The slimmest of margins

If I'm fascinated by the rise of right wing extremism in the Americas, it is specifically because this the first time I witness it up close. The election of Reagan in 1980 was a taste of what was to come decades later and I never thought it would spiral to Weimar Republic levels when the Nazis first rose to power.

In 1930's Germany at first it was a trickle but after the Reichstag storming it took on epic proportions until Hitler was defeated in 1945 after having murdered 6 million Jewish people, countless LGBT people, Roma and other "undesireables".

The parallels are of course striking in that Germans felt dissatisfied with the direction of their nation and economic ills could be blamed on convenient targets much like Trumpism has tried to do. That the American people seem to have nipped this in the bud does not take away from the lesson that democracies are tenous affairs often held together by the slimmest of margins.