Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Tomorrow was yesterday

You're right. Trump is no Hitler.

And a Conservative Amerika will be no Nazi Germany.

I think it will more closely resemble 1930s Italy. He's more a Mussolini type than a Teutonic Fuhrer clone. Perhaps an even better analog might be something like 1890's America--a new Gilded Age.

There won't be death camps, but there won't be any health care, either. Oppression and violence will be muted, even hidden, the population (even your sassy girls and stalwart Millennials) will be intimidated with chronic levels of imposed unemployment instead. The blacks will be co-opted, just like the working poor and lower middle classes are today, and the illegals will still be allowed entry in sufficient numbers to keep unemployment up, salaries down, the workers docile, divided, scared and powerless, and job benefits and regulations to a minimum. People won't be terrorized into submission, they'll be gradually coerced into it economically. There'll be no safety net for those who cause trouble, but there will be just enough that no one will want to risk losing it. You won't need a Gestapo to keep people in line, but you'll have SWAT just in case. Propaganda has come a long way since Goebbels. We have a century of marketing and electronic media to not only drive the message home, but to monitor its effectiveness and refine and target its signal.

Fascism has learned its lesson. Its not going to look like National Socialism or Soviet Communism. In fact, if you keep your nose clean and don't cause trouble, you may even do all right. Its a model that has already been introduced in Latin America and the Middle East and now perfected in China and Russia. If you don't rock the boat, they'll let you travel abroad, send your kids to private schools, and even keep the profits from your business. Of course, not everyone will be able to participate, but just enough will that they will help administer the system, and fight like demons to keep their place in it. After all, fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class. They may not be in charge, but they do benefit from it.

Trump is not the cause of our problems, he is only a symptom of them. And long after he's gone they will only get worse. He is not the sole vector of this pandemic, and it is not the result of economic or historical factors; the whole oligarchy carries it in their blood, like syphilis.

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