It seems that the MAGA movement is earily similar to what I learned about the Nazis before Hitler took office? Like blind obedience and hatred toward certain groups? Or am I wrong? Why?
You know, for this whole election cycle, many, many people have been commenting on the parallels between Trump/MAGA and the rise of the Nazi party. It hasn't just been people on social media, there have been lots of well cited articles. Take a look at this Guardian piece from the summer.
So yes, the parallels are so significant that it makes people wonder if it's coincidental or a playbook.
I'll be surprised if he lives long enough for that - he's old and has a terrible diet - but he said at a fundraiser that people would only need to vote one more time, which many took to mean that's all he'd need to stay in power. He tried a failed coup in 2020, so clearly doesn't care if it's lawful or not. Would anyone be surprised?
I would definitely not put it beyond him. The only thing that could really prevent this would be his death. Be glad that Trump is way older than Hitler was in 1933.
He doesn't need to. Elections will happen as usual, but states with Republican-led governments will report favorable results for Republicans regardless of the reality.
We are already well along the road of elections being fairly meaningless. Not because the results aren't counted accurately but because elections can be swayed by numerous mechanisms including voter suppression (voter ID laws, redistricting, restrictions on polling places and methods, etc) and propaganda. Combine that with economic suppression via wealth inequality that results in low-information voters being the norm and you have a relatively easy mechanism to "win" elections that's legal and constitutional.
Hitler didn't get into power by being a dictator, he became one through a series of events. The Reichstag fire was a pretext Hindenburg declaring a state of emergency which not only gave Nazi's the ability to frame and dissent or opposition as traitorous, it also lent "credence" to their propaganda about the threat of communism, allowing them to further consolidate power in the 1933 election.
The scary thing is that Republicans have the holy political trinity right now. Control of the executive as well as both legislative branches. They could easily pass an amendment to nix the 22nd.
I agree that it makes no sense, especially if you are a casual observer like so many. But I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the exact plan from the moment Jan 6 failed.
Make no mistake, the coup is complete. Nobody did what was necessary to prevent it.
You know how before he was elected, people would point out that his favourite book was mein campf and his favourite people were all dictators and that alot of the stuff he was saying and doing was the same stuff hitler was saying and doing to get into power? And also how literally every day people would say, "he's the next hitler" or "he's trying to become the next hitler"...
This is why Republicans have been eroding education and trying to remove state and federal curriculum requirements.
They have been teaching their children. That Nazis were misunderstood.
This has always been the goal.
And they want to mainstream "selecting their own education" with federally funded education credits to make the tax payers fund their brainwashing camps.
The propaganda tactics from the GOP are also the same. Take a look at Lügenpresse. Fomenting distrust in a free press is a necessity if you want to replace it with a controlled press.
That's true, but most press has been controlled by corporate interest for generations. I support actual independent press and fully reject all of the big players from MSNBC to Fox to Joe Rogan.
I think it has to do more with human nature. You can see a similar mentality with the Russian and French revolutions. The biggest difference is that people aren't economically desperate here. People may be poor or feel poor but they aren't truly desperate like Germany in the depression, Russia after the debacle of ww1, France with food shortages, etc. Here it is an ideological and cult of personality issue but not enough to get the majority of people and the major powers (the military, the very wealthy, etc) involved. This feels more like the Red Scare people of the 1950s.
One of my takeaways from the whole ordeal is that people don't need to be economically desperate, just feeling so goes a long way. The US has had one of the best post covid recoveries. Objectively the US economy is in decent shape but then if you listen to Trump's hustings' you could think that the US is in a deep recession akin to the 1930s, whilst also on the brink of world war 3 and overrun by migrant crime gangs. Combine that with the massive amount of targeted misinformation on social media and you get a new situation in which people are relatively well off (on the grand scale of history) yet radicalized as if destitute.
I really didn't want to believe it, but post-election I've come to the conclusion that a significant amount of these vibes are driven by YouTube and TikTok. My FYP is filled with videos that portray only the side of the U.S. that is decaying--abandoned shopping malls, blighted neighborhoods or towns that shut down for one reason or another, presented as memes about "liminality" or uncanniness. Admittedly I have a longstanding interest in urban exploration that predates the liminal space trend and its offshoots but you have to ask yourself why these media are being pushed so hard by algorithms and I don't think it's just that they appeal to people like me. I suspect that it's part of a more concerted effort to portray the United States as a nation in decline, failing to keep up with authoritarian powers like China and Russia, leading to an obvious prescription: replace our democracy with our own authoritarian system... which will be easier for large corporations and foreign governments (even China whom Trump ostensibly opposes) to exploit and control.
If you're only valuing similarities, then your missing the differences. When you see the differences, you can see the points of tensions that can arise. And if you're not historically contextualizing it, you won't know how this moment is unique and conditioned.
Politically, you still need to organize with people, probe for weaknesses, and attack knowing how mucher weaker you are than the state. This is the same for all responses. But what you do needs to be a unique response to the unique moment with unique weaknesses.
If you want to see Nazi late stage-like behaviour, look at Israel.
The Republicans with Trump are more like Mussolini, even down to how Trump seems less of a warmonger than the Democrats but still supports the present day Nazis.
Both parties in the US supporting some kind of Fascism has a very 1930s vibe to it and if the Democrats had won, that would still be the case.
It's just that in places like Lemmy you're exposed to a lot of Political Propaganda from the Democrat Party which is just subtlety-free maximum alarmism (it was their main technique during the election campaign) so obviously the perception it induces is that their opposition is of the worst possible kind of Far Right Populist (ironic when the Democrats in Israel support something a lot more like Nazism at its later most extremelly racist and murderous stage) when the reality, whilst likely bad, is subtly different: as I pointed out and judging by his previous presidence, Trump doesn't seem to be a warmonger, which makes him less of a warmonger that the Democrats often are and hence makes him more like the Fascist Autoritarians of the Mussolini kind than those of the Hitler kind.
It doesn't help that the typically well educated person is overeducated on Nazism and undereducated on all other forms of Fascism, so all far-right populism wanna-be autocrats seem to those people to be like the only system like that they've learned enough about: Nazism.
Have you really missed the last year of presidential election propaganda here, especially the last month in the run up to the election, as well as the relentless "it's all the fault of those who didn't vote Kamala" memes since!???
I mean, some people were setting up filters to exclude anything with the words "Trump", "Kamala", "Democrat" and "Republican" to get a little respite from the relentless bombardment of political messages and none of that messaging had the Republican-spin.
I'm not saying they're the majority here, but there are certainly lots of them and they're pretty loud.
Also if you notice the voting on my point above that "Trump is not like Hitler, he's more like Mussolini" anchored on him so far not having shown warmongering tendencies even in his last presidency, which is not at all denying his authoritarian tendencies or ability to cause damage to the US, there's a lot of knee jerk reaction negative voting on it (and so far, not a single counter argument, and that includes your post which is all about something I did not wrote in my post), and that's just basically a point on how we should be precise when classifying fascists rather than go into a blind panic fed by hyperbolic alarmism from politically motivated sources - in other words, I'm defending Skepticism (know your sources and suspect those with an interest in forming other people's opinions) and Analytical Thinking (ponder on things rather than rush to the most emotionally appealing conclusion).
"He's a far-right authoritarian fascism in the vein of Mussolini but judging by his track record is unlikely to start WWIII or start mass murdering people based on their ethnicity so is not like Hitler" is just using one's brain in a cold pondered way and hardly amounts to an endorsement of the guy.
The people trump pandered to are specifically the most well-armed people. And the ones with the least barrier to using them. I really hope it goes the way you think it will, but it certainly doesn't seem like it will be in the good guys favour if it does come down to actual combat. Good guys have less weapons and more hesitation to use them.
The only portion that is well armed are the Republicans. Democrats spent the last thirty years demonizing gun ownership and enacting laws to restrict people from purchasing them.
Only a pathetically insignificant number of Leftists own firearms, including myself. And even fewer spend any time per month training with them, and may as well donate them to Republicans because even the most operator-level ergonomic high tech guns are worthless paperweights without regular training.
If anything the Trump fiasco has shown how stupid the argument of using guns to prevent a dictatorship is. A couple people tried to kill the wannabe dictator and were villified by both sides.
Americans will never rise up against the government. More than half of those who can vote chose the fascism. He controls the military. All of you could be armed and you wouldnt get through to him. Have fun shooting a hellfire missilie with your AR