The Opposition Thread

A highly motivated base that didn’t stop both Bush and Obama winning reelection. Like I said if you are okay with 8 years of a Trump presidency then god speed.

I note that you’ve never actually revealed your master plan for overthrowing Trump. Is it sunshine and kisses?

It’s not repeating failed strategies for start.

EDIT: You are basically saying that I have to tell you what you should do to be effective or my criticism of your proven to be ineffective plan is moot. That’s not a real argument. Make the comparison all you want (like Republicans did to Obama and Hitler both wanting to take guns away or Bush and Hitler both scapegoating minorities) just don’t expect different results.

I came here for an argument. This is just contradiction.

Let me know when I contradict myself.

Look, we all know the Godwin etiquette. At the same time, we can’t let Godwin consciousness prevent us from noticing actual parallels with fascism. Trump said he wouldn’t accept the results of an election unless he won. That is a big fucking flaming neon red warning sign that maybe we should be vigilant that he sits for the results of the one in 2020. When, you know, he has the entire military and intelligence apparatus at his beck and call and can make claims of national security that are not easily refuted. And is just one tiny element out of the grab-bag of his authoritarian, nativist, xenophobic speeches and actions. Can you imagine this guy going into a mosque in a gesture of peace after a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11? Bush did. This guy is a whole different animal.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You don’t wait until the goddamn gas chambers are built before you start noticing parallels to the rise of fascism. You catch this shit early. My Spidey sense is tingling in a way it never was in the Bush years. I hope with all my heart I’m wrong about that.

Ignore the fact its hosted on rense, its a quote from a history book.

http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism

  1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
  1. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
  1. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

  2. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

  1. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
  1. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
  1. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
  1. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
  1. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
  1. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
  1. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
  1. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
  1. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
  1. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

14 out of 14.

and the GOP (and May’s Tories) would still be 14 out of 14 without Trump.

Yeah, all the talk about whether prior presidents are called Hitler is kind of moot, except for the fact that such hyperbole has led to folks discounting criticism of trump, who genuinely proposes fascist policy suggestions, as being mere hyperbole. It’s essentially become the world’s worst example of the boy crying wolf.

I would actually strike the “rightly” but Adam Gopnik’s point here (from this article) is fairly made:

Trump, in a tweet and then again in his press conference, actually compared the practice of leaking information about him to, of all things, the horrors of Nazi Germany. We are told, rightly, again and again, that such comparisons should never be made. The experience of Germany in 1934, and of that unspeakable ascent to power, is one that we ought to put aside as too enormous, too different, too blasphemous to even mention in our own crisis. But it is possible to be of the view that we ought always to keep that spectre in front of our eyes, not because our political opponents are “like Nazis,” but exactly because we too readily forget how easily the very worst can happen, and by what quick complicity we accede to the unacceptable, more often from our exhausted longing for decent normalcy (and normal decency) than from ideological conversion.

Emphasis mine.

It is not easy to maintain norms of constitutional government. Eternal vigilance is the price.

Completely agree. As a democrat i fear that this talk of Trump being some new, unique hitler candidate takes away from the reality that Trump seems to be 90% hardcore, modern republican and 10% twitter troll. If we ignored twitter, we wouldn’t even be able to tell him apart from other major republicans.

Well, previous Republican presidents in my lifetime didn’t make me fear for the foundations of our democracy itself. Perhaps things have changed since '09. But I would have been far, far more comfortable with a President McCain or a President Romney than I am with a President Trump. They are both in their way men of character and not for a second would I wonder whether they would sit for reelection, to say nothing of how much more hateful, grotesque, and vulgar a personality the soon-to-be Second Most Powerful Man on Earth (I think Putin gets #1 now) has.

It may be worth drawing a distinction between Republican presidential candidates and Republican members of Congress, but even there, I think their bad-faith obstructionism has until now mostly fit within the letter of the law. (The refusal to vet Merrick Garland is IMO one of the most egregious breaches so far.) Of course many of the laws Congressional Republicans advocate are odious to me, but I don’t think that is the same thing as undermining the institutions of our Democracy themselves. For many years the glorious old U.S. of A. had things like anti-Sodomy laws, anti-miscegenation laws, religious restrictions, race-based internment camps, heck, even eugenics backed up by an Oliver Wendell Holmes decision. Awful stuff all, to say nothing of slavery and Indian removal, but the republic itself rarely if ever seemed near breakdown or dictatorship. Terrible things like Plessy v. Ferguson and Executive Order 9066 at least existed in a framework where they could be undone by future office-holders rotated in according to the established rules.

Except for the fact that he doesn’t hold any Republican views on anything?

There is a reason most conservatives were flipping out about him and many still are.

Much of that was because of slavery and Jim Crow- those peculiar institutions forced compromise, because the South had a veto on policy. When that went away, you saw the beginnings of winner-take-all, South American style “democracy”.

Simon Bolivar’s constitution which was the basis of most of South America’s was based on ours. Checks and Balances only work when they’re effective and moderates can control things. When you’ve lost the plot, it loses the plot. We’ve lost the plot in this country, and we’re going to need hard reforms to fix it.

Oh so he won’t repeal obama care, gut social security, rail against the war on religion, practice trickle down economics, be against public education, think global warming is fake, etc etc?

Now i feel a lot better about a trump presidency.

Tell that to all the Dems in 2000 and 2001 who said the Bush’s stole the election.

I mean, he literally didn’t win it.

Bush did in fact win his election.

There’s a difference between objecting to the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore and claiming that our democracy itself is unraveling.

But this hair splitting is pointless. I don’t see any purpose to this line of discussion. We must be vigilant and Trump’s actions will define the terms and scope of that vigilance. Ray, if you want to keep feeling superior, knock yourself out.

It was one of the steps that led to Trumpism.

We might have gerrymandered ourselves into a civil war.