Anti-Liberals R' Us.

It must be relaxing to turn your brain off and let Progressives and Liberals do your thinking for you. It's amazing when you think about it, that Barack Obama wrote the GOP's entire legislative agenda...in reverse.

Earlier this year I read an excellent history by Volker Ulrich, "Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939", published last year. I believe he's working on the next volume covering the war years. It's gotten rave reviews, you've probably heard of it.

The first part is the fall of the Weimar Republic, and I found it engrossing for its analysis of the forces at work in German Society that conspired to raise up Hitler, or somebody just like him. The German people were anti-Semitic before Hitler, and deeply authoritarian (a majority pined for the return of the monarchy); he just deepened these flaws in his society and exploited them, but he wasn't the only one engaged in the project of destroying democracy in Weimar at that time.

It seems that the German people were deeply racist before Hitler. It struck me that the translations of German slogans by a German read a bit differently than what we Americans were told by people like Shirer. We were told the Nazis believed in "Germany for Germans", but the translation by an English-speaking German is an unvarnished "Germany for white people." I think the idea that the German people had so much in common with Americans might have been just a little too hot to handle for Shirer and his contemporaries.

Too bad. Sweeping that knowledge under the carpet cleared the way for Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in the late '40s, to develop the beginnings of the toxic civic religion we now know as the "Conservative Movement", and for later demagogues like Kristol to promote it starting in the '50s.

And the rest is tragic history.