Actually there is an analogue to the Werhmacht’s Loyalty Oath to the Fuhrer in modern American Conservative ritual.

Remember Grover Norquist’s “No new taxes” oath in 2012? Trump wasn’t involved in this obscenity, but Norquist did succeed in getting 95% of all US Republican legislators to sign up for it. He then enforced it by threatening to point out and publicize any deviation from the pledge to the constituencies of the lawmakers. As the Elder Bush painfully learned, no amount of leadership or competence can make up for raising taxes, no matter how justified the need may be.

Senators and Congressmen, as well as executive and judicial branch officials, already take an oath (to the Constitution), but as we now know, all that really matters to this crowd is not paying their fair share of taxes. Norquist coerced the entire Republican Party into assuming the posture and baring their rumps for this peculiar form of Conservative buggery, just the way Hitler intimidated his bad-ass Storm Troopers: the veiled threat that if you don’t swear you must be a Jew, Communist and traitor (or in the kinder, gentler American version, a tax-and-spend Liberal). This is how cults enforce discipline.

Republicans, as we now have been reminded by Trump, still spend lavishly on their pet projects while slashing their own tax contributions, they plan instead to loot social programs to make up the difference, or failing that, allow deficits to balloon so they can plunder social programs in the future. They don’t care about budget deficits, all they care about is paying for them.

Of course, Americans have already been psychologically prepared, since childhood, for the taking of coerced, public, “oaths”:

I pledge allegiance, to the flag…