Seems appropos
Not an expert but it seems to me the most important thing is education. In the U.S. they’ve been chipping away at that since at least the eighties. I’m not “handing it to them” but the right has put in the long term work to get us where we are today, with only feeble liberal centrist pushback.
Lotta very well-educated MAGAs. Not sure if education cuts to the heart of the illness.
Also a lot of well-educated and intelligent people who are not happy and/or governed by their inner darkness. Education is important but I think there’s something far more fundamental at issue
There are well-educated racists, but there’s MORE uneducated racists. The well-educated racists spread their ideology and weaken their opposition by hurting education, then they get to rule over the other racists by using their education.
But the bigger issue is the racist part, there must be people in history who were vehemently racist who had a change of heart…
What does it take for that to happen, is there a way to nudge them to take off their jacket in the warm sun
Being MAGA and being educated are mutually exclusive.
To believe in MAGA you need to believe there was a time in the past where America was great, but that that time has passed and that somehow there is a way to return to it.
Anyone with decent education realizes the myriad flaws with the very idea the movement is based on.
I’m sure you’re correct. Just as a poor education along with lack of socio-economic opportunity and inavailability of mental healthcare might contribute to radicalization in the working poor, it stands to reason that a basic lack of empathy, whether taught or innate, likely coupled with greed must play a role for radicalization of the wealthy.
There’s not one illness, strictly speaking.
Russia found a guy who appealed enough to the legacies of confederate know nothings who were about to become politically irrelevant if the GOP had died as expected in 2015.
The two illnesses are A) lawful evil, Roman republicans who are working to sell us out to Christian fascists. B) patriots of the Confederacy who think that if they lie to themselves long enough it will become truth. The stupidity of people in group B is profitable enough to turbocharge into political power for people in group A. The heart of the illness is the entire mass of B being held together by group A disinformation, you could call it propaganda but that would imply concern with truth. The hearts of the illness are the links holding them together.
Trying to appease fascists by avoiding confrontation or acting when they start chipping away at our insitutions willl just lead to more fascism. The nazis didn’t spring forth overnight, they consolidated their power through legal means and appealed to the population’s bigotry and hatred of ‘others’ without enough of a response to stop their ascension.
Basically the same thing that is happening in the west right now.
moderates need to stop only punching left.
hitler got into power because their moderates refused to appeal to their leftist voters and supported facism and so hitler’s side won the election and, later, the country after they disenfranchised the moderates and executed the leftists; right now it’s looking like americans are going to follow suit.
Idk I feel like moderates punch both left and right lol. The extremists on both sides are annoying.
Things that changed here in Germany (which I can think of off the top of my head):
- No presidential role. We don’t have a single person with that much power anymore. The most powerful is the chancellor now.
- No emergency laws. Many nations have laws that when something goes wrong, their president gets superpowers to do whatever they want. This is regularly abused, not just by Hitler. To my knowledge, we don’t currently have any such law.
- Secret voting. It is now illegal to make it public who you voted for. When Hitler rose to power, Nazis would sit in voting places and pressure people to vote for Hitler. And they would heckle people who didn’t want to show their ballot card.
Having said all that, it should also be said that we do still currently have a very real Nazi problem. It’s a few steps in the right direction, but no silver bullet.
The emergency laws seems like an interesting one because whatever its plausible justification, in practice, it seems like the only downside it would curb would be moreso any governmental liabillity for lawsuits and judicial review.
If the government wants to do something, it will do it and the courts will maybe take it up later. Any measure they say the needed to do they would probably just do anyway regardless of the true necessity or for whom it was evaluated in that light, the only benefit to an emergency law in that context seems to be dissolution of regular liabillity and having a talking point about being justified after the fact.
Seems like it incentivizes an opening for bad behavior
