I still think my Hitler parallel is apt: What if the Nazi Party had lost or been thrown out, before war broke out? We know what actually happened. But what if it had gone differently, and the Nazi's never got the chance to start a war?

There were still tens of thousands of average Germans that had been inculcated with Hitler's beliefs and believed in his solutions/plans. Shit, even after WWII there were still supporters.

Hitler isn't the actual problem. He could get bumped off or just fade into obscurity. All that would have done is leave a vacuum for the next-craziest disciple to follow him and rally the despondent dregs of the Nazi Party.

If everything goes well, November 5th we will be in that position; a vast number of armed, radicalized, racist, psychopaths who will have even more reason to do something even more radical. Their election was "stolen". Their rightful god-head was deposed by a vast child sex trafficking ring that goes from the President of the US to the CEO of MGM.

Beliefs just as loony and unrelated to reality as anything the Nazi's believed in.

So how do you quash Y'all Qaida? (Or, in my example, what could Germany have done to defuse the Nazis if Hitler had lost power?)

You can't, if you adhere to the US Constitution.

And if you temporarily suspend specific protections in an effort to root out the evil, you have become that which you despise, while also opening the Pandora's Box of possibilities that temporarily suspending the rights of Americans creates.

The ONLY path forward in the real America of today is further degradation. The ultimate power of, and failing of, Democracy is that it expects people to be generally good and decent to one another. Today, that basic assumption of humanity is lost. When you grow up in a system which has been specifically gerrymandered to disenfranchise and dehumanize entire swathes of the population, they aren't even human to you, so your humanity is lost as well. That central leg of democracy is broken.

You make a good point that there's no money to be made on vilifying the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free... but the private prisons, police departments, government contractors, and politicians would beg to differ.

Which brings us back to the unbalanced sway that industry/business/corporations hold over our democratic institutions.

In the end, we come out of this whole thing in 15 years either looking a lot more like Sweden, or the African National Congress; either a strongly socialist society that helps the less fortunate thrive and is devoted to the education and health of the entire populace, or a loose affiliation of back-stabbing mostly-failing nation-states that do performative diplomacy in public, and sabotage those same 'partners' in private.

And yes, I'd say a Pakistani-born son of an economist who lives in London is the exact right person to deliver this message, because he has lived through it and seen it with his own eyes. He has the gift of hindsight. We don't.