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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Welp.

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Fascism took over Germany not by foreign attack, not by domestic civil war, not by subversion or trickery.

Fascism came with a whoop and a holler.

It was what most Germans wanted, or came to want under pressure from both reality and illusion.

They wanted it, they got it, and they liked it.

I recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third...

No, that's a gross simplification, and leaves out all the violence and constant deception. This is a good primer on just how far off the pop culture understanding of the Nazis is: https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/

"Without subversion or trickery" is flat out wrong. And it's also wrong for the US today.

I really have no clue about history, and what you say sounds very reasonable. I guess it is true.

But I think any person who wants to live in a democracy needs a bare minimum ability to detect trickery. Because there has not yet been invented a system where none of the politicians lie, and you can make good decisions based on taking them all at their word.

Now, maybe the level of subversion and trickery in pre-WW2 Germany and/or in the US now is beyond reasonable. I don't know. But in general, if "people were lied to" is a good reason for people to choose bad politicians, I don't think there is any hope for a good outcome, ever. The world just does not work that way.

You don’t even need a sophisticated defense against trickery and propaganda.

The thing that works almost automatically, with exceptions, is decentralized power:

- direct voting on issues by all citizens

- compartmentalization of government into specialized units

- bottom up federalism

- appointment of representatives on a per project basis, not for general power

With decentralized power, people make pragmatic decisions, because they are focused on solving problems and not on maintaining power.

If you don't want to read all of Arendt's book, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/nazi_genoci... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung#Rise provides some details of the violence before and during Hitler's rise to power.

This line in particular is frightening:

> They thought that the Nazis were just another right-wing, nationalist party and that Hitler would be 'tamed' by power.

The claim was Germans (not some, not a lot, not most; just "Germans") knowingly voted for all that came after. That would be false even if Hitler had been actually elected, instead of appointed.

Do you think there was any way at all to prevent what came after?

I'd say of course, but that's easy to say with hindsight.

Edit: thanks for all of the replies, I’m questioning my framing here now due to some smart people’s thoughts.. I suggest reading the full thread, as there are some interesting comments.

I see the obvious parallels to Trump, and I agree completely (and hate that it is happening). But I feel like I also see a lot of parallels to the democrats. Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example. They both have aspects that heavily mirror the article.

I normally am not a fan of both-sides’ing an issue, but this seems like a literal case of everyone in the government basically performing that they disagree with the other, while marching down similar paths. They fight on issues that get people excited, while conspiring together to inch towards a “mystery government” which we must just trust.

I believe the path forward is to find things in common with our neighbors rather than politicians. Even if we disagree on some political views with our neighbors, we likely still have a lot more in common with them than any politician.

And, if you disagree, really truly read this with a critical eye, imagining the other side. Listen to their complaints. Because they feel the same way about your side. I’ve literally heard smart people in both political parties call each other authoritarian. So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.

You’re being gaslit.

Democrats did not subvert the checks and balances of our system - they faced opposition in all their initiatives in the judiciary, house, and senate.

What Musk is doing now amongst a silent government is unprecedented. His youth group is marching into federal offices walking past security and taking everything because people are afraid. They’re afraid of being fired. They’re afraid of reprisals.

The next step will be for Musk to USE what he’s taken from these IT systems. There’s a reason he beelined for the IT systems.

They have everything they need now to make lists. That is the next step. Lists of names.

Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.

I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.

But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.

It seems alarmist until you consider that Musk is a Nazi. He did the Hitler salute, live on national television. His followers tried to downplay it, but his own answer to the question "Are you a Nazi?" was "I bet you did Nazi that coming!"

People joke that he went from being the Henry Ford of our generation to being the Henry Ford of our generation.

I don't know whether I would say that Trump is a Nazi*, but the fact that he put a Nazi in charge of firing govt employees that don't follow orders does not bode well.

EDIT: * If only because he has never publicly admitted to being a Nazi like Musk has.

> That is the next step. Lists of names.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/federal-health-wo...

Musk is a traitor per US legal definition and his actions highly resemble a hostile foreign national takeover, he deserves nothing less than the maxumim punishment under current US law...

> Because they feel the same way about your side.

Yes, this is surely true.

> So maybe the issues are actually with both sides.

Not necessarily.

Is Russian resentment of Ukraine equivalent to Ukrainian resentment of Russia merely because both citizenries feel their own resentments passionately?

I see your point, however, in this case the democrats and republicans are part of the same entity.

I am suggesting that the politicians’ interests are somewhat aligned, in regard to grabbing power. Their techniques are different, but the outcome is that we become more normalized to the behavior of “being ruled”, bit by bit.

Don’t forget the right-leaning protests in 2020 over democratic governors telling people they had to get vaccinated or fired, and they were not permitted to have their small businesses open or go to the gym. That was also authoritarian, regardless of how necessary some people thought it was at the time. You may not have agreed with them, but they were upset about the same things as you.

An actuall global event that killed hundreds of millions of individuals is a very different thing than what Musk is doing, without any such precipitation...

I do not agree that firing should have been on the table, however this is not an Apples and Oranges situation...

I completely agree with your point, but it’s hundreds of millions of cases and ~10 million deaths I thought

Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.

> Rather than thinking in terms of "left vs. right", I think in terms of "extreme left vs. moderate left vs. moderate right vs. extreme right". I support moderates over extremists. I support democracy and rule of law. I care about this more than I care about left vs. right.

This is a great position. I wish more people adopted it.

The problem I have seen over the past few years is that those who are on the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.

> the extremes are not aware that they are on the fringe. They believe that their ideology is widely shared and common amongst everyone.

Yeah. I think the way to counteract this is for moderates to speak up against the extremists, including the extremists on their own side.

For example, Biden criticized the extreme left in the summer 2020 protests: https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/we-are-a-nation-furious-at-inju...

> Protesting [police] brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.

We need more of that from our politicians. When Republicans are willing to criticize Trump, I respect them enormously for it; but few Republicans are willing to publicly disagree with Trump.

Agreed - I think we say similar things. I am mostly suggesting that authoritarians currently live in all sides of the aisle in our government right now. And they’ve all been ratcheting up in intensity, getting us used to “their” version of it. This latest jump being by far the most severe and scary.

I actually think Biden/Harris are moderates, and tried to de-escalate things. Whereas Trump is anti-democracy and anti-rule-of-law.

> Deciding Kamala would be the candidate without any public vote, for example.

I have never really understood this parallel. What laws got broken, there?

No laws were broken. But it's very much in line with what the article is talking about:

What information was withheld? I hadn't heard national security invoked in this context before.

Maybe they weren't at the end of that sentence yet, but they were definitely at the start of it. "governed by surprise" yes. "receiving decisions deliberated in secret" very much yes.

Is it really fair to call it a surprise when prediction markets had 80% odds on her since the day Biden dropped out? (https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-t...)

Or did you mean Biden dropping out itself? I don't see how anyone could have reasonably offered more notice that he was dropping out - presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.

> presumably there was a fairly rapid decline in health for him to make that decision after the primary.

That's a generous assumption that doesn't really fit with how he seemed in public appearances before and after. The alternative possibility is that the narrative where he drops out of the primary and so the D candidate "has to" be appointed at a time when it's "too late" for the public to be involved was a deliberate one.

At this point we're at "the democrats might have planned for a single surprise, under circumstances that would be both difficult and suspicious to repeat".

It feels... exceedingly charitable to say that is "habituating people to surprise" in any real sense. If anything, I'd argue it has had the opposite effect: if the Democrats pull a second surprise like this time any time in the next couple of decades, quite a lot of people are going to be outraged.

I'm not really sure why they'd want to skip the Primary anyway? If she failed to pass as a candidate there, it would be pretty clear evidence that she wasn't going to beat Trump. If she passed the Primary, she's got more support behind her. It's a lose/lose to do what you suggested

Don't confuse legality with morality.

Okay, but that still begs the obvious question: what was immoral about it?

I think you are correct precisely because both US major parties are on the same side, the side of capital.

But they are not the same. One party is weaponizing racism and ignorance to illegally destroy institutions that have taken decades to build.

They can be very different, but still both push our governing structures and our thinking in directions that are not good for us individually or collectively.

To risk an analogy, if you're drowning and need assistance, you need some sort of flotation device, or a rope to get out of the water. If one person throws a heavy stone block at you, they're not helping. If a different person tosses you a metal chair, they're also not helping, even if they think they are. The objects are different, and the intent may even be different. But neither helps, and you are still drowning.

Examining that analogy in light of the electoral outcome, would you prefer to be in the timeline in which someone throws you a chair but there is a boat full of others who might throw you something useful, or the one in which someone has thrown you a heavy block, has drilled holes through the hull, and is actively pushing everyone else overboard?

In this timeline we’re all gonna be drowning.

They’re not both the same level of bad currently, I agree.

But they have both been consistently working to normalize their authoritarianism. I mentioned the 2020 protests in another sibling comment, which I think is a good example.

This is just the next step in an ongoing escalation, but yeah it is a big jump.

Scary times.

and the side of israel? which happen to be the solidest evidence to prove someone is a nazi

no matter who you voted for, no matter if you voted or don't vote, you can not change this, you have no power to change it

...why this got downvoted :(

which part of this is wrong?

The part where participating in collective cowardice overwhelms the individual will to seek truth.

As a purely mechanical point: having a D president with R house and senate and supreme court is a very different situation to having R all across the board, which is why the "checks and balances" have stopped working.

I see what you're saying, but listening to partisan rhetoric on both sides here does not really get you any closer to the truth here.

If you were you were to look back at the political discourse in 1920s and 1930s Germany, you'd find extremely scathing critiques from the Nazis lobbied against the Social Democratic party. Did this mean that the two were equally bad?

While it's true that Biden's actions during his recent term were frequently called unconstitutional by the right – be it for trying to raise the minimum wage or forgiving student loan debt – it was rarely from a perspective of solidifying his executive power. In the case of the Trump v. United States, he was avowedly against how the ruling implicitly expanded his executive power.

On the flip side, Trump's openly pushing the expansion of his executive power with his firing inspectors general, overruling the senate by freezing funds and appointing his own pseudo-agencies that take control over independent agencies in the executive branch.

These are fundamentally different things, and should be treated very differently, even if people from either side complain about both.

And of course January 6, a literal coup attempt, was perpetrated by the Rs. Nothing remotely like that on the D side.

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