- 02 Oct 2018 02:23
#14950305
There is an amazing and terrible museum in Koln, Germany: the Museum of National Socialism. On the upper floors are videos of Hitler’s early speeches and rallies: he attacks the elite and the press and uses fear, straw men, repeated lies, and racism to enrage his audience. At times the resemblance to a Trump rally is almost perfect. At this time Hitler was thought by Germany’s leaders to be an idiotic boor who would never rise to power.
In the basement are the interrogation cells of the Gestapo, with the graffiti of the victims still on the walls. They were in operation less than a decade after the above assessment.
I believe that it absolutely could happen here, and there is reason to believe that it has already begun.
Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.
In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.
But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it? The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.
Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.
The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.
In the basement are the interrogation cells of the Gestapo, with the graffiti of the victims still on the walls. They were in operation less than a decade after the above assessment.
I believe that it absolutely could happen here, and there is reason to believe that it has already begun.
Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.
In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.
But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it? The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.
Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.
The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.
"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897
- By late
- By starman2003