Dorothy Thompson, Harper’s Magazine:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi.…

I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.…

Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war.… It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

This essay is shockingly relevant today, some 83 years after it was first published in 1941. Simply replace “Nazi” with “MAGA.” 

Actually, you might not even need to do that.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi…. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

We’re seeing this play out in real time, as crypto bros, venture capitalists, and social media tyrants rush to support Donald Trump (especially in light of his VP pick, J.D. Vance, who worked in VC and was a protégé of Peter Thiel).

Bobby Allyn, at NPR:

[Marc] Andreessen, who has historically supported Democrats, said the “final straw” with his shift away from Biden was the president’s policy aimed at the super rich: a 25% tax on unrealized gains on households that are worth more than $100 million.

These cosplaying “masters of the universe” will cheerfully sell out this country before they share even a minuscule fraction more of their unimaginable wealth, happy to usher in an autocratic regime which allows them still more unchecked power, as they become even more absurdly wealthy.

They would be pathetic if they weren’t such an existential threat.