It needs to be said here that Godwin’s law doesn’t say that you can’t talk about Nazis. It merely says:
In other words, the longer we argue on a message board, the more likely someone’s going to bring up Nazis or Hitler. It shouldn’t even be that surprising, because as any given message board thread shambles along, it will likely visit every position in extremis, making it highly likely that someone’s going to reach toward an analogy for extremism, and Hitler is an effective and appropriate shorthand for this.
So the same axiom still applies. Trump’s only effect on it is that “longer” isn’t nearly as long as it used to be, because Trump is a Nazi.
One could propose another, darker form of the law. We could call it the Trump rule: as the history of a country grows longer, the likelihood of it electing a Nazi becomes 1.
We’re speaking about a dinner, not a message board. And people only change their opinions in baby steps, when they do it at all.
That said I’m no expert in persuasion, but I think, “Trump, man, he told his chief of staff that he wanted Hitler’s generals (the ones we beat in WWII). Don’t blame me, blame the guy who said it in the first place.”
Given that we now know Trump is obsessed with Hitler as a positive example, and we already knew he felt the same way about Kim Jun Un, it is hard not to call him a fascist. And yet it still feels like overkill. He is not going to bring all parts of society to heel in some totalitarian order. SDMB will probably survive (or am I missing the presence of a benevolent oligarch funding us?). And he is not going to try to conquer the world.
I follow the substack of Claire Berlinski, who uses the term caesarism and equates Trump not with Hitler, but with Erdoğan. This, on how the Bezos/WaPo preemptive surrender is right out of the Turkish experience, gives the flavor:
Trump is just the opening wedge; if they get the dictatorship they want it won’t be long at all before he’s replaced - due to age if nothing else - and who will at best kill millions of people. More likely billions, as part of the white nationalist desire to purge the world of everyone not them, and the End Times Christian desire to outright start the apocalypse. Conquest is less likely than an attempt to genocide most of the human race.
Swing voters will see this as highly implausible. So do I. And I see the implausibility discrediting attempts to.raise an alarm about Trump’s genuine threats to destroy enemies. He does not physically threaten immigrants qualified to vote, and does not much care what color they are. They know this, helping to explain why so many brown immigrants think he is a valid electoral choice.
This is wrong. Sure, the Republican official plank is “we don’t care what color you are, we have no problem with people who immigrate the right way”. Sure, they give it enough lip service that these “right way” immigrants can convince themselves they won’t end up on the wrong side of the barbed wire when Trump’s great deportation comes.
But once the surge gets spun up, Trump’s “special border police” aren’t going to make any effort whatsoever to differentiate Jose Martinez Jimenez, naturalized citizen, from Jose Jimenez Martinez, who crossed illegally and keeps a low profile. If you think this is about deporting the illegals and leaving the legals alone, that’s simply deluded.
Conservatives’ goal here is a show of power to prove that they really can round up a bunch of nonwhites for processing. Having done that, the next step (best case) will consist of herding them all toward Mexico, Trail-Of-Tears style, to let the Mexican government figure it out.
At worst, well, history isn’t short on examples of the things can happen when one ethnic population decides to round up and detain a whole other ethnic population. It’s unrealistic to think they can actually move 20 million people to Texas, let alone dump them on Mexico. The next phase won’t involve release and it won’t involve deportation either. And it starts with people saying that everyone’s just crying wolf about it.
There’s a reason why we will not see this in a Harris-approved advertisement. It discredits her electoral case among those who are wavering as to who to vote for, or whether it is worth voting.
As to whether you are actually correct, I hope we will not find out.
Right now, I like the comparison with Erdoğan and the Kurds. In the 21st century, does it matter if you are a Turkish citizen? Absolutely. Is inflation much higher than in other NATO countries, year after year, since he consolidated power, due to bullying the central bank? Yes again.
Because they are either irrational, willfully ignorant or inclined to fascism themselves. If somebody is a “swing voter” at this point then there is already something deeply wrong with them, morally or intellectually.
And their refusal to believe they are endangering themselves won’t save their lives. Nor has bending over backwards to pretend the Republicans are less fascist than they are done anything but make them crazier and more powerful.
“It hasn’t helped for the last fifty years. so let’s do it again” isn’t a good strategy.
I mean sure, but it’s not like a moderation rule where the thread is closed, right? People just sort of mention it like “ugh, so predictable that someone would bring up Nazis”. That doesn’t change the meaning of it, any more than “all intensive purposes” replaces “for all intents and purposes”.
If we’re talking about what Trump means to Godwin’s law then we ought to engage with the text of it, not with the common misuse of it.
There’s a special twist to this story. If you want to throttle illegal immigration, you need only beef up eVerify, in other words penalize employers for hiring undocumented immigrants. But the farm lobby, the restaurant lobby, the construction lobby, and all three combined won’t allow that. They are cool with efforts to oppress Latinos from other countries. But they don’t want an effective policy. And the GOP follows their tune.
So expect cruelty (like for example separating kids from families). And expect it to be ineffective (or maybe 20% effective). That keeps the program in operation in perpetuity, along with a fight with liberals. That’s the goal, and it works to some extent electorally: it riles up the conservative base. We saw a little of this when a conservative immigration reform package was agreed to in Congress, only to be squashed by Donald Trump. Republicans don’t care about illegal immigration, not really. What they care about is the ability to curb stomp a convenient scapegoat.
That might be a more perfect analogy: I don’t know. We should think harder about this if Trump wins the next battle. If Trump wins, I plan to review my old copy of On Tyranny, purchase Snyder’s later work On Freedom, and touch bases with Indivisible. Thinking about Trump’s fascism vs Trump’s similarity to Erdoğan will be a secondary issue, but still worth reflecting upon. I hypothesize that we are discussing a ratcheting process, where Erdoğan style policies may or may not evolve into the policies of Hugo Chavez, which may or may not lead to Slobodan Milošević. But I need to think further on this matter.
It’s more that they just shouted everyone else down with repeated ranting about “Godwin, you lose” and used Godwin’s Law as an excuse to refuse to engage with their opponents in any other way. And to demand the same of everyone else. And sometimes they were the moderator.
Ok Der, but your expression tends to be unhinged. Like I said earlier, I’ve retired my mock-hammer with you. But it isn’t unreasonable to say your largely unsubstantiated assertions are highly dubious. This thread is as good an example as any.
Ok at a first pass, that’s deranged. But conservatives don’t self police. So if you take a scenario where liberal power is crushed via election tampering, then add a financial crisis caused by unfettered conservative policies - which is by no means implausible - then as a matter of logic it follows that next-level brutality would occur. Then occur again at higher intensity. Then repeat. So Der’s scenario isn’t as crazy as it looks.
I’m not going to sit on my hands though. The scenario is rather far out there, but really it’s just the end of multi-step process, one that can be blunted at multiple points along the way. It’s sort of like the extrapolation from the 1990s that at current trends the entire population of California would be comprised of real estate brokers. But that ignored Simon’s Law: that which cannot go on forever will stop. There are not the same hard limits in this case, but again, liberals aren’t going to sit on their hands. Maybe possibly business conservatives won’t either, though there’s currently little sign of anything but fecklessness from them. Libertarians won’t help because they are not libertarians.
If conservatives self-policed as liberals did after the mid 1980s we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But they don’t, so we are.
I do not know about the lobbyists. But I think that, around here, if employers could get enough good workers, for the difficult jobs, from among those authorized to work in the U.S., they would. As for oppressing Latinos, the pattern is that immigrants do the hardest jobs for a certain number of years and then they, and certainly their children, find better jobs. If that is what you describe as oppression, I would disagree.
I would agree that the Republicans are unwilling to vote for so-called comprehensive reform that would make immigration no longer a big political issue.
No, it’s just paying attention. The Christian End Timers have been pushing for the Apocalypse at the highest political levels since Reagan at the very least, if not earlier. They had Reagan and least half convinced to start a nuclear war. And the FBI - hardly a left wing organization - called the pro-Hitler, world-genocidal The Turner Diaries the “bible of the racist right” for a reason.
Really, what do people expect a bunch of people who admire Hitler to do if handed control of the strongest military in the world and thousands of nuclear weapons? Of course they want genocide, on the widest possible scale.
It’s only “deranged” because the Right is deranged; it’s hardly my fault that admitting it is a taboo. One that has only recently begun to break down. The great majority of the right wing craziness that people are acting like it’s so shocking is nothing new, the main novelty is people admitting they see it instead of turning their head and pretending it doesn’t exist.
EDIT: And as far as “self policing” goes, they do plenty of that. It’s just that they take pains to drive out anyone who is insufficiently extreme. They’ve been purging “RINOs” a long time now.
Oh they could do that right now, no problem. At four or five times the wages.
I’ll see if I can be clearer. Trump’s family separation policy was oppression. Here’s a grim timeline. Thousands of children yanked from their family, and the documentation tossed so that they can’t be reunited. The US business community looks the other way: in other words they are cool with it. No high profile attempt to reverse the policy.
The proposed policy of mass deportation follows a similar pattern. Business has no problem with its brutality, provided it keeps the pool of workers scared and adequately large.
Migrant worker breaking their backs in the fields or getting repetitive motion sickness in the poultry industry? I’m not talking about that here. For better or worse. I’m not talking about loosening child labor laws either: that’s something business supports which is a level beyond being cool with it or looking the other way. Or at least a sufficiently powerful slice of the business lobby supports child labor in certain states.
This is accurate. As a citation, I’ll quote today’s David French column. The writer was a former lawyer for evangelicals.
If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only.
In fact, that’s a prime reason so many conservative writers dismissed the Trump phenomenon out of hand. We were all familiar with the unyielding ideological litmus test. Many of us remembered the slings and arrows directed at anyone who stepped out of line. The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.
Right until they didn’t.
Even casual interaction with movement conservatives reveals that they are intensely tribal. So yeah.
This may surprise some, but during the 1960s and 1970s there were some politicians characterized as liberal Republicans. Buckley’s crew drove them out.
ETA on derangement. There are a number of moving parts here, but part of the issue is that conservatism in the West and Southeast is heavily influenced by fundamentalist Christianity. That’s less the case in the Northeast, where I grew up. There the stereotypical conservative was a Wall Street conservative, best exemplified in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Sort of. There was a period of time where the WSJ’s news section had a solid reputation and editorial was considered pablum for upstate rubes. Those days are gone.
Whatever happened to American exceptionalism? If we have to have an authoritarian leader, why does it have to be someone so fucking stupid? If he was to be reelected, I would consider every one of his enablers a traitor. Not the vast mass of dumbfucks; I mean those who know better and do nothing. Assholes.
This is what some Trump supporters are hoping will happen if there is mass deportation and sealed borders. It will not.
Some consequences depend on exactly what these difficult jobs are. But from what I know, employers cannot “do that right now.” Prices would have to go up to the point where high tariff imports displace domestic produce. If Trump really deports most undocumented workers and seals borders, there will be a U.S. farm depression with the terrible working conditions hidden away abroad.
As to what this says about Trump being like Hitler? Well, actually, it tells me that Trump, in all his badness, is not like Hitler. DJT admires Hitler and Mussolini in the abstract, but it is a Hitler of his imagination.
