(11-10-2020, 04:25 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-09-2020, 03:21 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You just supported rule by oligarch. I assume you weren't paying attention or assume that you were unable able to figure that out? I guess we'll get to see if the blue oligarchs are any better than the blue politicians as far as ruling blue America these days. I think you guys did a wonderful job screwing yourselves this time around.
You need a strong government to solve the crisis. I paid attention enough to know Trump wasn't going to solve the COVID or racist problems. He was thoroughly on the wrong side of the two dominant problems surfacing thus far in the crisis. You solve the problems. Government becomes less focused in subsequent turnings.
We'll see which party has messed itself up. The base is still loyal to the ultimate loser. The establishment is thoroughly discredited. The true conservatives have an uphill battle against either. We'll see how the Georgia senate seats go.
Weak, ineffective government creates an opening for the demagogue who claims that he alone can solve everything. That demagogue typically asserts that he needs extraordinary powers to force a change... perhaps in ways that people do not want change. It may be an amazing coincidence, but PBS is now showing a story on how Adolf Hitler came to power right now. Weimar Germany had a fatal flaw as a system; it simply excised the Kaiser. The Weimar Republic never fully filled the vacuum, but Hitler certainly did. The weak, democratic German government was never able to get any mitigation of reparations... but Hitler was certainly able to. Hitler was useful to many people willing to sell their souls for whatever they wanted.
Most telling was that people who should have known better, people who preferred intrigues to determine who is to hold power to democratic processes -- and that the judicial system broke down as Nazis corrupted the system and the formal police. The Stormtroopers could get away with all sorts of violence, and once they could get away with anything, "law and order" became nothing more than the will of the Fuehrer.
I suspect that this was made as a warning in America. After all, we aren't Weimar Germany, are we? We have a Constitution in place from 1789 and no heritage of despotism.
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.
