A theme I write a lot about is how easy - and dangerous - it is to take things for granted. Today tends to look like yesterday. And when that persists for a long period of time, it seeps deep into our psyche. It becomes very hard to imagine big changes in the world, even though viewing history through a wider aperture tells us that change and messiness is more ubiquitous than we’ve experienced. I’ve talked about this as it relates to inflation, tech stocks, geopolitics, oil prices, fair markets, the dollar, etc etc. Our client portfolios strongly reflect this line of thinking.

Memorial Day is a day to remember that the same thing is true for our very way of life. The comfort we enjoy in the US required a lot of shooting and dying to establish, and we should celebrate and honor those who died to make it happen.

But again, we cannot take our hard-fought accomplishments for granted. Democracy is a system designed to follow Darwin’s rules and adapt. That why it can work when the country was run by dudes in wigs writing with quills as well as today. But it is not infinitely adaptable, and is the most important thing to not take for granted. I believe one of the best ways we can avoid taking it for granted is to study and learn from the mistakes of those who have given away democracy, and in doing so doomed their freedoms and quality of life. Memorial Day seems like a fitting day to do that.

And before I continue, let me just be as clear as I possibly can: I am not saying Trump is Hitler, or that we are on the verge of a fascist takeover, or any other politically charged subtext. Republicans are not Nazis and Mamdani is not Marx. I am just saying we are all better off for having studied the mistakes others have made. If a thing is important to you - and it is fragile - it’s useful to know what causes it to break. And AI has brought to light some new data that we can use to do that study.

With that as context, some researchers at Harvard used AI to read and digitize the membership cards of over 10 million Nazis, increasing the sample size for study by 200x. It’s incredibly cool. You can read the full paper at NBER. But a few things I took away from it:

1. The original Nazis were “true believers” with radical ideologies. By the time WWII came around, the Nazi party pretty much just looked like Germany from a demographics perspective - with one big exception (next bullet).

2. Something like 40% of municipalities in Germany had no recorded Nazi membership at all. It was red state/blue state on steroids. Digging into that, it appears community leaders - teachers, doctors, police - had a huge influence on whether Nazism took hold in each town or city.

3. Antisemitism was described as a factor in joining the party by only 26% of the sample. And even that number is probably too high given how the researchers calculated it. The top two causes were “national renewal/order” and “social belonging.” In other words, most Nazis weren’t cartoonishly “bad people” but just normal people who wanted what was best for their lives and their country but made bad decisions.

4. The heroes that Germany needed weren’t the ones that shoot bullets, they were the domestic leaders that never materialized.

I hope everyone has fun this weekend, but also takes a minute to be grateful.