(01-06-2017, 09:47 AM)Anthony Wrote: This "fascism" talk is way overblown.
Do you honestly believe that there are ever going to be concentration camps and the like in this country - or even a return to full-blown Jim Crow?
There might be mass emigration though - and without the government even trying to keep anybody from leaving. The yahoos will jeer the emigrants as they get on the boats, to be sure - but nothing beyond that.
...or committing suicide, which many people will do as they see the American dream turning into a nightmare that they can neither condone, reform, or adjust to. Being obliged to suffer for people who live in opulent splendor and conspicuous excess is a thoroughly-unsatisfying way of life from which many of the ancestors of current Americans fled, and that is what we will find as a norm. Basically, America will at best look to have returned to the social norms of the early-industrial era but without the basic innovation that improved people's lives.
I would be wary of a mean-spirited demagogue who suddenly aligned himself completely with the most reactionary elements in American life. At that, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump really have something dangerous and at best demeaning in common. In view of what that grossly-immoral man has said and done, Donald Trump offers me no hope except in his failure. If it takes a meltdown on the scale of 1929-1932, then so be it. Such may be necessary to make Americans good again -- looking out for each other, questioning the authority of self-proclaimed elites, and having to judge official pronouncements for their veracity.
Were I thirty years younger I would emigrate. I do not trust this man with my civil liberties. I would not trust Big Business shorn of all responsibilities for any decency except to ownership to treat people well with a President and Congress that I expect to enable the worst in greed and bureaucratic cruelty toward employees and customers.
...Nobody could have predicted that Adolf Hitler was going to set up concentration camps and persecute Jews. Nobody believed that someone who brought so much pride to a nation of people with hurt feelings and economic distress could bring them even greater ruin and shame than anyone could have expected. Persecuting the Jews? A people who thrived in Germany under ideal conditions could still do well enough if they lost a few things. After all, a people who had survived the Inquisition and tsarist pogroms could survive anything. Besides, people said as late as 1938, when Hitler finally dispensed of his conservative partners and allowed Kristallnacht -- "this is Germany, a civilized and sophisticated country".
OK, we Americans have Mark Twain and not Goethe; Gershwin, Copland, and Ives and not Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms... we probably have greater painters than the Germans ever had. But we are likely to cast aside the political heritage of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and both Presidents Roosevelt... for what?
Donald Trump may not be quite that bad -- but he offers me no cause to trust him on economics, civil liberties, foreign policy, or justice. American politics is about nothing more than the enhancement of the power of economic elites at the expense of everyone else. I expect to hate life in Trump's America much as I would have hated life in Castro's Cuba, with its militarism, regimentation, and numbing propaganda.
I dread having his finger so close to the Red Button that can destroy civilization. Hitler never had atomic bombs at his disposal.
We liberals must resist. We still have our own Founding Father -- Martin Luther King. Where is he when we need him most? We will have to create him in ourselves.
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.