03-12-2017, 01:56 PM
The anti-Trump resistance must be bigger than the Tea Party, and for good reasons. First, Donald Trump has the majority of an authoritarian Establishment on its side -- people who hold that people whose beliefs are contrary to theirs deserves to be rendered permanently irrelevant. Second, Donald Trump is a dictator, and he has the legislative branch under control. The only questions about the Trump dictatorship are of its competence and ruthlessness. Third, an American dictatorship would be difficult to escape and could get away from much.
So we have no heritage of executive despotism? Neither did the Germans going into 1933.
Except for those Americans who have first-hand experience under a dictatorial regime we don't fully understand what we are dealing with. (OK, blacks of a certain age in the Jim Crow South... but that would now be people over age 60 who might know the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as a KGB-like organization in the service of segregation).
So we have no heritage of executive despotism? Neither did the Germans going into 1933.
Except for those Americans who have first-hand experience under a dictatorial regime we don't fully understand what we are dealing with. (OK, blacks of a certain age in the Jim Crow South... but that would now be people over age 60 who might know the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission as a KGB-like organization in the service of segregation).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.