I mean, yeah, this guy is wrong for thinking Trump will keep us out of wars, and the idea that you would vote for someone you think it like Hitler to stop new wars is both contradictory and morally reprehensible. But I’ve heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that’s bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That’s a big shift that’s occurred in my lifetime, and it’s worth examining.
It’s because they aren’t. Clinton and Gore were 100% interventionist, and had no issues with preemptive war, some accused Clinton of starting a war to boost his popularity. Kerry was anti war historically, but pragmatic on Iraq, Hillary again with Bill not at all anti war–>
Obama’s military adittude was ‘‘a Democrat can’t say no to the military’’ and allowed whatever the joint chiefs wanted, which is never going to be anti war. And Biden was the same. Harris clearly not anti war either. Trump says he is, and that’s more anti war than any Dem in my lifetime. Can he effectively govern for war reduction? No. He’s an idiot, and liar. But he’s selling it.
Hillary again with Bill not at all anti war–>
Directly responsible for escalation in Libya, as Sec State, and the deaths of tens of thousands as a result.
Being “pragmatic on Iraq” turned off a lot of the left. Ralph Nader’s running mate, Peter Camejo, remarked at the time “Kerry isn’t Bush Lite. He’s Bush Smart! We do not need a smarter Bush!” Apparently the electorate agreed, because W. Bush went on to win a second term.
But I’ve heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that’s bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That’s a big shift that’s occurred in my lifetime, and it’s worth examining.
Because they’re idiots?
Every major war started in my lifetime (including the “war on drugs”) was started by Republicans.
The Democratic party is the party of complacency, I’ll grant them that, and we were in wars for several administrations that Republicans started. So it’s hard for their donkey brains to remember when and why the wars started and when they ended. A lot of people think that Obama was in office when 9/11 happened. The country is full of idiots.
Saying they’re the party of complacency isn’t really accurate. Obama may not have started any new wars (although there’s an argument to be made that his operations in Somalia represented a new, unsanctioned war front), but he didn’t get us out of Afghanistan, kept joint military operations going in Iraq, and created a massive, unaccountable robot assassination program that killed thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. That’s wasn’t an act of complacency, it was expansion.
To me, the difference in Democrats’ and Republicans’ positions on military use can be best summerize by how Obama and Trump reported drone deaths. Obama reclassified every adult male in a target zone as an enemy combatant so that he could artificially lower the number of civilian casualties. Trump just stopped reporting the numbers. One is obviously better than the other, but I wouldn’t call either anti-war.
But let’s say you’re right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they’re too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can’t tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?
But let’s say you’re right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they’re too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can’t tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?
You’re predicating your false dichotomy on the idea that: (A) the electorate will vote consistently for pacifism and for pacifists, (B) the electorate tracks the policy positions of politicians. Neither of these things are true.
This single issue did not decide this election, and it will not decide future ones (if we even have them) either.
The electorate is vibes based and has been for some time now.
I think you can’t approch it from a party line issue. People want to see it in fact as action for the candidates, and at least right now Biden dropped the ball on Isreal badly. He should have put harsh levers on Isreal to get them out of Gaza quickly, Ukraine is a more complicated problem, but the US should focus more on ending conflicts quickly rather than let them drag on forever. But that takes real policy and leadership.
Neither war is happening on US soil (or between the US and any country involved) and the US and Israel have had an alliance – which will remained unchanged if not strengthened in the Trump-Vance administration – spanning decades. In addition, Congress allocates funds to send to other countries and the President executes the orders he is given. Biden could’ve vetoed the aid bills I suppose, but there is a good chance that they would’ve overridden his veto. He could’ve impounded the funds, but I’m not really sure how strictly-speaking legal that even is, and Democratic administrations face pressure from both sides to follow norms (i.e. I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden’s own party members would’ve impeached and removed him given just cause for doing so).
But, as per usual, people like yourself expect the impossible (world peace) under Democratic administrations and yet many of them will turn around and think any war that Trump starts is fully justified and support it bigly until the next Democrat (if there is one) gets in there.
In addition, Congress allocates funds to send to other countries and the President executes the orders he is given. Biden could’ve vetoed the aid bills I suppose
Biden literally bypassed congress to send more aid than what they had approved multiple times.
I hate the way liberals just shamelessly lie about this stuff, you don’t even have the excuse of the election anymore.
The article you linked, did you even read it? That is approval of weapons sales, not sending them more money.
Congress allocates funds in our government.
I hate the way liberals just shamelessly lie about this stuff
I hate the way label obsessed “leftists” don’t know basic shit about how the government works, and spend all of their time online talking out of their ass and name-calling.
That is approval of weapons sales, not sending them more money.
And that matters why? We shouldn’t be giving them aid or selling them weapons?
That’s right, just accuse me of lying and post ap news articles that don’t disprove anything I said, and then when it turns out you were wrong…words no longer matter!
it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party
The only reflection I am able to accomplish is to look at the GOP and say “Worse, tho”.
If you aren’t voting for the lesser evil, I have to assume you hate America and want it to fail. And that’s worse than genocide.
First off, that’s a ridiculous assumption. Not everyone subscribes to your ideology of lesser evilism, and the vast majority of people who correctly reject that ideology are not accelerationists.
But secondly, just curious, if I was a German citizen who hated Nazi Germany and wanted it to fail, would that make me worse than the Nazis? The Nazis were just doing genocide, after all, but I committed what is apparently a far worse sin in your eyes, of insufficient patriotism.
Not everyone subscribes to your ideology of lesser evilism
If they don’t subscribe to my ideology, they must be a greater evil.
if I was a German citizen who hated Nazi Germany and wanted it to fail, would that make me worse than the Nazis?
It would make you a Communist Fifth Columnist Jew-Loving Traitor and earn you a ticket straight to the camps.
The Nazis would absolutely say you were worse than them.
The Nazis would say it, sure. Would you agree with them? Because it sort of sounds like you’d agree with them.
Jesus fucking Christ
The only appropriate response
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Done went from being the guy we’d kill if we had a time machine to the guy we voted for in less than a decade. Pretty impressive trick.
Maybe, even if they hate him. Know he is bad. The one takeway is that they liked Kamala even less. It is combination of desperation and despise. If the Dems don’t learn from this, they will repeat the same mistakes over and over. Pick someone likeable
Shoulda ran Walz as prez from the get-go. Dude ticks all the masculinity boxes the right loves while being a real human being.
That was my first thought when I heard Walz speak: “Wow! Can this guy be president instead?”
Now he has no hope of becoming president, because he’s connected to a historically losing campaign. The Democrats would never nominate him now.
No matter who Democrats pick they will always be painted as unlikeable, losers, and evil by Republicans. If you think picking a “likeable” candidate is the trick then you too have fallen for the endless Republican framing trap.
Rrrrrriiiiiigggghhhhhtttt. There’s nothing wrong with Democrats, and if you think otherwise, then you’ve bought into Republican propaganda.
I didn’t say that, but ya you seem to have fallen for Republican propaganda.
Likeable with a penis
She didn’t lose because she’s a woman. She lost because she’s an empty suit neoliberal promising more of the same to a nation desperate for change as the majority of us are one paycheck away from disaster.
And before you have the knee jerk liberal response of bUt TrUmP iS wOrSe you’re missing the point. This election - and elections around the world this year - are referendums on the current establishment across parties and ideologies.
Either learn that neoliberalism is a losing ideology and embrace leftist positions or lose to fascists over and over again.
I’ve said it before and I truly believe this, unfortunately sometime very soon lots of us are going to be LONGING for the days when we were able to live paycheck to paycheck.
I’ll send you my left foot if regular folks benefit instead of the 1% during this presidency.
I’m not saying I agree with trump voters. But democrats are completely incapable of self reflection and deserve losing this election as hard as they did after gaslighting the public about inflation and not doing a single fucking thing to stop these fascists. They had FOUR FUCKING YEARS to go after trump for J6 which is arguably the strongest case against him and they didn’t.
They had decades to make roe v Wade law. They didn’t. They lose elections on purpose and then fundraise off the loss. They block progressives and leftists and protect their corporate donors over making any kind of popularly supported change. When did the senate parliamentarian ever matter until it came time to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour? I’ve paid close attention to politics since 9/11 and I never heard of them until then.
The thing is that you’re paying waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more attention to politics than the average joe six pack voter. The imagined reasons you have for why they voted the way they did are just that.
Average joe six pack knows they’re one missed paycheck away from disaster and voting accordingly. After all, biden/Harris said the economy has never been better!
The average joe six pack doesn’t even know they’re one missed paycheck away from disaster and they’re out there looking at new F-150s hoping to get an approval. 🤞
Also, I watched a lot of Harris interviews and crap, and she would always start her statement with “I know a lot of people aren’t feeling the progress we’ve made on the economy and that’s why we want to X”, but that was too nuanced for donkey brains.
She should’ve came out with a series of ads saying things like “I am running for president, the previous president is Joe Biden who stepped aside and will not be on this year’s ballot” and then talked about basic governmental structures in the country…preferably over a popular song.
Everything I’ve read from the people on this site is analysis that would apply if the electorate wasn’t full of complete idiots. However, it is.
Trump communicates on their level because he repeats obvious things over and over again and he is donkey brained just like them…that’s part of the reason why he’s their hero.
always has been
Maybe he just meant all the good qualities of Hitler. Like the ones he used to get away with his evil fucking mass murder for so long.
Say what you will about that Hitler guy - but at least he did do a good thing or two, like killing Hitler!
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…I call BS on Wolfson’s reasoning. The bastard is most likely a neo-Nazi shitbag and knew exactly what he wants out Putin’s Sock Puppet.
Well, Hitler and the nazis were inspired by the USA…
Reference: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hitlers-american-model
Right slavery is pretty much ≥ genocide
In times past, I was fascinated by Hitler and WW2. It was a lifelong obsession that I had since childhood. But ever since the Trump era started it started to wane due to the fact that WW2 and Hitler just didn’t seem so distant anymore… the world felt like a repeat of what was happening in those days and looking up facts felt, in part, like learning more to understand what is happening now instead of about history.
But if there is something that I need to point out is that Hitler was a SHIT leader. Germans and Germany ever since the Kaiser era were portrayed as hyperefficient and militaristic, and people then claim the Nazis were the same. They weren’t. Nazi bureaucracy was bullshit and most of their economic growth was based on plunder (initially from German Jews and other marginalized groups and later from other countries) and almost purely military build up. Germany actually lagged behind in technological build-up to most countries, despite the stereotypes of the Wunderwaffen of WW2 (Fritz-X bomb, the ME-262, etc), and industrially as any technology that didn’t have a direct military benefit was discarded. They didn’t even have any proper anti-biotics during the war!
Even agriculture was fucked by the Germans. Despite the romanticization of the German peasantry and the countryside by the Nazis, they could not sustain their population at all. Most German food was imported, and they were preparing their population for harsh wartime rationing even before the war started. They fed their population almost entirely on stolen food from Poland, France, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. Also by killing a lot of people in the death camps they saved on food that way as well.
People stereotype communist countries as having no food when they don’t realize that fascist nations just can’t feed their own folk. Nazi Germany wasn’t alone in having serious food problems. Imperial Japan couldn’t feed its own population and would have had widespread hunger if they didn’t start plundering China during the war.
Hitler lead Germans and Germany into death and destruction and misery and mayhem. He did nothing good for Germany. None at all. Even towards the end of the war he would have been OK with the German people being genocided since if they were defeated by the barbarian orc-like Soviets and the mongrel Americans they were not the master race he thought they were and they deserved to die. There is a reason why he is remembered as one of the world’s greatest monsters.
I remember in 2016 thinking how similar Trump was to Hitler and rhetoric and everything. I was written off is basically being nothing but hyperbole and physical form unfortunately I wasn’t wrong which sucks
I see where you’re coming from. Perhaps not as obsessed, but I always had a historical interest in the era until it became an alarming parallel to present day news. Most people do not know much about what went down in the pre-war period. They just have knee-jerk reactions to it. “Traditional values” were trending at the time, Nazism was marketed as the modern, cool choice. Education, administration and even scouting and chess clubs were Nazified at the time. I see it with the freaking MAGA hat everywhere nowadays. I just see it and say, fuck this is some Nazi Germany shit. To me now there are two kinds of people, those who see it, and those who don’t. People are so precious thinking that Germans went nuts with the mass murder shit and elected this guy, but themselves have been on the exact same track as Nazi Germany for years: idolizing a dangerous man without ever questioning him. Soon they will have no excuse either, only collective guilt. Some of us won’t be here to see it though, for one reason or another. I have pointed this out in my other comment: once fascists get hold of the state apparatus, there is no horror we can put past them.
i think it’s at least in part because we have always been taught to see Hitler as a monster instead of a person. We dehumanised him and the entire nazi party so much for many it sounds like a myth instead of history, the take away seems simple - just don’t be a monster.
The lesson was - some people are born evil
Instead of - anybody can fall the wrong path and find themselves committing atrocities. Even your friends, even your family, even you
i’ve been saying this for a long time - Hitler wasn’t a monster, he was human just like you and me, and that’s a hundred times more terryfing
Indeed, dehumanization of the Nazis made most people think they are immune both to similar propaganda and similar atrocities. They think that Hitler advertised the Holocaust to be elected. It was a war time state secret (although there was the “Hitler’s Prophecy” but no-one took it at face value).
Hitler regime rose to power with the now familiar rhetoric: traditional values, family, order, capitalism, down with the trans degenerates, beat up leftists they poison the blood of our country.
That is why Trump goes out so easily saying “Hitler mught have said that but in a very different way”. He didn’t. It was the same fucking way.
Having said that, consider how the “abstractio ad Hitlerum” advertized as a fallacy actually enabled, eventually, Trump to get away with Hitler shit, just by saying it is a fucking fallacy. (I think this is in turn called the “Fallacy fallacy”) This timeline is history repeating itself as a farce, exactly as Marx predicted.
I feel for some Nazi-like propaganda in times past, and I am PISSED at the people who tricked me and I will never forgive them. They weren’t born evil in some nefarious manner, I will agree, but they did fall for the same shit that anyone can fall for. This was the critical lesson that most people forget.
Also the depiction of Nazi Germany as this hyperadvanced tech nation also played a role in it. While the Germans did have some very interesting secret weapon projects, people don’t realize the following:
1: They were in trial stages and were often rushed into production well before the underlying technology was sufficient to make them operational. Meaning they would NOT have been able to turn the tide of the war no matter what.
2: The Germany military was seriously lacking in many BASIC components. They didn’t have enough trucks and automobiles to do most of their shit. The Americans were fully mechanized, on the other hand and had FAR more of the nuts and bolts needed to win the war.
3: Much of the secret weapons they tried to make were wastes of time and resources. If they had put their efforts onto the stuff that is needed to win they might have held out for longer, but their failure was their attempt to win by a magic bullet instead of real bullets.
4: The Allies also had their own secret weapons projects that were just as funky and cool as the Axis. The Allies had jets and radar controlled stuff, too (and need I mention THE ATOMIC BOMB!). The Allies even had operational jet fighter squadrons during the war, but they didn’t throw them at the enemy. Even the Soviet Union, a backwards nation compared to the UK and the US, had their own secret weapons projects, too. But Stalin, like Roosevelt and Churchill, realized that the war would not be won by magic bullets, but real bullets, and focused more on getting the basic needs of the military done.
In short the Nazis weren’t any more advanced with their tech. Their attempted use of fancy shit was done out of desperation and not an sign of better thinking.
It seems like people as a whole are very generational. Meaning that there’s a generation that struggles, one that succeeds, and one that takes it for granted and fails.
Then the cycle repeats.
Im not talking about strictly boomers to x to z, but in a broad sense.
Yup. I have a similar argument before. If one reads more about Hitler and the Nazis, they are actually not different to any of the standard third world dictators like Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi. The difference is that the Nazis were only more powerful because they inherited a working institution-- especially the Prussian-based military-- while third world countries had to start from scratch after decolonisation.
The Nazis like other dictators are very inefficient. I am reading Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. The book goes through the convoluted bureaucracy and logistics of the Holocaust. Different pen pushers and administrators arguing who should be able to use the trains for their own departmental needs. What struck me the most is that the Nazis wasted so much effort transporting so-called undesirables to concentration camps, when their own soldiers are struggling to get supplies and reinforcements to the frontlines!
More importantly, as you correctly mentioned, Nazi Germany struggled to feed their own people. As a matter of fact, there is strong evidence that Hitler started the war in Europe to stave off the looming economic crisis, which his own economic minister warned him of, thanks to endless government spending particularly with the re-armement. That economic crisis had been warded (temporarily of course) by plundering the resources of their conquered territories.
The one scary thing about the holocaust is that while it did cause some problems in shipping supplies as you mentioned, it actually didn’t cost that much at all and even produced a profit. If I had to point to the ultimate evil of capitalism I wouldn’t point to the massive wasted food or environmental destruction. I would point to the death camps. They were remarkably cheap to run all things considered AND they paid for themselves AND made a profit.
There were over 40 assassination attempts on the shit stain Hitler and all of them were domestic. The Allies fully understood who was responsible for Germany’s strategic and tactical failures and they wanted the turd alive until the end. Cadet Bone Spurs will do the same thing to the US military.
He did nothing good for Germany.
He did kill Hitler tho.
Then he also killed the dude that killed Hitler
igual igual
true
Jackass and proud of it
infinite_facepalming_picard.jpeg
Everyone keeps looking for answers to why trump won. I keep coming back to media directed stupidity
And social media feeds.
How much you wanna bet this guy scrolls facebook a ton? Or listens to railing radio/podcasts on drives? This opinion didn’t spawn from a vacuum.
They should be following up and asking him where he got those ideas.
Yeah, media, social or mass, has guided the people incapable of sound reasoning exactly where they wanted them.
Ya know… if I thought someone was literally Hitler, the last thing I’m gonna fucking do is help them literally have control of… everything.
Unless you want to bring about the end of the world. Seriously, that’s how at least some of these people think. They want to throw a monkey wrench in the works, because they think they’ll be the ones to survive the apocalypse.
Trump won’t bring about the apocalypse he’ll just bring about economic ruin. Which is a lot less fun than the apocalypse.
I want the end of the world too, but it’s because I don’t wanna survive the apocalypse, we are not the same.
Haha… I’m depressed.
But what if the country needed a change in leadership after recently being fucked up by this hitler guy, eh?
Can’t we convince MAGA that trump has been replaced by the deep state or something that makes them fight for a good cause for once?
No, because Dems are stuck on a high horse and burned 1 billion campaigning like its the 1950s. Fff, they could have won the election spending a tenth of that on bots and paying off influencers.
We absolutely need money for a shameless ‘oppositional’ propaganda apparatus.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the RNC was more “with the times” than the DNC on how to campaign in the current media-circus climate. That’s right, they were more progressive when it came to using information technology. This observation burns like the heat of a thousand suns and I hate it, but there it is.
Granted, thanks to the likes of FoxNews and bloviating try-hards on radio and podcasts, they had the inside track here. Still, a billion USD should have leveled the playing field for a short campaign like Harris’.
It’s on purpose. Nobody is this incompetent, this many times in a row, by accident. The Democratic party doesn’t care about us and needs to be replaced.
Exactly this. And when you try to talk about it people look at you like you’re crazy or spouting some insane conspiracy theory.
Dems believe, clearly incorrectly based on recent results, that money wins elections. They decided that if they wanted to compete they’d have to get some of that sweet, sweet donor cash. Those donors aren’t spending money out of the goodness of their hearts, they expect something in return.
So now they are caught in a trap, they can either promote very popular progressive policies and watch the donors dry up or they can do the bidding of the donors and try to convince the voters that they are still somehow promoting the policies they want.
What we are seeing now is the end result of running that latter selection over and over. The millionaires and billionaires donating to the Dems don’t want to fix the endemic problems we face, because the donors handing them checks got their money because of those endemic problems.
When healthcare takes up 1/8th of your GDP, that money goes somewhere, to the people that buy the politicians to make sure that healthcare keeps funneling 1/8th of GDP into their pockets. That’s why the ACA didn’t embrace a single payer or even a public option, it just made it so that everyone had to give the donors their money. Same with rent, those checks go to landlords who buy the politicians.
The real solutions to our problems will never come out of a party capture by the donor class, not because of some tin foil conspiracy but by asking one simple question. Would the people funding this politicians want them to fix this problem I care about? This ask explains why the only place the Dems will take hard stances are on issues that don’t threaten the wealthy. The large umbrella term of identity politics (which is often overused or misapplied, but sometimes it’s accurate) has been a great carve out for the Dems for the last few decades.
Gay marriage doesn’t threaten a landlords wealth, so it’s fine to pick a fight on that topic. But even these have limits. Capitalism is by its very nature exploitative, the only way for the person who has the capital to make profit is for them to pay labor less than the value they generate and capture the difference as profit. So if your identity politics veers too close into empowering a class that’s currently being exploited, shut it down.
It would be great if the lesson they took away was, “money won’t be enough to win, we need to actually fix these problems” but they seem dead set on going “we just weren’t far enough to the right to get those swing voters, we will shift further”
“I voted for the guy that I think is like Hitler to end conflicts and keep us out of wars.”
Did he not read the part where Hitler genocided Jews, Europeans, and the disabled?
Did he not read the part in history where Hitler caused a war so large that it wiped out entire European families, literally tens of millions of Europeans?
The white working class in this country is going to get everything they voted for. I hope Trump floods their neighborhoods with immigrants, LEGALLY.
Did he not read the part where Hitler genocided Jews, Europeans, and the disabled?
That’s the thing though — Hitler didn’t run on a platform of genociding people, he ran on a platform of economic improvement. Weimar Germany was economically depressed and many average people and families were suffering from unemployment and financial hardship while the rich were relatively unaffected and enjoying themselves. Hitler promised to change that (and in all fairness, he did). The genociding Jews part came much later.
Hitler was in charge of Germany for 11 years (1934-1945) — the war didn’t start until 1938, and the holocaust only began in 1942, so the voters DID end up getting at least 4 years of relative peace and prosperity. Also, keep in mind that Hitler was 45 years old when he became chancellor, meanwhile Trump is 78, meaning even if he manages to finish his second tenure successfully, he’ll very likely simply be too old by the end of it in order to continue, which makes it somewhat unlikely that he’ll attempt to stage another coup in order to remain dictator for life.
Though he could put Vance or another one of his cronies on that platform.
Possible, but Vance doesn’t exactly strike me as Hitler 2.0. I watched his Joe Rogan interview and he came off as a pretty reasonable guy.
Vance is an opportunist, and dangerously smart and eloquent. That’s actually a huge positive over Trump, I really hate we have such an actual gullible idiot in office.
Problem is I don’t really understand what is actual political beliefs are. It feels like he’s just a sycophant in interviews, given his history.
He’s hitched himself to the MAGA train, but if, say, he was president with basically no opposition and Trump dead, what would he do?
Read!?
Ha!
The thing to keep in mind about idiocy is that idiots make mistakes, a lot. At the same time, those mistakes are usually small-stakes affairs (it’s hard to make big mistakes with no money and/or resources) and are usually recoverable. The idea that their mistake could affect so many others simply does not happen, because that’s not how things typically work.
