Politics and Religion

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(03-03-2021, 02:01 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I think the only Hitler parallel I've really been keen on for Trump was one of the names for the attempted insurrection, just because the Beer Belly Putsch cracked me up.

(03-03-2021, 02:24 PM)hollodero Wrote: There's no real disagreement.

then

(03-03-2021, 07:51 PM)Dill Wrote: I tend to agree with this. The less people know about Hitler's rise to power, the less likely they are to find comparisons to Trump "apt" or useful. Most view Hitler in a kind of rearview mirror in which his later deeds overshadow the conditions which allowed his rise to power, and how he availed himself of opportunities or created them.  Some assume the standard of comparison to be persons, whereby the more "like" Trump an autocrat is, the more useful the comparison. The less like, the less useful. Even more assume the point of such comparisons is to simply tar political opposition rather than legitimate critique of actual behavior (or they do see the legitimate critique, but want to obscure it).

Better to make this point from a different angle--the more people know about autocrats/authoritarians in general, how they acquire power, how they overcome democratic checks, how they undermine public discourse with false narratives and foster distrust in government, the more likely they are to find Hitler comparisons useful, though not the end goal of analysis. From this perspective, one compares someone like Trump to a spectrum of autocratic rulers, especially those who emerged in democratic regimes, as well as borderline cases, like some of our own presidents and vice-presidents.  Then one can see how different cases may offer different and multiple points of illumination on the present. E.g., the Nazi case helps illuminate how standards of public discourse (truth vs post-truth) are broken down by systematic inversions of victimhood (Hannah Arendt's work on Totalitarianism would be a useful bridge here). Spiro Agnew provides an American model for discrediting the press to cover corruption. And such study is not limited to persons. E.g. Hungary's Fidesz shows how a contemporary liberal party slides into a regime party over two decades.  Venezuela foregrounds autocracy conditioned by economic constriction. The point of this more comprehensive approach would be to raise awareness about behaviors in current leaders, their relation to their own party (like targeting critics within the party for exclusion) and to economic conditions, which might otherwise go unremarked.

This approach might have a better chance of receiving a fair hearing, since it doesn't place Hitler front and center, and it allows people to see dictatorship in a variety of actual and potential forms.  And it might alter peoples' assumptions about how to go about comparing political leaders, parties and ideologies, leaving them with a kind of generalizable civic/political knowledge which is not Trump-specific, but likely to become ever more useful in an increasing divided U.S. in which the turn to authoritarian leaders may intensify in the future.