Look at National Socialist Germany, the USSR, Mao's China, N Korea, Venezuala, etc and sane people wonder "how do things like that happen?". Oh if there were just one crazy simple "sure sign" that would allow us to innoculate against the totalitarian impulse!
There are all sorts of base reasons ... people lose a sense of history, of culture, the ability to understand what it is that their civililization and culture are about, they start to believe that "history has an arc" ... therefore what is new must be better, and the future better still. We could go on ... but the day to day reason is simply that nearly everyone wants to "go along to get along". Why have a conflict if you can find a way to fit in and go along with whatever the masses are saying is "correct".
The linked article covers the specific case of Esquire magazine doing a profile of a "typical white male teenager in Trump country".
The linked is a bit long, but I think it is worth it because it is all so ordinary ... banal. We see this sort of writing and thinking everyday, however if one reads something like the Gulag Archipeligo we realize that we are increasingly living in the conditions found in a totalitarian state already -- it is just that so far, unless you really stick your head up like Trump, the "enforcement" is via public shaming vs incarceration.
I think this quote from the article is a good example of what I'm talking about:
To explain the stultifying effects of Communism on the individual, he relates a story of the greengrocer who puts a sign in his shop window proclaiming, “Workers of the World, Unite!” The grocer doesn’t believe the Marxist credo. Rather, he displays the sign “because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble.” The sign, Havel writes, conveys the following message to passersby and society at large: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
So much of what passes for journalism and political conversation today mimics the pathetic self-abnegation of the greengrocer. People are constantly writing and saying things of highly dubious merit — “Hannah Gadsby is funny,” “Islam is the religion of peace,” “Trans Women are Women,” “’Black Panther’ deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Picture” — as if they were religious incantations. The whole lamentable phenomenon is utterly totalitarian in spirit and has been abetted by social media, where one can instantly and constantly display his or her correct opinions and righteous outrage in the hope of keeping the wolves at bay. Depart from the consensus, fail to display the correct slogans in the proverbial shop window, and “there could be trouble.”
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