Voters face an easy but tectonic choice in the race for the White House.

Will they choose the first woman or the oldest man to be the next president?

Will they choose the prosecutor or the convict?

What too many of us don’t know now is that the rise of Nazi Germany and the lead-up to the Holocaust was a slow play fertilized by denialism about what was happening in plain view—not the Final Solution out of the gate. Non-targeted Germans continued their daily lives, even as their kids trained to be hardened and hateful Nazis, and believed the bigoted lies that it was “subhuman” people—which is not a thing—causing all their economic problems.

What's going on here isn't especially confusing. Prior to Dobbs, calling yourself "pro-life" was a low-cost way for Republican voters to tell a story where they are morally upright heroes while casting feminists, urban liberals, college kids, and racial minorities as oversexed heathens. When abortion is legal, it's easy to condemn other people's abortions as a matter of "convenience" or say they're "using it for birth control" or employ other euphemisms for promiscuity, while quietly believing the abortions you and your friends get are justified.

But moral outrage must be closely managed, or it can do more harm than good. Ganz, who eventually became a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has spent years teaching people how to use their anger to effect change. Stoking the emotion is easy. Learning how to channel it to useful ends, he told me, is harder. For anger to be productive, at some point, it must stop. Victory often demands compromise. “You have to know how to arouse passions to fuel the fight, and then how to cool everyone down so they’ll accept the deal on the table,” Ganz said.

Walz, with his cheerful goober dad persona, offers a view of masculinity that is far tougher than that displayed by even the most steroid-inflated men of the MAGA world. He's a guy who isn't afraid of basic empathy. A man who is confident enough not to run from those who are different. A man so sure of himself that he can let a woman be his boss without acting threatened by her power. That's what real strength looks like. No wonder a weak man like Trump thinks Walz is the apocalypse.

But isn’t “weird” just making fun of people? Well … yes. And that’s good. It’s good to mock and make fun of people who are bad or want to do bad things. It’s also necessary politically. One of the challenges of the Trump era is that Trumpism is very threatening and dangerous. It aims to upend and destroy the foundations of our civic democracy. But in cataloguing these threats and pumping up outrage over every Trumpian transgression we can also build up the image of their power like inflating a vast flaccid balloon, a sort of collective psyching yourself out. Good thrusting mockery cuts right through that. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also insecure, stunted degenerates. They’re weird. Normal people don’t want to be around them. They think this kind of talk is normal because it’s common parlance in the far-right podcast subculture they live in. That’s really the JD Vance story right there. In his world, raging at miserable cat ladies trying to rule our lives doesn’t seem strange.