To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short … - Timothy Snyder

Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same. —

As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny.

It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, “the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east.