07-22-2021, 12:24 PM
(07-22-2021, 07:52 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-21-2021, 05:01 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(04-09-2021, 02:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.
I see Hitler as centered on his nation and culture, while Trump is centered on himself. That makes them hard to compare. Still, the elites and the racists are a real problem in America. Trump managed to take advantage of them.
Good point. It's hard to build a lasting political movement on narcissism. Eventually, that gets old -- even for the acolytes with no life of their own.
Eventually people go back to the sports bar and show off their encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia, grow a garden that gives them pride, start playing hymns or pop tunes on their Hammond organs, or do some hobby that does far more to assert individuality than does participating in a political cult damned to marginalization. Politics becomes problem solving to a far greater extent than identity, which is healthy, and fewer people are in rage.
The deficiencies of Donald Trump as a political leader are all too obvious. Narcissism is the norm in political leaders of almost all kinds, whether democratic or dictatorial. The wiser sorts of narcissists like FDR know that they must earn the accolades. The not-so-wise ones corrupted by power, like Ceausescu who think themselves entitled to the sort of adulation that the Beatles got for their legitimate achievements in music, rely upon a personality cult and a dreaded secret police.
When people are back to putting more effort into a garden than in politics, playing more music on a solo instrument or in some ensemble, debating whether the Chicago Symphony or the New York Philharmonic is a better orchestra, painting rustic scenes or urban abstracts, or doing needlepoint... as politics again becomes boring -- then we are in a 1T.
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.