Look up my comment “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

You answered it then by making a long irrelevant speech about how you don’t want to talk about “economics or politics”(!) and then jumping out a window.

I’ve got centuries of history backing my view of the dangers of too much political power, and you’ve got a TV commentator.

Remember, the purpose of government is to protect us from bullies. That doesn’t mean it always does, or even that it does it effectively. It just means that’s why we need one. Some governments are better than others, and maybe no government is perfect, but there will always be bullies, you can count on that. You don’t need a government to have bullies, they go into business, too.

http://leftcall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/chris-hayes-powerful-take-from-weak.jpg

It really is that simple. That’s why George Orwell was a Socialist.

Some people think a “fascist” is a noisy person with bad manners who thinks we need to tighten up our borders.

I think, and I believe history backs me up, that fascism is about the unhealthy accumulation of power. You can put any other “-ism” name you want on it, or simply try to obliterate any political terminology that can be used to point to this. The concept remains.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

- George Orwell, 1984

Sidebar1: The election in Argentina is over. The election in Venezuela is Dec. 6. The first member of the political opposition has been killed. It should be remembered how their leaders got to where they are now, what their original rhetoric, political ideas, and promises were, and who supported them. This is also “data.”

Sidebar2: It turns out that the myth of the trains running on time in Fascist Italy isn’t true either.

You do realize, that leaves only two alternatives. One of them is mistaken, or both are mistaken.

Then again, there may be a third possibility. They are both correct, but they are using different language to describe the same phenomenon.

There is no a priori way to decide among these alternatives. But realizing that they exist at all is the beginning of wisdom.

The endgame of the mixed economy is always going to be a “merged” economy–not being able to tell the men and pigs apart anymore.

Even communist countries have fat cats. They’re just loyal Party members, lobbying from the inside out instead of the outside in.

I understand your particular views on corporations and government, at least to the point where you’d think Bernie Sanders is a good idea, but nobody’s going to fix anything by giving the government even more power and wealth than it already has, or pretending that powerful political leaders and parties are always going to be more benign than powerful business interests. “Accountability” is a feature of a decentralized, less-powerful, bottom-up government with checks and balances, not the monolith we’re developing into.

Where the hell is the Antitrust Act for political entities?

Hillary or Sanders will just make it worse, and I doubt any of the Republicans would make it better.

Which, incidentally, is precisely the situation that existed in Germany in the 1920s. The Weimar Republic may have been corrupt and incompetent, but it didn’t create the Nazis. The Nazis were not created by the German industrialists and financiers, either. But they were nurtured and bankrolled by them in order to consolidate their own power and to oppose the Communists. Fortunately, we don’t have Communists, although I suspect we disagree about that too.

Of course there is no one-to-one correspondence with contemporary USA and the Germany of almost a century ago. The world is a very different place and our two peoples are very different, and our histories are very different. But the parallels are striking and very compelling.

Read Shirer. It really is spooky.

USA Today column by Glenn Reynolds.

These one-in-four of the electorate are the people who woke up one morning to find that in spite of all the promises made to them, and in spite of their willingness to work hard and play by the rules, the American Dream has passed them, and their children, by. A combination of military reverses, economic erosion, cultural change, demographic shift and historical evolution has led to ignorance, fear, anger, envy and hate. They are pissed, and they will follow anyone who offers them a way out, a scapegoat, a reason why its not really their fault, why its not the fault of the people whose quality they strove to emulate or the system they swore fealty to. Neither are they ready to accept that perhaps no one may be fundamentally responsible for their interrupted destiny. That sometimes that’s just the way things work out.

People would rather blame treachery and betrayal for their misfortunes than history, or just bad luck. They need someone to blame and someone to hate, and they need someone they think can make it all just like it was before. Or how they have convinced themselves it was before.

This is nothing new, it has happened before, in not exactly the same way of course, every age is different and conditions are never the same, but similarly enough that the parallels are obvious and unmistakable. Review my post “Weimar Amerika” below, in response to your “garden variety fascist” thread. It doesn’t have to happen here, but there’s nothing to stop it either. And right now, it looks like its right on schedule.

Trump is the least of our problems. He’s is not the disease, he’s just a symptom, and if he isn’t there, there will be plenty others ready to take his place.