Something that I posted elsewhere:
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.ph...msg7761830
Quote:Trump lost. Maybe he did better with the economy than one could have expected despite the effects of COVID-19. For many, how well the economy works (creating jobs) matters far more than does his fascistic antics. Trump would have come close to winning even had he started pogroms, which says much about the concerns that people have for jobs and 'food on the table'. Remember: Adolf Hitler, who did far worse things than Trump, was popular among German gentiles and would have probably won free elections even he let the Centre, Nationalists, and Social Democrats challenge him in 1936 or so.
Note well: In case you have any lingering delusion of the reliable superiority of the common man over other parts of humanity, especially of segments of humanity by sect or ethnic group within the common man, the 2020 election should disabuse you of that. Donald Trump got more support from white working people than from among the well-educated Model Minorities and perhaps even well-educated white people. Donald Trump is a thoroughly-horrid person, and his personal vices are well known. This is not a partisan statement. The last two Republican nominees who lost to Barack Obama, Barack Obama, and of course Joe Biden himself, are far better persons than Donald Trump. People extremely self-righteous about their religious devotion often voted for Trump despite his sexual misconduct that makes Bill Clinton look like the ideal of a Mormon missionary by contrast. Trump's business dealings and his personal conduct, as well as that of his campaign (a fish stinks from the head, folks) also demonstrate the moral rot that Donald Trump is.
If you want illustration of how capable the common man is of evil, then remember that the most dangerous people of time, political leaders who spurred genocide were able to find common people to be perpetrators. Stalin's gulags and Hitler's murder camps relied upon the common people to do the worst possible, including firing machine guns at helpless people whom those people had just herded to a shooting pit, introducing Zyklon-B into a fake shower, or having trained dogs dispatch emaciated prisoners. Brutal guards under the Japanese in World War II? The barely-learned people who killed in the name of creating a new and glorious Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge? Genocides in Rwanda and Turkey? Likewise. The people attending the sick spectacle of an auto-da-fe or the execution of an alleged sorcerer in which someone was literally burned at the stake were not largely physicians, attorneys, poets, and university professors. Add to this, the process of dragooning slave laborers for the nightmarish plantations and keeping slaves in bondage involved the common man as captors of new slaves and catchers of escaped slaves.
I have no illusion that we Americans are any better than the Spaniards who celebrated the immolation of some converso who lapsed by refusing to eat pork or out of sentimentality did some elements of celebrating Passover, the Turks who butchered Armenians or Greeks during or soon after World War II, citizens of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union, or Rwanda not so long ago. Human goodness requires reinforcement within the educational system and the mass culture, and when that reinforcement disappears or is short-circuited, then all Hell can break loose. We are just lucky that Donald Trump was not as adept a despot as he dreamed of being.
End of rant.
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.ph...msg7761830
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.