Matthew Dowd Says Germans Who Elected Hitler Were Also Scared of Inflation: ‘They Lost Their Democracy’

MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd drew a parallel between Americans concerned about the price of basic necessities to Germans who “lost their democracy” when Adolf Hitler became dictator.

The former GOP strategist and one-time Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in Texas made the comment on Monday’s The ReidOut.

While expressing her concerns about the 2024 election, host Joy Reid said former President Donald Trump’s “fascism” is “not even being hidden at this point.”

“What scares me is that I’m not sure everybody minds,” she said of the impact of inflation on the upcoming elections. “You know, I think there are some people who will just sit back and let it happen thinking it won’t be that bad. And that, to me, is almost more dangerous than the radicals.”

Dowd noted a plurality of votes got Hitler democratically elected in post-World War I Germany, which in 1933 was struggling economically. He connected their concerns about inflation to those of voters today:

I’m not going to say that the GOP are Nazis at this point or whatever, but it certainly sounds very familiar to what happened in Germany, which is a bunch of citizens, Adolf Hitler gets a third of the vote, nobody thought it could happen there. They went along because he said he would solve the economy and fix inflation

You can hear those sorts of things, and then oh, lo and behold, a few years later they lost their democracy, and they’re all like, “How did that happen here?” That’s my worry. That is my worry. Obviously, the price of a hamburger, the price of milk the price of gas is concerning, but that is a short-term problem. The loss of a democracy will decimate everyone’s freedom.

Watch above, via MSNBC.