Here are the covers of two books that I've been thinking about:
Donald Trump and his surrogates are continuing to channel and amplify Nazism and Adolf Hitler. This is not random or happenstance. It is part of a strategy. “Feral politics” made even more explosive and toxic by adding blatant white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism. Occam’s razor, as it often does, provides the most simple and compelling proof of how Trump and his campaign’s feral hate politics strategy is very intentional: He and they have increased their antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy (and misogyny and hostile sexism) greatly in the last few weeks as the polls and other metrics show him tied with if not behind Kamala Harris, a Black South Asian woman, in the presidential election.
Adolf Hitler is one of the most evil leaders in recorded human history. Hitler and his Nazi regime are responsible for the systematic, industrial-scale mass murder of six million Jewish people and millions of others (including Black Germans). World War II, the deadliest in human history, resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world (estimates range from 50 million to 70 million or more). Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, Nazism and the various forms of racial fascism, and the other antidemocratic and illiberal political belief systems and ideologies in its orbit have not been fully vanquished. They are resurgent in the form of Trumpism, American fascism, and the larger global antidemocracy movement.
This very brief history lesson about the evils of Hitler and Nazi Germany is necessary given the broken state of America’s schools and a society where amnesia and organized forgetting are the norm. For many Americans of a certain age (and older,) Hitler and the Nazis have been reduced to the stuff of internet and social media memes from the movie “Downfall,” generic characters to kill in video games, or perhaps in their most real and frightening form as outliers in American society who rampaged in Charlottesville or commit hate crimes.
Trump, with Vance ready to step in should he no longer be able to serve, may be the leader of ordinary Americans about whom books may be written five decades from now. Hitler's Willing Executioners was published in 1996. Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis was published in 2021.
Like me, some of you won't be around 50 years from now if books like "Trump's Willing Executioners" and "Trump's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became MAGAs" are published. Even if Trump wins there's no way to know that he'll be able to achieve his Project 2025 goals which will turn us into a modern day version of Nazi Germany or post-revolution Russia. There's no way to predict whether these books could even be published in the United States. Similar books could never be published in Russia.
After World War II half of Germany became a democracy (technically a democratic and federal parliamentary republic) and the other half was socialist and closely allied with Russia. It was only unified as a democracy in 1990.
On the other hand, consider that the Soviet Union was formed as a result of the 1917 Russian Revolution with Lenin as its leader. Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1954. Then there were a series of dictators:
Who knows what a list of American leaders will look like 100 years from now? Will we have a list of dictators or of fairly elected democratic leaders?
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