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kpete

(71,903 posts)
Sat May 21, 2016, 09:22 AM May 2016

Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States

Adam Gopnik: “One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses.”

“To say ‘Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that’ is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.”


http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump
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Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States (Original Post) kpete May 2016 OP
Trump is not Hitler but "Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was pampango May 2016 #1

pampango

(24,692 posts)
1. Trump is not Hitler but "Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was
Sat May 21, 2016, 09:37 AM
May 2016

tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable."

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