Wasn’t the height of Nazi popularity (at least vote wise) something like 30%?
Keep in mind we’re talking about a political system where coalition governments are far more common. It’s not the two party system the US is used to, so votes aren’t a measure of “popularity” per se. What I mean by that is you can have plenty of people who don’t vote for a party, simply because there’s another choice they like better out of the fairly wide array of options, but that doesn’t mean they actively dislike every option they didn’t vote for just that it wasn’t their first choice. On top of that, the Nazis were very smart about putting in place policies that improved the lives of average working Germans (you know, the ones they liked), and they made sure to start out by targeting the minority groups that people least liked, or cared about, before taking their crackdowns wider.
This has been one of Trump’s major misplays. They went in with their immigration crackdown, which should have slotted neatly into that same zone of “Going after the minority groups people least liked” but in order to hit Trump’s outlandish target numbers they had to start rounding up the immigrants that everyone actually likes. Turns out for the most part Americans actually really like Abdul who runs the corner shop and gives them extra meat on their delhi sandwich, and they really like Eduardo who does their landscaping and is always on time and super polite, and the immigrants they hate are mostly just fictions made up by Fox News. Whereas Jewish people in Nazi Germany really were pretty actively disliked by a very broad swathe of the populace (the roots of European antisemitism go back millennia), so there was a lot less resistance to the concept as a whole.
It was very cumbersome to take a picture in the 1930s.
Yes, but you’re also not travelling as far from your home neighbourhood to do your job as any kind of cop or government agent. So a lot of the people around you are going to recognise you that evening at the bar or grocery store. People generally moved in smaller circles.
Keep in mind we’re talking about a political system where coalition governments are far more common. It’s not the two party system the US is used to, so votes aren’t a measure of “popularity” per se. What I mean by that is you can have plenty of people who don’t vote for a party, simply because there’s another choice they like better out of the fairly wide array of options, but that doesn’t mean they actively dislike every option they didn’t vote for just that it wasn’t their first choice. On top of that, the Nazis were very smart about putting in place policies that improved the lives of average working Germans (you know, the ones they liked), and they made sure to start out by targeting the minority groups that people least liked, or cared about, before taking their crackdowns wider.
This has been one of Trump’s major misplays. They went in with their immigration crackdown, which should have slotted neatly into that same zone of “Going after the minority groups people least liked” but in order to hit Trump’s outlandish target numbers they had to start rounding up the immigrants that everyone actually likes. Turns out for the most part Americans actually really like Abdul who runs the corner shop and gives them extra meat on their delhi sandwich, and they really like Eduardo who does their landscaping and is always on time and super polite, and the immigrants they hate are mostly just fictions made up by Fox News. Whereas Jewish people in Nazi Germany really were pretty actively disliked by a very broad swathe of the populace (the roots of European antisemitism go back millennia), so there was a lot less resistance to the concept as a whole.
Yes, but you’re also not travelling as far from your home neighbourhood to do your job as any kind of cop or government agent. So a lot of the people around you are going to recognise you that evening at the bar or grocery store. People generally moved in smaller circles.