RE: The Official "Damned Trump" Thread
July 16, 2017 at 11:35 am
(This post was last modified: July 16, 2017 at 11:36 am by Foxaèr.)
Quote:If Republicans do not wish to be remembered like the German conservatives of the 1930s, they had better find their courage.
In his committed mendacity, his nostalgia for the 1930s, and his acceptance of support from a foreign enemy of the United States, a Republican president has closed the door on conservatism and opened the way to a darker form of politics: a new right to replace an old one.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump spoke of “America first,” which he knew was the name of political movement in the United States that opposed American participation in the second world war. Among its leaders were nativists and Nazi apologists such as Charles Lindbergh. When Trump promised in his inaugural address that “from now on, it’s going to be America first” he was answering a call across the decades from Lindbergh, who complained that “we lack leadership that places America first.” American foreign and energy policies have been branded “America first”.
Conservatives came to regard the American involvement in the second world war as a high mark of American morality, the work of “the greatest generation”. The current administration wants no part in this national story. In January, the White House passed over Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning the Jews. Its spokesman contrived in April to suggest that Hitler had not killed his “own people” by gas, an error of fact that reveals a deeper absence of ethics. The only way to believe that the German handicapped people and the German Jews who were gassed were not Germans is to accept the Nazi definition of race.
Conservatives always began from intuitive understanding of one’s own country and an instinctive defense of sovereignty. The far right of the 1930s was internationalist, in the sense that fascists learned one from the other and admired one another, as Hitler admired Mussolini.
The far right of today sees Russia as its model. Putin is openly admired by America’s leading white supremacists Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach(who is currently on trial for using force to eject people from a Trump rally, and whose defense is that he “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J Trump”).
As the political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov has shown, Russia supports the extreme right in Europe and the United States in order to disrupt democracy. Nowhere has this been more successful than in Russia’s support of the Trump campaign. Conservatives would see the danger of a president whose major sponsors are abroad.
One of the reasons why the radical right was able to overcome conservatives back in the 1930s was that the conservatives did not understand the threat. Nazis in Germany, like fascists in Italy and Romania, did have popular support, but they would not have been able to change regimes without the connivance or the passivity of conservatives.
The last time around, the old right chose suicide by midwifery, and it seems to be doing so again. If Republicans do not wish to be remembered (and forgotten) like the German conservatives of the 1930s, they had better find their courage – and their conservatism – fast.
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/trump...nservatism
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
~ Erin Hunter