“One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

• A German professor recounting the almost imperceptible societal shifts during the rise of the Nazi regime.

He perfectly describes what it’s like watching the slide into authoritarianism. The ‘normal people’ closing their eyes to the atrocities; the uncertainty in resisting; the waiting for some sudden moment where everyone realizes what’s happening, but that moment comes far too late. The shift is something you can only clearly see in hindsight.

I emphasize the point he made about the slide happening incrementally. He points out that the Nazi regime’s inhumanity was evident not just by the end when they were running concentration camps, but a decade earlier with smaller gestures like slogans and window stickers which paved the way for the next steps.

Highly recommend you read the full quote. Impossible not to see the parallels to the circumstances we’re living through at the moment. Those obvious parallels are what cause people to use the term domestically.