Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The asteroid doesn’t care.

I’m terrible at remembering who said what and when, but someone at a recent podcast made the point that many European leaders lack the confidence to take a strong bold stance against Trump because their popular support is so weak. Well, maybe their popular support is weak precisely because they’re perceived as so feeble and pathetic and spineless and lacking in character. They’re sure as hell not doing anything to earn my support. At least we can all stop pretending to be baffled by how the Germans could go along with the the Nazis and still manage to live with themselves: We’re seeing the same collective failure play out before our eyes right now. There’s a reason why the first lesson from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was “Don’t obey in advance”. Because if you fail that test, you have already failed all the others.

Speaking of which, this is anecdotal, so don’t take my word for it, but supposedly the guy who coined “Godwin’s Law” has retracted his own invention in the light of recent events. Taken literally, the so-called “Hitler fallacy” was, of course, always kind of a silly idea. Obviously analogies to Hitler and the Nazis should be used with caution, but to dismiss any such analogy as inherently fallacious in principle pretty much amounts to saying that there is nothing we can possibly learn from the worst atrocities in history. That doesn’t seem like a very useful lesson to me.

A much more useful concept is the “Historian’s Fallacy” which basically boils down to thinking and acting as if people in the past had access to the same information that’s available to us now about what was going to happen later. When Hitler was elected Reichskanzler in 1933, the horrors of World War 2 and the Holocaust were still years into the future, and it is fallacious to take our current knowledge of what happened later into account when judging the behavior of the Germans at the time. This still does not get the Germans off the hook, however, since the information that was available to them – Hitler’s attempted coup d’état, his obvious extremism as expressed in Mein Kampf, his many speeches, the party program of the N.S.D.A.P. etc. – should have been more than enough to conclude that this person needed to be kept as far away from the reins of power as possible. Likewise, the information that is already available about Trump (and has been since before he was first elected in 2016) should have been more than enough to lead any sane and halfway decent person to the exact same conclusion, and this remains true even if – by some miracle – we manage to get out of the current crisis relatively unscathed. Again, it’s fallacious to take things that haven’t happened yet into account. If anything, the people who go along with Trump now have even less of an excuse than the Germans of the 1930s. For one thing, we really do have the benefit of knowing how things turned out back them. And, of course, as much as there is reason to worry about the weaponization of the American legal system, the role of ICE etc., the risk associated with opposing Trump is still negligible compared to risk associated with opposing Hitler once he came to power.