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Wow. Trump Derangement Syndrome has killed Tenacious D. On stage in Australia yesterday, when asked to make a birthday wish, Kyle said "Don't miss trump next time."
Today, Jack Black cancelled their tour and appears to have killed the band.
I've found the reactions of intense disappointment that Trump wasn't murdered to be really disappointing but unsurprising. My parents (who I was with when it happened and I broke the news to them) immediately expressed disappointment that he was still alive. Watching people post these sentiments publicly online as if they are completely unaware that advocating for the assassination of your political opponents is really bad and completely unacceptable has left me amazed. How can people not realize that it's a bridge too far? They're literally saying that to preserve democracy, they need to assassinate the leading candidate, a level of cognitive dissonance beyond anything I've seen.
That said, I also find the current cancelations hilarious. The very people who are calling Trump "literally hitler" are now pearl clutching that it's not okay to try kill Hitler. The catastrophizing wasn't acceptable before either - maybe this snapped people out of their delusions?
I was surprised by my own reaction, too. I was a lot happier that he survived, and a lot more impressed with his immediate response than I expected to be. Trump grew in my esteem a lot.
I’m surprised at the strength of the backlash tbh. I expected biden‘s condemnation of political violence to be less categorical than it was. As a centrist with a strong interest in maintaining the democratic peace & order , who doesn’t think Trump is that bad, it’s easy for me to say that the old geezer should live. But I confess I don’t understand the anti-assassination case for opponents of the status quo who have spent years denouncing him as an authoritarian threat.
We all agree Hitler should have been killed, right? That’s the most popular hypothetical ever. Although some (e.g., Lothar Fritze) have objected to dead waitresses and complained of insufficient self-sacrifice in the few attempts on his life.
Therefore, I must conclude that they don’t believe Trump is Hitler after all, and instances of anti-trump and anti-red tribe hysteria only came from extremes or were meant to energize the base, while the leadership remains sane and committed to the american project. Reports of the death of democracy have been greatly exaggerated.
It exposes the culture war these last years as a giant attack ad, clickbait, crude emotional manipulation for dull partisans, irrelevant and rightly ignored by people who matter.
I don't know. Based on the info we have today? Sure. Based on what was knowable then? I really don't know. I could imagine myself in 1930s Germany going "Pfft, even if Hitler becomes Chancellor he'll still have to govern in coalition. There's no way the other parties will sign off on handing full unfettered power to him".
Are we sure? The person who did the most damage to Hitler's ideals was arguably Hitler, though the mechanism is a tossup between "Let's fight on two fronts; doesn't getting involved in a land war in Asia sound fun?" versus "Let's get rid of all the Jews; what good are their wacky nuclear physics ideas ever going to be anyway?" The latter dumb idea was probably baked into the Nazi ideology, but the former dumb idea might have been a Hitler-specific mistake. If Hitler dies, do we end up with something like the Germany of today where anti-immigration polling above 20% sends the country into an introspective panic, or do we get a Germany (plus half of Poland, plus France, plus...) where hatred of The Other hasn't been so massively discredited, because its banner got taken up by somebody more competent?
Check out the Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. It's by no means obvious that Operation Barbarossa was a dumb idea. Opinions to the contrary often seem to assume that militaries and societies can run on orders, rather than oil and bread.
However, I think that Hitler's earlier decision to go to war in 1939 was the beginning of the end of fascism. The promise of fascism was military power. By fighting a war against two of the main powers of the day (France and Britain) with backing from an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA) Hitler was taking a huge gamble with the risk of defeat. And the defeat of fascism militarily was its defeat ideologically. Soon, even the Spanish and Portugese regimes were moving in a conventionally conservative direction.
Similarly with communism: once the hydrogen bomb ended the prospect of a Soviet military victory in the Cold War, it was stuck in an economic competition with an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA again) and in comparisons with countries that had fundamentally better economic systems. The promise of communism was prosperity, which became a joke once Soviet citizens had a standard of living that trailed increasingly behind such erstwhile primitive backwaters as Finland, Spain, and even Taiwan.
There is no good evidence for intelligent design, but the closest is that God apparently directed history so that fascism was defeated militarily and communism defeated economically, i.e. on the grounds of their main promises. It's as if e.g. communism was able to deliver a more free society than classical liberalism or fascism a more stable society than classical conservativism.
Some might argue that the mandate of heaven is its own evidence 😉
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