As readers of this blog know, I am not an admirer of Donald Trump. He is vain, cruel, narcissistic, arrogant, and just possibly off his rocker. He makes a mockery of Jesus's command to love God with all your heart and all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself. His Republican buddies seen to not realize that the teachings of Ayn Rand are much closer to Satan than Jesus. At no point does Jesus preach rampant individualism, egomania, avarice, or hatred. God in his Commandments has stated that there shall be no gods other than Me. This includes capitalism, communism, and "the market". In short, I don't like the guy. The behavior of many his followers (certainly not all) is appalling. But I do not think that Trump is another Hitler. I do thing that he is a grave threat to the unity of the federation that is the United States of America.
I have several reasons for believing Trump is not another Hitler.
1. Trump just doesn't have the necessary skills. Hitler was an authentic political genius. He had the ability to inspire a mighty nation and bend it to his will. The fact that he used his genius for evil does not change this. Trump just might be a genius also, but if he is a genius, it is in self promotion, not leading a mass movement. He inspires much hatred and very little love. His support is broad but only an inch deep. As of this writing he has been President for less than a week and things are already showing signs of falling apart. It will get worse for him rather quickly.
2. People who think Trump is another Hitler confuse the definitions of nation and state. A state is a sovereign political entity under one government whose lines you can see on any decent world atlas. The United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Indonesia are examples of states that include more than one nation. A nation is a group of people who share, or believe they share, a common culture, history, language, ethnic background, literature and symbols. For example, the United Kingdom is a state. England, Scotland, and Wales are nations. (Great Britain is just the name of an island). Quebec is a separate nation included in the state of Canada. A country can be both a nation and a state, like France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Kurdistan is an example of a stateless nation that bleeds into the boarders of three states.
The problem in the United States is that people believe it is a nation when it really is a confederation of nations under one state. Don't believe me? The Civil War was really a war between nations that had very little in common with one another. Today, there is very little uniting, say, Massachusetts and Mississippi other than a common national state. They hate each other. There is no way in Hell that Massachusetts will allow itself to be taken over by fundamentalist Christians imposing their version of Sharia Law. Efforts to impose secularism on Mississippi and Alabama have met with constant, unceasing resistance. Why? Because Massachusetts and Mississippi are parts of very different nations that have very little in common and in fact despise one another! We cannot even agree on the definitions of such basic concepts as freedom, liberty, patriotism, and what the flag means. War and Peace? Health care? Racial Relations? Forget it. Chicago is part of a third nation. Los Angeles is part of yet another. Same with New York, Seattle, and Denver. Hell, Miami is a nation of its own! The idea of someone placing the entire United States under fascism is laughable. The reason Hitler came to power was that Nazi Germany was a very homogenous nation-state with a strong culture of conformity. Even someone with the evil genius of Hitler could not unite the U.S.A. by the force of his will. Even if he wanted to, Donald Trump would not even come close.
3. Donald Trump's supporters just don't have it in them. Many (certainly not all!) of Trump's supporters are sullen, indolent, and ignorant. A belief in unearned privilege based on race or religion debases a people of its character and breeds decadence. Look at the Confederate States of America. White South Africa. Northern Ireland. Saudi Arabia. Are these or were these healthy societies? Whites in America are suffering the same social pathologies that blacks suffered a generation ago. Crystal meth and OxyContin are the new crack cocaine. Births out of wedlock have reached the same levels that blacks in the ghetto had thirty years ago. The late Eric Hoffer in his classic book on mass movements states that The True Believer is willing to make unbelievable sacrifices and subsume his whole self to the cause. This does not look like America in 2017. Not even close. If things turn bad, people are much more likely to turn on Trump than to follow him. Will his successor be good or bad? We don't know.
I don't think we do not have to worry about a fascist takeover of America. We do have to worry about America breaking up into its component nations. Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown fired a warning shot across Trump's bow. He essentially said that he will not put up with Trump's shenanigans and to remember that California could be an independent nation in its own right. Some people have already had the idea that California could secede from the left, much as Texans have often talked about seceding from the right. Indeed, what do we have keeping us together? Not much. The Constitution. Inertia. A belief in American Exceptionalism based on a world that no longer exists. That's about it. Colin Woodard in his excellent book American Nations said it best, in the last paragraph on the United States in his book:
"But one thing is certain; if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia Law. We wont hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States. or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them with their ideas. The union cannot function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn't withstand public scrutiny. Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion,, or near universal consensus on many fundamental issues. The United States needs its central government to function clearly, openly, and efficiently because its one of the few things binding us together"
So far, Trump and his GOP buddies have done everything to flout national unity. I would add gerrymandering, the continued existence of the Electoral College because of inertia and the idea that people who live in rural areas are "Real Americans" and city dwellers our not, Citizens United, and the dirty tricks that have been indulged in since Nixon, what they charmingly call "ratfucking". The horrible truth is that the United States will not turn fascist because the union will break up long before this happens. To prevent this from happing, Trump must stop or we must stop Trump. We still have time, but it is running out. Quickly.
If we continue to indulge in the worst side of our natures, the USA will break up. We will become much less than the sum of our parts. Much more vulnerable to external threat. That would be a tragedy for us and for the world.
