in our adventure stories, we must never forget that they were human too. Not to mitigate the evil of what they did. But to recognize its seeds in ourselves before it’s too late.

We need the perspective and humility to own how our actions, regardless of our intent or beliefs, have hurt others. We need to develop a resilient self-image that doesn’t shatter when confronted with our mistakes. We need to transform our pain at not living up to our ideals into determination to be better instead of shunting that pain right back at those we’ve wronged.

Trump is not Hitler. I hope to hell he never will be, because success looks like making sure the parallels stop with his rise to power. But the words are already powerful, and we know what he said he’d do. We know what too many are already doing in his name. We know what behaviour too many others have tacitly approved with their vote.

The people we love aren’t evil, no matter who they supported.

But none of us has to be evil to do evil.

None of us has to be evil to allow evil to happen.

And none of us has to be evil to give evil more power.

Our moral responsibility doesn’t stop with not being evil. That’s where it starts.