Because "if it could happen in Germany, it could happen here". 22:35 <&scythe> Do you understand why the Americans all had a problem with democracy? 22:35 <&s

Because "if it could happen in Germany, it could happen here". 22:35 <&scythe> Do you understand why the Americans all had a problem with democracy? 22:35 <&scythe> And the Australians and Canadians were on board? 22:36 <&KinGAleX> Because you're mostly Germans? A belief in American idealism -- up to about 1933 or so -- was that democracy was naturally, thermodynamically, the end-game stable state of human civilization. Sure, other democracies had failed in the past, but there was always an excuse. It was easy to believe until 1930 that the replacement of a democratic system with a despot could never happen in a modern democracy. After all, Italy had always been poor, and France had become a stable republic post-1871. Weimar Germany, at the time, was the world's second-largest economy, and had a largely fair and free electoral system. Imagine tomorrow that Japan, modern Japan, becomes a Nazi-like dictatorship, and you start to see some of what the appearance of the Nazis in Germany looked like to Americans in the 1930s. We're obsessed with the Nazis because Naziism is an idea we can be afraid of; we don't have to worry about Americans trying to form a caliphate or having a Marxist revolution. We're totally unafraid of, say, Japanese-style imperialism, because Americans could never adopt a early-20th-century Japan-like imperial culture, obviously.