New Poll: 43% of Republicans Want to Give Trump the Power to Shut Down Media

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81. History Repeats

Found on the internet.

When you look back on the history of Germany or Italy or any country that descended into fascism, what do you actually think were the warning signs?

You can see the warning sign when a leader wants to close down a free press, and that’s already happened to a large extent in places like Turkey and Hungary. Opposition newspapers have been closed. The same thing happens in Putin’s Russia. And Mr. Trump has declared his hostility toward the press, but he doesn’t have the means to do it. He’s not able to close down the Washington Post or the New York Times as the Nazis closed down newspapers. You can see it in irresponsible and aggressive nationalist belligerence in foreign policy. Again, Hitler did not believe in international institutions. He got Germany out of the League of Nations. He regarded international treaties as pieces of paper that would be torn up when he wanted to. And again, you can see in Mr. Trump a certain amount of contempt for international institutions and the belief that America should leave them.And then finally, I think, contempt for the truth. Goebbels was completely cynical about the truth. He said, All we need to do is to say the things that suit us. We don’t have to bother about whether they’re true or not. And if you bang away hard enough in propaganda and you repeat a lie, then people will start believing it. I shudder to think what Dr. Goebbels would have done with the internet. And I think that’s one of the most dangerous things we’ve seen from Mr. Trump.

So what’s scary now is that even though Trump is not Hitler, or whoever else is not Hitler, we do have to reckon with the fact that our democracies are in trouble because these guys all have more legitimate popular support than someone like Hitler did?

One of the problems, perhaps the fundamental problem of democracy today, is that the mass of the electorate, millions of people in the electorate, are disillusioned. Hitler only ever achieved 37.4 percent of the vote in a free election, but Erdogan, Orbán, and the Polish government, for example, have been elected by majorities of the electorate who approve of their policies. I know Trump lost the popular vote, but he was elected when it was clear that he was no friend of democracy. So that’s the situation we have to deal with. And that is: In some ways, democracy is dying bit by bit.