Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.
You must read more history then. If you live in the U.S. you have it far better than most people regarding representation and access to justice in the history of civilization. We excel at recognizing the failings of our current States, but we utterly fail to recognize their successes in the context of history. People have long had far worse as a starting point for improvement though civil engagement.
Just to clarify, I do not live in the US and never been there, so my opinions on this matter may not really be representative of the situation at all. However my parents did grow up under a socialist totalitarian regime in eastern Europe and I myself grew up in many countries in Africa and Asia, so I am quite familiar with other systems around the world. My point is, however, that it is quite ridiculous to say you are defending a system, which allowed such things to occur in such an obscure manner in the first place. Also, if you look at the US now, you can see there aren't that many options for civil engagement as it would seem. First of all, if you look at the current election (and many of the recent elections), you can see that the way the President was elected was not representative of the country at all. There was a a 58% turnout, Hillary got over a million more votes than Trump and it was all under the electoral college system, which hugely overemphasizes some regions. So you can see that Trump was not elected by the people, but rather by an obscure system not much different from chance. Furthermore the US political system is flawed in a tremendous number of ways. 6 corporations own all the media in the country. The effect that lobbying has on congress is incredible. Congressmen spend more time calling for money, than working on legislation. Congress is elected with the first past post system. And finally, having a nationwide referendum in order to implement a law is not possible. Of course the US respects all human rights, which is still not happening in some countries, but Americans seem to fixated on the way their democracy works and trying to defending it, without really looking at the flaws and maybe the reason Trump was elected in the first place.
In the face of a new kind of fascism, it's better to be prepared than to sorrow about missing the opportunity, but... is the situation in the US that dire? I don't hear many news lately, and most of them are about Trump's surprising or disgusting appointments.
The blessing and the curse of Donald Trump is that he's a selfish, narcissistic idiot. It's a blessing because his primary goals are self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, which means any policy changes are going to be incidental to his personal benefit. It's a curse because it means anyone who can influence the world while also stroking his ego gets to influence the world. I'd much rather have a moron running things than a malevolent ideologue. Both choices suck ass, no doubt, but what politics Trump had were centrist Democrat, at least until the whole Birther thing gave him a new way to be famous.
I'm more worried than you and Odder, but I'll say this: most of the bureaucracy has civil service protections, so attempts to punish dissenters would be difficult, and at least the subset of it I have contact with really does care about doing the job they do and are perfectly willing to subvert any policies that get in the way of them doing it. I have heard funny stories about the Bush administration. Except for those that get defunded, government business is likely to proceed more-or-less as normal in spite (perhaps more literally than usual) of whatever horror gets appointed to nominally run things.
The two factoids I've seen lately : 1) Trump's cabinet has a combined personal wealth greater than the bottom 30% of the country 2) Trump's cabinet has the lowest education level of any cabinet in modern history, with the only doctorate belonging to Ben Carson. They're going to do terrible shit by mistake, not on purpose.
Put another way: Dick Cheney did terrible shit on purpose... because his idea of "terrible shit" is the polar opposite of my idea of "terrible shit." Cheney was 100% convinced that the CIA was full of shit, that Iraq had WMD, and that the US needed to take the Middle East in order to preserve the American way of life. Donald Trump isn't an idealist. He's not Marx, he's not Kennedy, he's not Mao, he's not Hitler. He could be Stalin. He could be Duterte. But he's a 70-year-old real estate developer whose political itch didn't advance to putting together a campaign until he was beyond retirement age. Donald Trump doesn't think he's on the side of angels. He thinks angels are irrelevant. He won't do evil shit to be lionized by history because his idea of "historic" is large buildings with his name on them. He's going to do stupid shit because he has less interest and respect for politics than the average HOA member.
Seems like you've never interacted with a narcissist to any degree of knowing the person. Your idea of Trump is that he's going to actually put in effort to achieve whatever high point he's setting up for himself. Trump's idea of Trump is that the world's going to bring it to him, and if it doesn't, it's the world's fault for not living up to his desires. Despite having mastered the public appearance of sincerely-confident person who always sells the good side of his product, inside, he's still a deeply-wounded and insecure man-child who, like all children, projects his imaginary power over the reality that doesn't give a crap about what he wants. That he's learned to force himself onto what doesn't bend to his will as an adult - with varying degrees of success, a graph which sadly includes actual successes when people are his targets - doesn't make him more adult or, for that matter, more mature. To hope that he'd do something good with it now that he's 70 is getting your hopes too high: he is, after all, still an asshole.
I think you're right about this, but that doesn't actually contradict what white2 was saying. My position on Trump in this regard is that his goals (to the extent that he has any) are horrible, but he will be super bad at attaining them, which actually works in our favor.Trump's idea of Trump is that the world's going to bring it to him, and if it doesn't, it's the world's fault for not living up to his desires.
Have they stopped recently, or did they ever not like him? From what I've seen on The Daily Show, it sounds like Fox was soundly pro-Trump at least before the election. What does that mean? Did I miss some epic spy story?even Fox news doesn't really like him
because the CIA and NSA have already shown with the "Russian election hack" story that they'll sell him out at the first opportunity.
Apparently yes. Your spy services, apparently backed by Putin himself, hacked quite a few things to push the election results towards Trump. CIA, NSA, and FBI all agree on that, and they never agree on anything. So they hacked the DNC emails, we all know that. And released the stuff to Wikileaks, since Assange is such a dear friend of shaking the state. But it also turns out they hacked the RNC, found incriminating stuff, and then decided NOT to release that stuff. And they also hacked the company that supplies the electronic voting machines in key battleground states, long enough before the election that it appears that the machines seem to be running an altered version of their OS. (And the hand recounts and machine recounts in one state are already out of whack too far to be just a statistical anomaly.) So yeah. At this point it is clear the Russians hacked the US election and may have asserted enough sway to have actually had an effect on the election. The Electoral College gets together today to vote for the new President officially, and this is usually a formality. But now several of them have asked for briefings from the CIA/NSA/FBI on the hacking evidence before they place their vote. Which is kinda the point of the Electoral College... to be the last bastion against shenanigans. (The other story which has faded from the press was that many of the fake news sites that were publishing insane shit about Clinton - like Pizzagate - were run by a group of 9 or 10 young people from Moldova, with direct Russian backing in the way of funding and server support from .ru. That definitely had an effect, as well.) Did I miss some epic spy story?
As if I needed more reasons to not like this country. It's all weird power moves from Russia. I mean, it's quite cool of it to use cyberwarfare for its benefit, but - for Christ's sake, to what end? Power? Control? Money? It makes no sense to me. If you want to effectively seize control of another country - which, from what I hear, is Russia's apparent plan - why would you do it before taking care of your own? Also, those aren't "my" spy services: they're Russian government's. I'd like not to be affiliated with what the current government does. When the country I live in decides to openly spy on its people, it's not something I would support. By the way, the Yarovaya laws? the ones that require mobile carriers to store data from the services they provide for six months? They remain unchanged after whoever takes care of it in Russia had a hearing about possible changing them.
Potentially? U.S. intelligence agencies have now come to a consensus (with the FBI being a little late to the party) that Russia hacked the DNC and released all those damning e-mails with the purpose of helping Trump win the election. That those same agencies have gone public with this (which undermines Trump's legitimacy) is what Odder is referring to.What does that mean? Did I miss some epic spy story?
Well, Quartz did lift this from his Facebook page, so it's not like he was writing to be published. It was kinda yoinked from a cheeseball medium and published in a more serious outlet... which gives the article more weight than the original author probably intended. This is probably a function of the author: "Yale History Professor" doesn't sound to me like a font of deep political analysis ...