They Thought They Were Free (1955)
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The discussion revolves around the book 'They Thought They Were Free' (1955) by Milton Mayer, which explores how ordinary Germans supported the Nazi regime, and draws parallels with contemporary political situations, sparking reflections on individual responsibility and the dangers of complacency.
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Sep 21, 2025 at 6:56 AM EDT
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- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)
No one sees all the major threads here, not even us. There are too many, and the turnover is too rapid.
One very helpful workaround is to browse the HN "front page" displayed at
https://hckrnews.com
so that you don't have to worry about HN censorship / algorithm fuckery
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315#25104589
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lie...
This article is all we need to know about fascism, the candidate admits this is the central tool they use on the path to gain unlimited power, even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially: "In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio."
The central problem is epistemological, the coding of explanations in mythological thought, which is narrative. The myth is the primary causal illusion. That causes that. When we add intent, which is elusive and reduces meaning subjectively, it robs any event of the true meaning load, we create propaganda without knowing it. There's the rub. If we wee the burning bush as just a brushfire, we are sane. See it as the voice of God, we're doomed.
https://x.com/HunnyBplus3/status/1835326924597366869
JD Vance: "Dana, [stories about Haitians in Springfield] come from first hand accounts of my constituents. I say that we're creating a story meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it. I didn't create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield, Kamala Harris' policies did that, but yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story."
> The central problem is epistemological
Yes!
"Multiple news reports in September 2024 detailed Senator J.D. Vance's inability to provide firsthand accounts or evidence for his claims that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When asked for proof, he pointed to anonymous "firsthand accounts from his constituents," which were later refuted by city officials"
The dilemma that The Guardian faces is that it neither wants to draw attention to the lie, but also doesn't want to let it stand without some counter-argument. After all, if you just ignore everything then no counter-argument is ever offered and that's not good either.
This is really the "democracy hack" they're using: you don't want to draw attention to it, but you also can't really ignore it. In a healthy system, people that employ these kind of shameless dirty tricks would be excluded by the sense of civic duty of other people of their own party, as well as enlightened self-interest because in the end this will be bad for everyone. Yet here we are.
Why does it bother you?
We do treat reposts as duplicates when a story has had significant attention in the last year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but that's a separate issue.
Occasional reposts are well within HN's norms, and when something is reposted, it's common to link to past discussions for comparison.
The "other side" isn't great either. Would be great to have a sane alternative, I guess.
Authoritarianism is not a “one side” problem in the US and until we collectively figure that out each side will continue increasing it, all in the name of stopping the other sides’ extremists.
Assassinated Americans with drone strikes: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-were-the-4-us-citizens-kill...
Lied to the courts to imprison Twitter users: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.967...
Used intelligence agencies to spy on Congress: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief...
Expanded mass surveillance: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov...
EO declaring that some laws would not be enforced on favored demographics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DACA
Ordered social media companies to censor and ban users: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil... https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...
Locked people down unless they were protesting for approved causes: referring to the BLM protests
> engaged in politically motivated prosecutions of their enemies. Another reference to the Mackey case and the novel legal theories required prosecute Trump in NY, and the now known to be false constructiion of the Russia narrative.
Look, many or all of these things may have been for a good cause, a good end. But the problem we're talking about is the means. Now people are using the same means for different ends. Everyone has to agree authoritarianism is bad even when it’s for really good ends or this will continue to escalate.
The equlibrium that is always reached in a first-past-the-post voting system is two parties that are mostly the same, and you vote for a party that's only slightly more of what you want (because those are the options) and your vote tells both parties which direction to move in, to chase more votes.
If the party that drone strikes its own citizens and imprisons Twitter users consistently gets more votes than the party that drone strikes its own citizens, imprisons Twitter users, and builds concentration camps, then the latter party will quickly figure out that the only way to win is to drone strike its own citizens, but not imprison Twitter users, or build concentration camps. And then the former party (now losing) figures out that doing none of the above is the way to win, but maybe they still tap all communications. And so on...
We got to the point we're at today step by step, with people voting for one new measure at a time, and parties taking notice of what measures people consistently vote for. The current parties did not spring fully-formed out of Zeus's forehead.
The real test is how any model handles corruption and expunges it because no matter the ideology, people are in charge and people are corruptible.
The only real model that can work is one that minimizes the power of those in charge.
By this I mean: it’s not as if the things we see playing out are lawful. Is there a structural difference that somehow prevents the same kind of lawlessness?
Put another way, what stops a movement that decides to ignore Germany’s constitution from ignoring it should they somehow gain power?
Also (though not an issue with the law itself) it's really dangerous only having two parties at the helm.
Separation between civilian leaders and military leaders is a big one, yeah. When the same person controls both the military directly and the executive branch of the civilian government directly you don't have any way to punish him without his subordinates overthrowing him since he controls all the power.
2. Trump knows the military will not participate in a coup.
3. Trump will not run for a third term. If he does, he will loose because Americans knows it's unconstitutional.
So Americans know that all the dirty laundry will come out when the next president takes office.
2. Likely true, but they don't really need the military as ICE which now employs all the armed racists they need, like Jan 6 people.
3. He's floating the idea, even talking about not having elections if they're in a war like Ukraine, even though its not in the constitution. Either way they're going all in on rigging elections so Vance will take over.
(Never mind, Trump never cared about little details like these...)
It’s not all new with Trump (governing by executive order, ignoring duly enacted laws, strong arming media companies, etc.). But while earlier administrations might have done those things on the margins, Trump takes them to 11 (in the spirit of the new Spinal Tap) and makes them the central and primary means of administration.
With the norms destroyed, we potentially lose our nation of laws, and become a plutocracy with different juntas every few years.
THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat, our methods are justified. THEY have been doing this to us for years, now this is our chance to fight back.
When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings.
I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said “leftists” and the other “fascists”.
My only question who is pushing the messaging and who does it benefit?
Requiring face masks in a pandemic (which happened under the trump admin, in case anyone forgot) is not the same as masked goons throwing brown people into vans.
This makes the Democratic [establishment] bureaucratic authoritarians, while the current Republican [establishment] are autocratic authoritarians.
Obviously I would prefer anti-authoritarianism - a goal of reducing government control in our lives (including corporate de facto government). I think so would most people, but for being lured in by partisan messaging. Authoritarian singular-perspective narratives always sound so simplistically compelling.
But while the autocratic authoritarians weren't in power, it was all too easy to point to the bureaucratic authoritarians as a creeping problem. So now we have autocratic authoritarianism "good and hard". Between the two, I'd prefer bureaucratic authoritarianism as it at least keeps the worst impulses in check (eg the capricious tariff taxes, the naked corruption/bribes, politicizing departments to go after political enemies, wanton cruelty against immigrants for circenses, etc). The only real question is whether at least some of our institutions will hold out so that we can collectively decide to change course, or if it's just set now.
As far as the mask issue, I want to live in a world where they weren't mandated, but yet most everyone wears one out of enlightened self interest. The traditional Republican message would have been "wear a mask to protect yourself". The fact that it was self-harming contrarianism instead has more to do with edgelordism and foreign influence campaigns.
It's not a matter of imagining some "truly libertarian" government, as that is an artifact of US "Libertarianism" which is itself fallacious (it mostly just renames "government" to "corporations"). It's a matter of which ideals to strive towards.
You get 0 "both sides gotcha" points for this one because there is a clear answer when it comes to right wing messaging, and it has been the same since the 19th century, long before modern conservatism existed. It's big business owners and anyone else who stands to gain from an oligopoly economy backed by an authoritarian state that punishes and suppresses anything that could destabilize said oligopoly. There's no conspiracy theory here.
Meanwhile who is pushing the horrible left wing messaging that racism is bad? A bunch of professors and kids on social media?
It's those triple-damned Demonrats! In between molesting and eating babies, they go on and on about "multiculturalism" and "systemic racism" and all kinds of other ridiculous crap.
Yes. The darkies are inferior and need to be firmly controlled and/or exterminated. No sane person thinks any different. Those people aren't really people, are they?
They're subhuman animals who need to be dealt with. The fact that they can touch our women should be an immediate death sentence.
Hell, I'm not really sure why we're even bothering with these "deportations." Just shoot on sight for heaven's sake. Just the way Jesus says we should!
Well, the actual neo-Nazis do support one particular party (and it's not the Democrats); see (e.g.) Charlottesville, 2017:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally
And it was (is?) official Republican strategy to court racists:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
As The Simpsons once joked “Fox News: Not Racist, But #1 With Racists”:
* https://www.nydailynews.com/2017/07/24/simpsons-creator-matt...
There are no "Leftists" in government. No, Bernie and AOC do not count. Soc Dems are nice, don't get me wrong, but the vanguard they are not.
There is no "Leftist" billionaire funding propaganda, no the boogyman 'Soros' doesn't count. He's very much a 'liberal' capitalist, just ask the UK.
There is no major US media outlet or platform owned by a "Leftist". If you insist that actually Biden, Obama, Clinton, Schumer, or Pelosi are leftists, please please just stop talking about politics.
Again, I'm begging you to separate "things pseudonymous people say online" from "things government officials say and do"
Let's try an example: "Fascists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies" or "Leftists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies"
Which of these statements is true?
And back then there was a proper systems conflict. People like Krupp actually had to fear being disowned by communists.
"The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
...and I recall people reading it and saying they don't see how Donald Trump ticks the boxes.
It's all very tedious to complain about when half the electorate supports it. It makes one feel like a nag and a broken record.
But the psychology behind fascism stems from deep human quirks and is something eternal.
All those nations, except perhaps China, share the DNA. If we didn't already have names for their systems, we probably would describe them as fascistic.
What Trump has turned the American government into is closer to Fascism than to Liberal Democracy, no?
In future highschool textbooks Trump Fascism will have its own name ("Trashism" perhaps?) but it will be placed in the same chapter as the others.
The Trump presidency is the culmination of a roughly 45 year campaign to return the United States to the Gilded Age, and to ensure it stays that way until it's bled dry and nothing remains of its corpse. The political and social problems that led to his second election have been a long time coming.
What's interesting is that the gaps in our political system that allow him to do so many illegal and distasteful things have always been there. The framers of the constitution never anticipated all three branches of government colluding together in alignment and bad faith, with the vociferous support of roughly half the voting population.
If I blame anyone it's the American electorate.
It's tempting to continue and discuss which phenomena I blame for the poor judgment of the average American, but that would triple the length of my comment.
Either way, it's beside the point: if there is one lesson to remember from the 20th Century it is 'never support an authoritarian'.
Some parts of the country never really recovered from 2008. Obama took the smug liberal approach of telling people it was all over when it clearly was not all over. The country was primed for the Tea Party to step in and offer the promise of a remedy. You and I both know that the remedy was bunk, and it was just a rebranding of the same old far right, who saw that the Evangelical Christian movement that they were previously allied with had lost influence. And so into the propaganda brainwashing funnel went millions and millions of people.
Right wing media was already powerful and influential long before Trump started his own social media company and Zuckerberg switched sides. Blaming social media doesn't make sense either, because if it wasn't for social media, it would've been something else.
Social media became a major force after 2010, and indiscriminately affects nations around the world.
Since the nations with rising authoritarian movements have little else in common, social media clearly is the cause.
> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
> But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
At the root, there’s either principled freedom or control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.
I have no idea where our current "line" is but it's not the same as it was last time and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc
The other day I watched this interview with Dan Carlin from 4 years ago and near the beginning the interviewer says something like "I don't think any of us want to draw any comprarisons to current nations and Nazi Germany"
that caught me, because why not? Of course no one wants to actually create parallels, but do we see any? maybe we didn't see as many then, and it was more of a worry in 2021 about even thinking about the possibility of tipping MAGA into that territory. but then again after January 6th we should have seen that they basically don't have a line and are just pushing it gradually. They don't really know what to do when they get the new power either, but the people who could stop it may not even realize it because they haven't had to deal with this kind of thing before. like invading Greenland? taking it from Denmark? how do you even create a response to a suggestion like that? so nothing happens and they see what else they can do.
another edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc&t=570s
The really interesting part of the interview gets going around the 7:50 mark, but here Dan talks about the options if you're an average citizen trying to figure out what to do. A litany of poor options if you're trying to pick a side right now really resonates with me.
USA swoops in towards the end (a large cost as well, but not as much of it and not on their doorstep) and takes a big role in creating the new world.
Since around Nixon (maybe?) there has been a gradual post-WW2 deregulation that really accelerated under Reagan and now with Trump its accelerating again. More and more keeps shifting into the hands of unelected, wealthy individuals who see that their power keeps growing and growing and as far as I can tell, won't stop until they have it all. It doesn't make any sense to me why that looks like a stable world to them, but the one thing that is certain is that there is no 2nd amendment that will stop the billionaire club.
Wow! That was hard work. I'm hungry. Gonna go get me some freedom fries. Yum!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese-eating_surrender_monkey...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
The Marshall Plan was a real thing.
My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.
The Marshall Plan was a real thing. <
So damned funny!!8-)) The phrase "Grasping defeat from the jaws of victory!" comes to mind.
But yeah, transporting those old machines back to France was probably a waste of Paris's time.
[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...
Germany was behind the UK even before WW2. Just the UK outproduced Germany in (e.g.) aircraft production, and that was even before the US got involved.
Adam Tooze wrote an entire book on the subject:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
Yep. -- I noticed that the first link of my comment is somehow not working. Here is another reference for those who want some numbers. It is a German publication ("Deutschland in Daten", PDF) but the relevant tables should be understandable anyway:
https://www.bpb.de/system/files/dokument_pdf/deutschland_in_...
For GDP per capita in "International dollar"/"Geary-Khamis-Dollar" for Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, USA in the period 1850-2019, see p. 312 and 313.
According to this publication, 1930, 1940 and 1950 the German GDP per capita was about 75% of that of Great Britain. However, there was a big dip right after 1945 shown in the second table.
The German "economic miracle" ("Wirtschaftswunder") of the 1950s and 1960s was in essence not an outperformance of other western countries in absolute terms, but a catching-up process with them. The same holds for Japan. The process lost momentum, when parity with most of the other major economies was reached.
However, the USA have always been considerably ahead since WW2. -- So much to the slogan "Make America great again". It seems to be based on a very distorted self-image of having a backward economy, for which I have no sound explanation as an outside observer. And even if it were not about the general economic situation, but about a growing disparity inside the country, then a solution to better the situation, when the country is already so much ahead economically, cannot come from outside, but must be domestic.
Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.
Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.
It leans heavily on assumptions about countries and institutions.
I am fully willing to believe that the US royally fucked up the rebuild of Afghanistan.
Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan
Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...
Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.
There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.
There was no effort to keep either Kenya or Malaysia as British. In Malaysia, the war continued after independence.
they just wasted it on things like nationalizing the coal, gas, electricity, rail, air transport and steel industries.
It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.
The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize China right now.
I think the US has been spiraling toward authoritarianism since 9/11 personally. This did not start yesterday or with the most recent election, nor is it exclusively the result of the right or the Republican Party. A lot of people to the left have also abandoned liberalism and ideas like free speech. There’s been a broad based shift away from liberalism and individualism and toward collectivism, which always leads toward totalitarianism.
Right wing collectivism comes in the form of racism and nationalism, while for the contemporary left its identity-grievance politics and a resurgence of Marxism.
“Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?” is one of the questions I keep asking.
Control of the people comes from all sides. The end result is the same, but the methods are different, intended to make people happy to be controlled.
...
Some exerts from 3 different studies but you may find more if you want.
> This suggests that red states faced a more pronounced impact from COVID-19, experiencing elevated mortality rates compared to their blue counterparts.
> Red states had higher COVID-19 infection rates and deaths in 2021 compared to blue states.
> A study in June published in Health Affairs similarly found that counties with a Republican majority had a greater share of Covid deaths through October 2021, relative to majority-Democratic counties. The Yale researchers behind the new working paper say vaccine hesitancy among Republicans may be the biggest culprit.
There is a different between draconian restriction that saved lives, vs "FREEDOM" that resulted in more people dying but hey, they did not need a vaccine or mask. I hope it was worth it for those that had family *unnecessarily* die because of their own, or others "FREEDOM".
I think you confuse dictatorships with measures to help a to prevent deaths. Hey, i remember the "dictatorship" of required seatbelts outcry's. And yet, how many lives have been saved.
There is a difference between people crying how their rights are removed, vs the general good of the population. Being selfish in a society does not make you a freedom proponent, but just a selfish person. If people want to live with all the freedoms in the world, great, go live in some mountain somewhere where you have no contact with others. But the moment you have a semblance of society, there will be more and more pressure to prevent individual actions from harming others. If you want to shoot your guns out in the open like Rambo when your a individual and do not harm to others, fine, have fun. But if your shooting your guns in any society structure where you have neighbors or people around, and you actions have consequences to those around, you will always have some form of governance that will "restrict" your freedom, as now your part of a society.
The issue become dangerous when that governance is MISUSED by those that pass laws and restrictions, that are not for the global good but for their own financial or power benefits. And i feel that people misunderstand the difference between what a social governance is and a autocracy governance.
More intense pandemic measures make more sense where density is higher.
But did we even have any true lockdowns in the US? Maybe in some cities, but we had nothing close to China or even Australia. Were there any places in the US with actual curfews where you were not allowed to leave, or anything like that?
I lived in California in the start of the pandemic and Ohio the rest of the time and neither place had true “lock downs.” I only saw businesses requiring masks and some jobs requiring the vaccine.
Again, we had no real lockdowns. School was remote, which had its own really bad effects on early socialization.
I'm not at all sure what we should have did differently. Technically a hard lockdown for 6 weeks could mostly eradicate it everywhere. But a lot of people can't handle that.
What I do now know is our society and public kinda sucks, people will show up and do stuff sick, spread sickness, and not really care much. And our government has been getting steadily worse and worse as long as Ive lived. And my generation and younger ones are either in for a terrible time, or already IN a terrible time.
The 6 week lockdown was more a potential way to slow covid and basically knock it out across the country. But I'm not sure we could even do that if we wanted to. Most people only have a few days of food in their house.
I also note that domestic abuse skyrocketed also during the vaccine-less parts of the pandemic. There was a whole lot of weird.
However with RFK and Dr Phil (cringe) as heads of respective health agencies, I know if we get a new pandemic, we're fucked. These are the same idiots that think vaccines cause autism and horse dewormer cures covid.
But there does seem to be states where such orders were legally mandatory. Were they enforced? Would they survive court scrutiny if someone was arrested for say walking down the sidewalk in open air? Did they have massive escape hatches (eg caring for family members) ? No idea.
This depiction of Covid restrictions (restrictions that were actually relatively permissive given the seriousness of the disease and the unknown nature of the virus at the time) as though they were an authoritarian power grab by malevolent politicians instead of a health policy, is part of the problem.
Maybe if people had been willing to accept a small curtailment of their personal desires for a short time for the sake of the common good, rather than framing it as a dictatorial punishment,we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re heading into now.
COVID was 100% an authoritarian power grab by public health officials. Zero percent actual health. And public health is an overwhelmingly left wing and political field, being as it is the idea that health should be managed collectively.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9338
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.21249884v...
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
>Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens
IMO they didn't - at least not explicitly. Individualism has been somewhat illusionary since the progressive era it is just finally coming home to roost. What happened is that the internet finally out ran the ability of the traditional media consensus methods at the national level as the internet generation aged in. So we are sort of in unknown territory where it is not clear any "expert" can play the designated role to drive the consensus required in the neoliberal system.
Where to go from there is an open question but her thesis is that the neoliberal system needs to be adapted in someway. Anyway that is largely the picture of the problem she paints. I'm not doing it justice but it is worth a read to at least place a lot of the problems people are observing in a mental and historical framework.
I think a good step is moving towards federating into smaller communities. The best of those ideas will get adopted by other communities. Basically the fediverse model applied to society. People already have this feeling intuitively and it is playing out with the push back against globalization.
The political quadrant is more important than ever compared to the mess of one-dimensional politics :
Right wing is economic (neo) liberals, while fascists are top wing center : these will (like a century ago) gladly use left-wing policies and rhetoric if they bring them the power they crave above all else. Or ally with corporations when convenient.
While societal liberals are on the bottom wing, and regularly clash with anti-liberal socialists/communists (left center, but also left top).
(Proto-Antifa used to ally with Nazis to beat up Social Democrats, until Stalin had decided to change direction, it's wild how both the name and flag are still reused today despite that dirty history...)
On small example: The president openly ordering targeted killings started under Bush and was broadened to include US citizens under Obama.
Of course the dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch has been something the US has contended with on and off over the years. If you read The Federalist Papers, it seems clear to me that the architects of our government did not envision congress steadily abrogating its power; the expectation was rather that it would be jealously guarded by those it was granted to.
Social media also made it easier for you to be a group thinker and reap the benefits of that. Being an individual gives you no clout.
You mean in the aftermath of the great recession where most people were struggling economically and saw that the rules are only for little people? The 20-teens were the time of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party - I don't see how it can be
I think individualism increased, after the teens, in a "don't trust the experts, do your own 'research'" way. Regardless of one's politics, its hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when you see a conspiracy play out in front of your eyes, at your expense. You could draw a straight line between the GFC and the growth of the "burn it all down" contingents on the left and right - indeed, a lot of "Bernie bros" became Trumpers whole remaining true to that ethos.
Does it? I haven’t thought about shooting anyone. I would like to see more widespread awareness, protesting, and a general strike.
There are so many non-violent approaches that would be effective. First, there is the 3.5% rule [1]. Second, if 10%-20% of the general population would go on a general strike, pretty much all of society would come to a standstill and it would send a heck of a powerful message. One of the issues though in the US is healthcare tied to employment, combined with fire at will. It reduces preparedness of people to protest until it's possibly too late. So, it's simultaneously important to build/strengthen unions, etc.
Aside from that, and this is true for Europe as well, we need to heal as a society. People have divided themselves in stupid 'teams', fueled by politicians, foreign interference, algorithms, etc. Not woke enough? You are cancelled. Left-wing? You are cancelled (employer contacted and fired). We have to do a little less social media and go outside and talk to other people. Even if I disagree with people politically, there often a lot of common ground (we all want food, health, to be safe, etc.), we all like to talk about some sports match, and whatnot. We don't have to agree with each other, but we can at least try to understand and care for each other. Break the stupid tribe wars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
FWIW, when the best case recommendations for a restoration of civil order and the rule of law involve very large scale society-wide civil disobedience...
...then maybe the comparison to Nazi Germany and authoritative dictatorships more generally are perhaps not as far afield as you're implying. Like, once your thinking goes beyond "just win the next election" things are kinda over as far as "democracy" goes.
(And FWIW I don't necessarily disagree: the existing regime's leadership, not just the White House, seem extremely unlikely to just walk out the door if they lose an election. It was tried four years ago and failed, the resulting loyalty tests have produced a very different cabinet this time.)
Elections are not the only form democratic participation can take. We can take local action, coordinated action, talk to our representatives at various levels, and so on.
If leadership-aligned politicians won't dare step out of line, and those opposed are systematically marginalized by the executive, other legislators, and the courts, then what good does that do? Deliberately neutralizing the opposition's power renders the opposition's ideas, efforts, and proposals useless, and the allied politicians will never disobey, so petitioning either of them to make changes is pointless.
I'm not saying any of that is completely true right now, but people are nervous that this is becoming true.
It seems abundantly clear that there will be no peaceful/rule-of-law transfer of executive power in January 2029 to anyone but a hand-picked Trump successor that wins an election. A democratic victory (or even a Republican primary winner that isn't appropriately selected) will be resisted at all levels of the executive, and... we'll just see. Whatever the result, the losing party will call it a coup and illegitimate, and such an administration will survive only so long as it can hold control of the government by authoritarian means.
It may even happen earlier. A lot of the kerfuffle around redistricting is being presented to right wing audiences in a way that would be very easy to spin as "cheating". What do we do if democrats win the house next year and Johnson simply refuses to seat the California delegation to keep power? Are we prepared?
Basically, the End of the American Experiment may have already occurred.
Sorry, I was not implying they are far afield. We have seen this playbook in several nearby European/Asian countries in the last two and a half decades (I live in Europe). Of course, not all these countries did have a long democratic history, but they did show the fragility of democracy, you have to actively protect it.
Heck, even in the country where I live, which has quite a healthy democracy, a majority of parliament has just accepted a motion to request declaring antifa a terrorist organization because Trump did it as well (all Dutch experts, including former secret service personnel agree that antifa is neither an organization, nor terrorist). Some of them just to score a few points for the upcoming elections. Only a judge can declare an organization to be a terrorist organization, but it's all small steps in eroding the rule of law.
(Coincidentally, the next day 1500 right wing hooligans rioted in the streets of The Haglue the next day, burning police cars, damaging the office of a center-left political party and the parliament square.)
oof. I certainly understand where Luigi came from, but I'd also say that Luigi represents an escalation that empowers the Trump regime. The general population's latent desire to see some "justice" metered out on the "elites" pushes those elites into cozying up to Trump. Because those elites know that if Trump chooses to go after them, even the masses against Trump aren't going to be terribly concerned with their plight.
As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years? And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.
Meanwhile Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Part of the pressure are the populist memes that makes the masses unsympathetic to their plights, even though they are the structure of our society.
It's less about the murderer himself, and more about the high level of support he has. "Many of the rank and file in the Democratic coalition want you dead, but not to worry nearly all of them are cowards who'd never do anything about it." is cold comfort.
> And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.
Do I really need to go trough Reddit to find you people calling for the murder of "capitalists", right down to landlords and homeowners?
I'm sure the elites (if we could call them that) prefer to seem like they are being pressured by the Trump administration. It's better for business and it's safer that way. But their compliance comes a little too easy.
You've also completely sidestepped the fact that Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Sure, it's conceivable that some capitulating-institutional leaders were looking for an excuse to bring their institutions to heel, but it's not conceivable that they all were.
It seems like your goal is to absolve the autocratic authoritarians, and justify the elites cozying up to the autocratic authoritarians. So I don't see how continuing this conversation can be productive.
They would rather rule over ashes than join us in a little bit more of an equitable society.
He is still in jail and being charged with murder.
He is not free, and the meat of the of the case - a murder charge - is still being actively prosecuted.
Wasn't there a group cheering in front of the courtroom when the judge dropped the terrorism charge? Those people were not bots.
> How many people say things online they wouldn’t say in person?
Ohh, so lovely of them. I wonder how Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and ultimately Paul Graham feel, to know that the only reason why a good portion of the population doesn't advocate for their death is taqiyya?
I'd like to sidestep the question, and ask, is lethal violence justified as a retaliation? But I'd like to ask that as an ethical, not as a strategic question.
Suppose the starts align and the omens are good. Imagine the assassination of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would be highly beneficial to all your pet political issues. Would killing them be a good thing?
https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/07/07/a-billionaire-an-ai-...
And when the algorithms on the rest of the media sites are used to drive maximum engagement for profit purposes, or maximum dissent because of the political leanings of their owner (e.g. X), social media is most definitely not the reality.
Thanks for the downvotes
This is, is course, why it's the one preferred comparison.
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