The shadows of Nuremberg

Jews are understandably defensive when comparisons to the Holocaust are bandied about. My father, a lapsed Jew who was born in Czechoslovakia and fled just ahead of the Nazis invasion in 1939, led a medical mission to back to Czechoslovakia in 1945 and was among the first people to enter Terezin after it was liberated. He saw first hand the unspeakable horror of the Third Reich. There is nothing that compares, nor God willing is there ever likely to be, to the systematic organized slaughter of 6 million Jews.  My intent here isn't to make a direct comparison to the Holocaust, but rather to examine elements of its antecedents.

Of particular concern is the use of large rallies at which xenophobia is stirred and reinforced by the excitement and affirmation of the crowd. It is the kind of collective hysteria that was on display at Nuremberg rallies that is echoed today at Trump's campaign rallies. There were thirteen Nuremberg rallies; at the largest in 1937, some estimates suggest as many as 700,000 attended though other figures suggest te number was 350,000. Trump held 186 rallies as part of his election campaign, and another 71 since taking office. While clearly some attendees will have gone to multiple events, assuming each stadium holds about 30,000 people, Trump will have had a total audience of 7.7 million, compared to 2.3 million for the Nuremberg rallies. More people are likely to have attended a Trump rally than attended all the Nuremberg rallies. As a proportion of the population, the Nuremberg rallies may have involved of the population 3.3% over 12 years while Trumps has reached 2.4% in just 4 years. 

Next it is worth considering how the emotional fallout from these events is propagated. Social media didn't exist in the 1930s so propagation would be by word of mouth. The spread of the emotionally charged message would be limited by the size of the networks of the attendees. Assuming at least some dissipation along each link, it would take some time for the message to reach a bring about a sea change in culture sufficient to pave the way for the organized genocide that the Third Reich carried out. The ground was fertile anyway since Germany was still recovering from the Great depression and the strictures of reparations the countries was required to pay. That created resentment and anger, ripe for harnessing by a demagogue.

There are similarities in 21st century America. The financial crisis of 2008 and years of economic decline in middle America along with off-shoring and the creation of most value-creating employment only on the coasts have created the conditions that make the politics of fear and resentment so effective. And today, the emotional intensity of rallies like Trumps has the potential to go viral over the social media networks that are much larger than personal social networks. So those who worry that we may be nearing the critical mass needed to cause an inflection in the culture may be right to be concerned.