Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas.
Today we watch a wannabe dictator attempt to wreck American democracy. As he tells us he will.
Will it work? November will tell.
In the meantime, voices current and past, try to wake us up to history.
From an American reporter who witnessed the rise of fascism In Europe: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” This reporter wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi.”
“By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.” They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle.
“But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
“Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion”
And current voices: “My four year study into totalitarianism generally, and fascism specifically, has taught me two valuable lessons. The first is that the common thread among democracies that collapse into dictatorship is that no one panicked until the threat was already in power and it was too late.
The second thing I learned is that the constitution/law can only protect you if all parties agree to adhere to it.
All you need to end a democracy is a leader willing to suspend or end the Constitution and a supporting cast large enough to allow him to do it.
Republicans have both.”
Off to vote. And in doing so, hope that America still wants to be America.
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