And this is just exactly the crappy argument that a hypothetical Trump presidency would use to make sure that we eliminate all those bad lefties, who are all just dirty unwashed hippies with “bad” ideas.
Times like these make me wish I invested in tin and aluminum mines.
I’m all out of Kakutani references so all I can say is “I am rubber, you are glue.” Literary enough?
And he would be wondering who this “Adolph” guy is. His “furher” (sic) I guess.
That’s can be more than 14.88% of Trump supporters.
Into the mix, toss a severe economic recession or depression. Millions out of work, hundreds of thousands homeless, or squatting without paying rent. (Who’s gonna evict that many people?) As the level of desperation soars, so does the willingness of the people to follow a strong leader who promises a solution.
FDR offered a New Deal. Hitler offered a Final Solution.
A new American dictator would probably go somewhere in the middle, but I can see severe losses of civil rights as a very likely outcome. Reversal of Obergefell and of Roe to start with; voter suppression and Jim Crow perhaps to follow.
Or maybe something as mild as the Sedition Act under Adams. Who’s to care other than a few journalists? Of course, the SDMB would have to be shut down…
Exactly right. People are understandably looking for social and economic change and visionary leadership in the present political climate, which is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Trump is just a simian hayseed who stumbled into this yawning chasm of need. He didn’t so much earn the nomination as trip and fall headfirst into it. Just about everything he advocates is precisely the wrong solution, and he’s far worse than the rise of the right in many European countries because in addition to being a hateful bigot he’s also a total blithering moron.
“slick propaganda machine that used the latest technology” You know who else does this? That’s right. Hitllary! Vote Hitllary for Fuhrer!
Aside from Trump not being Hitler, I think the more important factor is that the US isn’t Wiemar Germany. The current political system has its problems, but it’s no where close to being as dysfunctional Wiemar Republic was. Even the height of the financial crisis the US economy was nowhere near as bad as the Great Depression was in Germany. Iraq and the War on Terror has been traumatic for the US, but they haven’t left anywhere near the scar on the public psyche that WWI left on Hitler’s generation.
The US doesn’t have anywhere near the level of organized political violence that was present during the Wiemar years, and while Trumpism has an authoritarian, anti-democratic streak, the Wiemar Republic had a legislature where, even before the Nazi’s came to power, a majority of the seats were held by political parties that were explicitly in favor of an end to democratic rule.
The review is kind of fun exercise in “sub-tweeting”, and I think there are some parallels worth paying attention to (especially the last quote in the OP). But even if Trump was literally Hitler, I think the risk of the US going the way of the Wiemar Republic is pretty minimal.
Which of course, doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t be a disaster. Not everything has to be “holocaust bad” to just be “really really bad”.