4/10/21
It is a question I often hear people ask during conversations about the rise of Adolf Hitler: If I had been alive in Germany when the Nazis took power, would I have had the courage to side against them? Thanks to the 2020 presidential election, there is now a convenient way to answer that query. Hitler rose to power because he told a Big Lie. Millions of people believed that Big Lie because they held more sinister beliefs; millions more likely didn't believe it, but weren't willing to denounce it as an outright lie at the time. The same dynamic is true regarding Donald Trump's claim that Joe Biden stole the election from him. It is a Big Lie being embraced to advance a racist, anti-democratic agenda. Anyone who doesn't stand up to that Big Lie today would have likely been complicit in Hitler's Big Lie last century. A lot of prominent Republicans who are trying to worm their way around this issue by not quite saying they believe the Big Lie, but rather that it is somehow validated by the fact that many other people agree with it. Never mind that there is literally no evidence that mail-in voting being particularly susceptible to fraud. The arguments of Clarence Thomas and Cruz were essentially the same: Even if there isn't evidence of fraud, if one side claims the other side might have stolen an election, that's enough to justify making it harder for the other side to vote.
Let's call these things what they are: Attempts by Republican officials to exploit Trump's Big Lie to create permanent Republican rule, but without quite saying that they agree with the Big Lie itself. This is where the Hitler analogy comes into play. When he and the Nazis were fighting to gain power in Germany during the 1920s, they did so by claiming that their country had been defeated in World War I because they were betrayed by a secret coalition of Jews and socialists. Hitler connected his Big Lie to the cult of personality he was creating for himself. It is impossible to overstate how much this Big Lie enabled Hitler to rise to power. You may be wondering, at this point, what evidence Hitler and his supporters had to back up their claims. The answer is, simply put, none whatever. This brings us back to the 2020 election. It isn't really necessary to go through every specious Trump claim with a fine-toothed comb. His own attorney general investigated Trump's claims and found that Biden had won legitimately. If Republicans want to learn the right lessons from the 2020 election should find a way to modernize their message so that it is both consistent with conservative values and distances itself from the corrupt regime of Trump and the ugly bigotry that has driven away so many potential supporters. That would be the way of democracy. The path of enabling Trump's Big Lie, by contrast, is the way of fascism.
