Steve Bannon.

[hollodero]

(02-16-2017, 07:57 PM)Dill Wrote: Hitler comparisons CAN be silly, but not always. Depends on what is claimed, what is compared.

You mentioned a point I have repeatedly made--Hitler was much more FOCUSED than Trump. 

Since the 1950s in the U.S., presidents have been compared to Hitler, mostly by the Right, but somewhat by the student left in the 190s. Organizations like Planned Parenthood and those advocating universal healthcare are frequently aligned with fascism and Nazism.

Most such comparisons are based on a very superficial, distorted knowledge of Nazism, perpetrated since the 1950s along with anti-Communism. (National SOCIALISM--get it?)

In Trump's case, what spurs people to terms like "fascism" and comparisons to the world's most famous Austrian is the autocratic style and the famously authoritarian personality. I don't have a problem with people highlighting that, since those traits are likely to produce bad policies.

Historical periods and figures are never identical. It is silly to suppose that, given our current checks and balances, Trump could become a Putin-style dictator, let alone end up on a balcony in a uniform speaking to thousands with 100 ft long American flags draped on either side. But that doesn't mean he cannot do great damage in the next year--even to Europeans not enfranchised to elect him.

It is interesting that the U.S. has never had a president so similar to Hitler, not just in personality traits, but also in what might be called "policy instinct"--the claims "weak" leadership has left national trade and employment subject to whims of free trade and international capital, lip service to workers while preparing tax relief for the wealthy, readiness to trash old alliances in favor of new ones with other autocrats, the desire to expel immigrants and control borders, the perpetual scapegoating of minorities in the name of security, the ability to push the buttons of people who feel liberals are siphoning off their hard earnings to support social parasites--people who agree the free press "lies" and that the government has forgotten them because traditional political parties have diverged from their original purposes and now only represent their own short-term interests--hence a "new movement" is needed to break the stranglehold of traditional elites and business as usual; the existence of a leftist "fremdkultur" in control of the country's policies, and capable of throwing up national leaders racially different from the norm, of uncertain origin, and culturally alien.  A country to be taken back from those who don't belong, don't represent or express the national values . . . .

Whew! I am out of breath listing similarities. And I never even mentioned the hatred of a sneering liberal elite whose aesthetic production (e.g. Hollywood movies but also modern art in the German case) is destroying the conservative social fabric. And I have totally skipped the personality traits--the Manichean casting of all around as friend or enemy, weak or strong, useful or not, support or threat.  And then there is manner in which Trump, like Hitler, sets underlings in competition with one another in a perpetual chaos of toadying. You mentioned Bannon--I could go another paragraph on the kind of people Hitler selected to be around him, the kind of person you had to be to work with him, but I'm running out of gas.

One can always find a president who exhibits some of the above-mentioned traits, but I cannot think of one who checks so many boxes as Trump does.  Pointing out that Trump doesn't have a moustache negates none of the above.
 

That I consider an excellent post.