OP, if I understand you correctly, a couple of your neighbors are MAGA types, and have different political leanings than you. And this bothers you a lot.
Interesting that you interpreted “Deeply irrational to the point of self-destruction and supporting partisan violence” as “having different political leanings”.
I suspect you’ve never lived in a rural (and mostly red) part of the country.
Yea, sure, there are many MAGA types around where I live. They hunt, shoot guns, drink beer, and some subscribe to anti-science / conspiracy bullshit. But they’re mostly harmless. I’ve learn to get along with him.
Let’s be honest perfectly clear on this point: supporters of Donald Trump and similar ideologies (“MAGA” types) do not just “have different political leanings”. Rather, they are conspiranoiasts who support a sitting president who made unambiguous efforts to overturn a legal election; a leader who has aligned himself with white nationalists and fascist boosters; a candidate who has called for violence, imprisonment, and assassination of political opponents (and no, not just in jest); who attacked a venerated figure of his own ostensible party resulting in subsequent persecution and harassment of his widow; and who has most recently called for abeyance of the fundamental law of the land purely for his own gain. These are people who have threatened and intimidated election officials of all stripes; who have claimed massive voter fraud with virtually no evidence whatsoever (and what little actual fraud has been discovered is predominately by Republican voters); who have shouted down people in school board meetings and community gatherings over baseless and nonsensical claims of repression and corruption; who have denied the factual reality of school shootings and an insurrection that threatened elected officials and tried to prevent the certification of Electoral College votes, and oh by the way resulted in the death of a Capitol Police officer and several of the rioters for no reason other than to feed the hubris of their anointed Furher.
This isn’t just a difference of opinion or a representation of a normal political spectrum. This is exactly what the birth of fascism looks like. The o.p. should be scared, because this is a frightening prospect in an enormously well-armed country that seems to be headed right down the path of the Weimar Republic circa 1930. And, again, even if Trump keels over into a bucket of KFC tomorrow, there are plenty of would-be successors posturing to replace him, all of them denying electoral integrity and democratic norms as if that is just the normal course of politics. You don’t need to be Jewish, or queer, or even particularly liberal to have a deep concern about the course modern national politics has taken in the last six years. Dismissing it as “different political leanings,” is utter denialism.
Many Jews learned to “get along” with their National Socialist neighbors, too. Some of them even did business and collaborated with them. Because, after all, nobody is going to allow their neighbors to be rounded up, sent to camps, and gassed to death, right?
Stranger
My grandfather was Jewish in Nazi Germany before the war. In the very early days, he did have some experiences similar to the OP.
He was a teenager and considered himself German. He had lots of German friends, but seemingly from one day to the next, they just stopped hanging out or playing with him. Suddenly, he was getting shunned by those he considered friends.
So, in that way, the OP’s experience is similar, for what it’s worth. This doesn’t imply that roundups and mass killings are next.
It is new (at least in recent history) for politics to affect so many aspects of life, even where people live – they are sorting themselves into red and blue areas. My impression from the OP is that this is what they were asking about – no longer associating with folks who don’t agree with you politically, not whether Republicans or Democrats are going to set up concentration camps for the opposing party.
(My grandfather escaped to Poland and then to Ukraine where he met my grandmother. His parents and sister thought that fears were overblown and ended up getting murdered in a camp.)
To the OP’s point, I’m sure this is something Jews in pre-Nazi Germany would have heard quite a bit. “You’re overreacting, they would never do what they’re telling us they want to do.”
I can’t judge the situation as the OP describes it: it sounds scary, but he may exagerate. I tend to err on the side of caution on those things. One important factor in nazi Germany was that they knew who “the enemy” was. There were registers where the religion of every person was written for the autorities to see. Nobody, it seems, had any reason to hide their religious affiliation before the Great War and archives lasted much longer. Also political affiliation was easy to find for the Gestapo. Neighbours ratted on neighbours (sometimes they got the coveted flats where they lived, sometimes they were just despicable haters, and complex cases galore). When you don’t know history it may seem that today’s Germany’s data protection laws are a paranoid absurdity. They are not.
And this is where I wonder how it is possible that the young ones in Germany give away all those data on themselves and their friends voluntarily on social media.
What do autorities and neighbours know about you in the USA? Being jewish is a thing you are or are not (at least according to nazis it is something you can’t give up), political affiliation can change and may be hard to prove, sexual orientation is a private matter but a drag to keep secret because of fear…* What do you think you can get away with, and how do you feel about it?
* Sorry if this descriptions sound frivolous, I am trying to make a point staying succint. Not my forte.
There are a few crazies out there. I had to go to a junkyard auto parts yard recently and while most of the folks there were friendly the guy driving the forklift was bat-shit crazy. Start the conversation talking about how all those Satanic Democrats needed to be killed off and it got darker from there.
I just nodded, made “praise Jesus” noises, and took my new-to-me wheel rim off to my truck.
There have always been a certain number of people speaking of violence, and subset of them willing to use it give the right circumstance. I think the threat level is higher than it was, say, 20 years ago. I’m not convinced it is “Germany 1932” level of threat at this point but the potential is always there for civil society and government to break down.
Heck, some folks are even undocumented!
Hey, wait a minute.
Yes, that was a crime in Germany too. And in Spain, come to think of it. They called antisocial behaviour or something.
You suspect wrongly.
Yeah, I am also going to respond perhaps too literally, but yes, the vague fear, coupled with rational explanation of how the violent attacks heard about are by just a few thugs, not everyone, things will pass … that pretty much is how many German Jews felt in the early days of Nazism’s rise. With others feeling of course that it is group x being attacked by these thugs, not me.
But agreed that the OP’s feeling being similar doesn’t imply that we are in the same situation.
Neither however am I complacent in belief that something similar couldn’t happen here with several more ingredients added to the mix. Or that anyone has really learned from history as we’ve seen many ethnic cleansings of various “others” across the world.
I’m not the OP but the last time I sat down to a Seder with other Jews one of the men at the table was a survivor of the Tree-of-Life synagogue shooting in Pennsylvania. So nothing directly to me, but close enough, closer than I’d like. That’s the recent thing.
More distant was my family being run out of Russia 130 years ago during the pogroms and the ones who went to Warsaw, Poland instead of the US not surviving the 1940’s. My family will never have a family reunion with our European cousins unless, perhaps, we visit Auschwitz.
Mostly harmless. The problem is the one or two that are NOT harmless. Especially if you’re in a targeted group. It only takes one bad man with a gun in a county to really ruin the day of a couple dozen people.
That is why the local religious centers of non-Christian faiths where I live, despite being in a Blue county, have security, bullet resistant windows, and a police presence during any community festival. We have armed members of the congregation sitting amongst everyone else during worship. We have active shooter drills in the community center and the synagogues.
No, we have not had a problem where we live here but a half dozen of our local community are survivors of shootings in other places, like Pittsburgh and Poway, California which have happened in recent years (all of them were visiting relatives in those states when the shooting happened).
Yes.
Be concerned, be afraid, but do not be terrified. I have my plans for what to do and where to go if the SHTF in my area.
Jews have always been a bit suspicious of the gentile neighbors given centuries of persecution. You do have to work with the neighbors to exist in a community, the trick is to know when to get out of Dodge (and I do mean that literally - leave the area for elsewhere). That’s the hard moment to judge.
Usually things don’t unravel to the point of persecution and killing, but it can. It very much can.
There’s a part of me that wants to think there was exaggeration but in the past 5 years or so I’ve had some encounters where I live that were, to be blunt, frightening.
I’m not, at this point, worried about “the authorities” in the US, I’m worried about crazy neighbors.
Religious affiliation has largely not been something people felt a need to conceal in the US. If you’ve stated your religion on social media at some point, though, the information is out there. Nothing really goes away on the internet.
Then there’s the problem of assumptions. I have a surname that screams “Jewish” the way “Martinez” screams “Latino”, or “Kowalski” screams “Polish”. That’s part of my legal ID and bigots will notice things like that.
At this point we have secret ballots, but I’m sure there are those who want to change that. If you voted in a Democratic primary who, exactly, you voted for is not known but the fact you voted in a Democratic primary is (this is somewhat short-circuited in my area due to “open primaries” where you can vote in either primary regardless of your affiliation, so we’ve had Republicans voting in the Democratic primary and vice versa to try to influence the person their favored candidate runs against). Sexual orientation? Post-college adults with same-sex room mates can come under suspicion.
Sure, a person can lie, claim a political affiliation they don’t feel as camouflage but that sort of thing is corrosive to the spirit and can be surprisingly difficult to keep up for a long time. You can live a lie, but it’s hard.
Other things are harder to conceal, like legal names, heritage, ethnic appearance traits…
As I said, I don’t think we are at 1932 Germany, but we’re closer than we used to be and that makes me very uneasy. I don’t think Jews will be a primary target this time around, they seem to be demonizing the LGBTQ+ people more right now, but the first group targeted, if things get that bad, are unlikely to be the last. Obligatory reference to Reverend Niemöller’s famous poem.
I get why people bring up Nazi Germany in order to understand our current historical moment. But I think the analogy is of limited use. If a wave of ethnic or political persecution hits America in the future, it would probably look mostly different from the Holocaust yet still be catastrophic. If it resembled the Dirty War in Argentina, for instance, where suspected leftists were “disappeared” off the street, it would still be horrific.
None of what the OP says is new. It’s been around for a very long time. What’s scary is that now there is no hesitance in saying hateful things out loud or making overt threats. That, to me, is the tipping point between ordinary dissatisfaction and overt fascism. Hey, my brother-in-law (may he rot in hell) was an overt racist and bigot around family, but didn’t take that out in public, where everyone thought he was a wonderful person. In today’s atmosphere, he’d be the OP’s neighbor.
My own brother (a gun nut with an arsenal in his basement) told me that “when Obama won the election, I went downstairs and loaded up everything I have”. When I asked him why, he just muttered something vague about people coming for his guns. If he were alive today, he’d quite likely be exactly like the neighbor the OP describes.
What is even scarier than ordinary people acting out like this is the number of high-ranking military who would likely be happy to go along with an armed insurrection at the behest of a lunatic in the White House.
I do find it frightening that whoever shot those transformers is living next door to someone else.
I am scared to absolute tears of being left without heat. May they (the shooters) rot in hell. Whatever their political persuasion turns out to be.
I’d compare things to the 1994 Rawandan Genocide but too many people respond with “the what?” when I do so for it to be useful. But everyone has heard of Nazis.
Exactly. Beyond the fact that outside of a few people, nobody’s actually advocating any of this, there’s the obvious identification problem.
What constitutes a liberal? There’s multi-axis political spectrum out there- someone can be say… LGBTQ friendly, and yet also anti-abortion. Or pro-gun and pro-racial equity. It’s only under the party umbrellas where this stuff comes together to represent some sort of “conservative” or “liberal” ideal that nobody actually lines up with in the real world.
As odious as the conservatives can be, I think anything like this would end up hurting them more than it would help, and they know it.
I’m pro-science, not MAGA, and can’t stand Trump. But IMO, living in constant fear of MAGA-types is irrational. It’s also irrational IMO to live in constant fear of the Antifa/leftist extremists who rioted a couple years ago.
I don’t live in the USA, I may misjudge, but this is good sign. It’s the autorities that can and do systematic jailing and killing, the neighbours usually remain sporadic. The neighbours did not kill the Jews in Germany! They denounced, they looked the other way, they did not help, but they did not kill. The state did that. That is how Germans could claim after the war that they did not know, they could impossibly have known, and how horrible, isn’t it?
Of course history does not identically repeat itself, this time it may be like you fear and it will be individuals who come after “the enemy”. When they start to call them cockroaches, vermin, infrahumans… it is time to start to really worry too.
I repeat myself: It’s not the neighbours, not usually. It’s the state and it’s apparatus. The mark of a fascist state is that you cannot be inocent. There always is a law you have not respected. There are contradictory laws in place, so that you cannot but disregard one or the other. And there is guilt by association, there is kin liability (of which the mass murder of the Jews can be considerend the extreme example) and there can be crimes of omission. Abortions are illegal (or should be and will be, so help me God 
). You did not have an abortion? But you drove that woman to the clinic! You did not drive her to the clinic? But you knew that your husband/neighbour/usual Uber* driver did! And so on.
In fascist and totalitarian states you can be accused of anything. And once you are in front of a judge the conviction rate is 99%. For the record, in the USA the conviction rate as per the last link rose from approximately 75 percent to approximately 85% between 1972 and 1992. I wonder where it is now. Considering that attorneys are elected and are judged by the voters according to the rate of conviction they achieve and looking at the incarceration rate the trend should be up.
* Hell! What a name for a company! Do people not know what that means and where it comes from? Sorry for the ranty side note, it makes me angry