Republican National Convention(s)

[Dill]

(08-27-2020, 01:32 PM)michaelsean Wrote: You're missing something here, and that is the far left is showing restraint when they compare him to Hitler and some policies.  They believe he would willingly exterminate 12 million people to advance himself if he could get away with it.  They just aren't willing to outright say it yet.

A GREAT DEAL of restraint. Some have even gone so far as to  uncouple Trump from fascism and Nazism altogether. On this very thread even.

Speaking for "the Left" in quotation marks, I'm not sure how killing 12 million would fit into the kinds of goals and self-image Trump sets for himself, like getting hotels built in Moscow and Kazakhstan, and adulation from followers at his rallies. He doesn't write much. His books were written by others, but in them he doesn't say anything about "exterminating parasites" and the like. 

Speaking for the Left without quotation marks, I doubt any of us are thinking of Trump in terms of potential genocide. Hitler after '33? For the historical materialist, the matter for comparison to Trump drops off precipitously, or suffers stretching beyond usefulness. SSF has a good point about this, though, as after '33 the matter(and temptation) for association by demagoguery is greater. In this forum we don't have to worry though.

It's not that I think Trump has some heretofore hidden well of empathy that would block genocide. Or that he doesn't. To get into that discussion I would have to imagine absurdities--like some how Trump is forced to choose between a brand new Trump tower in Moscow or preventing Putin from nuking Georgia. I have no confidence Trump would make the right decision, but I can say that have little interest in warning people about that possibility. I'm sticking with the sort of empirical and institutional analysis of authoritarianism that helps us understand what we could expect from Trump's second term. That helps us recognize what we have, and why people chose the authoritarian option. The latter problem won't just disappear if Trump is voted out of office.