What you are doing right now

Since not long after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, there has been this meme going 'round among liberals, something to the effect of "If you've ever wondered what you would do during the rise of Nazi Germany, it is what you are doing right now."

The implication, of course, is that Trumpism and the fascism lurking just beneath it places us in a position analogous to Germans in say 1933.

I have no argument with the point. There is something to it.

However, it is at best a kind of loose analogy. It's pattern matching deployed to persuade people of the moral stakes of our situation, and to identify which actors are right, and which are much worse than merely wrong.

Germany (or German-occupied Poland) in 1943 rather than 1933 presents an even more morally evocative touchstone for comparisons.

If you've ever wondered what you would do during the rise of Nazi Germany, it is what you are doing right now.

In Gaza, trapped innocents are being killed in large numbers.

Perhaps the comparison is unfair. The Nazis never tried to warn their victims with pamphlets and "roof knocking" to get out of harms way. Hamas provoked the current conflict with mass atrocity in ways the Jews of Germany never did. No country could be expected simply to tolerate an enclave ruled by terrorists who openly promise to repeat their atrocities again and again and again.

All of that is true.

Trumpists of course can also draw a lot of true and important distinctions between their movement and the actual literal Nazis of Germany 1933.

The power of the analogy is to cut through the nuance and expose it as sophistry. This will always seem unfair when you are on the side whose defense requires nuance.

Whether in God's eye the nuanced position is right or wrong, here on Earth moral intuitions are blunt instruments. Generally people will side with a penned-in defenseless population getting murdered, regardless of the bigger picture. As a heuristic, that doesn't seem so terrible.

If you've ever wondered what you would do during the rise of Nazi Germany, it is what you are doing right now.

People who make these kinds of remarks seem so certain they know who the Nazis are. But it could be us, too. The Nazis didn't think they were the Nazis, in the way we mean it now. Whenever we consider ourselves part of a group so inherently righteous we are immune, we become particularly susceptible to slipping into the role.