Decency, Trump and Obama.

[Dill]

(03-15-2017, 07:01 AM)hollodero Wrote: But the analogies to my country fail at very important points, the situation is so different. And yet some mechanisms are so strikingly similar, something I never saw in american politics before (similarities I mean). I can only see it as it was taken from Europe, who took it from us, see "Jörg Haider" "HC Strache" or "FPÖ" (you know some of those probably, don't feel prompted to google the others, doesn't matter). What happens in the US, we invented... but again, vast differences, our alt-rights have their own party and didn't need to overtake another one, we don't have a vain dumb-dumb millionaire who is driven by reaching historic immortality they can use as a tool, and we don't have to deal with North Korea and stuff like that.

You are correct about the differences between Alt-rights, e.g., they have their own party in the East Reich, etc.  Whereas in the US they had to take over an existing party, which often resists their aims, (Imagine the FPÖ and ÖVP forced to share the same administration and budget)

But I think there has been more historical interaction/resemblance between US and European/Austrian right than you realize.  The kind of “scientific racism” so prominent in post WWI Germany originated in the 19th century US, France, and Great Britain, where Northern Europeans either lived side by side with millions of African/Asian descended people whom they did not want to see assimilated or were in a position to control vast colonial populations.

History never repeats itself, but many of the phenomena you describe about manipulation of masses by vilifying the free press and constructing media liberal elites with secret agendas and boosting a strong, authoritarian change agent who can jump over politically correct liberal hurdles to get things done and shut the liberal elite up along the way—all that existed in the US and UK as well as Germany in the 1920s.  Germany even had the dissatisfaction of rural dwellers who felt the main parties weren’t listening to them—“flyover Germany” so to speak. I find it chilling to read Nazi discussions of immigrations and foreigners and the pre-occupation with borders and the urgent need to register foreigners living within the Reich.

Watching Trump speak about judges who blocked his executive order, mis-explaining US law to thousands of listeners, was especially chilling—the roaring approval of groupthink hatred from the dis-informed crowd chanting "lock her up, lock her up."  It is still all about symbols and magical thinking and revenge.