Megan Carpentier says that liberals should stop asking whether Donald Trump is a Nazi—not because the comparison is meaningless, but because the question misses the point in an extraordinarily American way. The Nazis gained power in Germany through democratic elections and maintained it through maintaining the support of a plurality, if not a true majority,…

via Washington Monthly

I have to say; I can’t argue with her premise. The voters are responsible for being educated about for whom they vote. Even worse? Some people voted for Trump because of his fascist leanings. It reminds me of a story told by David Neiwert about the German population that lived near a concentration camp during WW2:

When he was a young man, he told us, he served in the U.S.
Army as part of the occupation forces in Germany after World
War II. He was put to work gathering information for the military
tribunal, which was preparing to prosecute Nazi war criminals
at Nuremberg. His job was to spend time in the villages
adjacent to one concentration camp and talk to the residents
about what they knew.
The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched
daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded
like cattle into the camp. Even though the camp never could
have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in,
the villagers knew that no one ever left. They also knew that the
smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady
stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant
about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because
no one wanted to know.
“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic
way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside.
And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off
the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight.
Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend
not to notice what was happening next door.”
“When the camps were liberated and their contents were
revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had
gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather
dusters.”

What will those who voted for Trump say should some atrocity occur during his term?

In any case, if we are a government of the people, by the people, for the people it is then the people who are ultimately responsible for the leaders they elect.