Imagine it’s September 1939, here on FR. What would the discussions been like. A couple of things. A lot of conservatives of the time were driven by a white hot hatred of FDR. Also many despised Britain as well. And many thought that while Hitler was a bad guy, he was just trying to rectify the evils of the Versailles Treaty. And some would have blamed Poland, and point out Poland’s history of antisemitism, and her stubbornness to give up Danzig. Also Poland threatened Germany when she allied with Britain and France. And you certainly would have had some echoing the sentiments of Lindbergh about Jewish influence.
The parallels between then and now are striking.
You are absolutely correct - there are some very striking parallels between now and the immediate pre-WW2 period. The reason for that is history moves in a series of cycles. I don’t know if you have heard of a book called The Fourth Turning, but it is based upon the thesis that once every 80 or so years there is a major crisis or series of crises which afflict this nation, and which that particular generation has to rise up to handle. The first was the Revolution, the second the Civil War, the third the Depression and WW2; the fourth is upon us.
Note that 80 years corresponds very closely to a human lifetime. I would make the argument that the authors of that book made, which is that human beings forget the lessons learned (oftentimes at great cost) by others. When a generation that went through a time of troubles has passed on into history, the new generation is very likely to repeat many of the same mistakes. Human emotions and human nature in general don’t change.
Reasonable people of reasonable intelligence acting in good faith have, do, and always will disagree with each other when looking at the exact same fact pattern. The same disagreements that people had before WW2 are fully on display today. Of course, it is not exactly the same, and the events of that period have been studied intensively, so SOME lessons have been learned (hence the near universal condemnation of Putin’s invasion). Time will tell here, but there’s also a lot going on that we don’t know - for example, how could that 40-mile long column of the Russian Army be bogged down for “lack of supplies” less than 100 miles from its border when this operation was planned for months? They may not be as adept at combined arms operations as us, but we’re not talking about amateurs here. That and some other things just don’t add up.