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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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But he... wasn't. He lost the presidency in 1932 to Paul Von Hindenburg (53% to 37%. not even particularly close) who later appointed Hitler under pressure to the channclorship (which was an appointed role) in 1933. Hindenburg died in January of 1934 and Hitler de facto merged the presidency and chancelorship into one office (Fuhrer). The story isn't "regular people put Hitler in power", it's "broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists".
Lucky America doesn't have a broken legislative sys... Oh no
At least we have a good judici...
Fuck.
We can rest easy knowing that the judiciary is subject to checks and b…
God damn it.
But i mean.. at least there subject to some level of ethi...
Well fuck all of us.
But we don't have a hoard of fascists frothing at the mouth, waiting for their....
Oh wait
We’re toast
No we aren’t. Antifascism was effective at stopping fascism in the US and UK.
was it?
i always thought that's mostly because german fascists dragged both of those countries into war by attacking them, which caused severe backlash by proxy, and not really antifa being particularly effective in those countries.
explains why the U.S., despite having a large fascist movement at the time, reversed course and turned on fascism as an ideology (in public); they got attacked.
same in Britain; early attacks in the war, plus some lingering resentment from WWI, combined overcoming a push towards fascism...
I'd love to hear/read more about successful antifa movements in the UK/US, but that's what I've always thought/read were the major reasons for failing fascist movements in those countries: other fascists...
She would know all about that. Bernie was killing Trump in the polls. Hilary was neck and neck with Trump.
The DNC cast their votes for who was going to General. A winner was announced. Everyone started to go to the announcement and for the only time in DNC history, the announcement was rescinded and everyone was broken up into different groups. Hilary staffers were observed scurrying around between groups. Then everyone was forced to vote again. THEN Hilary was declared the candidate going to General.
It was all live tweeted. It was all loudly publicized, but noone seemed to notice. Noone seemed to care.
Of course she is now going to make a historically inaccurate statement that casts actual democracy in a bad light.
That hag needs to stay under her rock.
I mean, there was a court case...
DNC's lawyers used the legal defense that they're a private party and can run anyone they want in the general, and because of that, it doesn't matter if they influence a primary election.
They flat out said primary elections are just a performative act, and the judge agreed with them.
It's their party, their candidate, and they only let the people vote as a courtesy.
Our "free" country has been run by two private institutions interested only in their own popularity for over 150 years.
We lose. Everything.
Which is correct if you look at the history of how primaries came to be. Parties simply nominating someone is exactly what used to happen. The first Presidential primaries started in 1901, and they still don't even happen in every state. Plenty still use the caucus system, where a bunch of insiders (usually local people who have volunteered for the party in some capacity) take off a day from work to decide on a candidate. The caucus system has historically been far more susceptible tampering by powerful interests. It literally was a smoke filled room, and is where that metaphor started.
Primaries aren't some system enshrined in the Constitution or anything. It's just how both parties have evolved over time. The general population gets its say in the election later on. The system now is far more democratic than the one that existed 200 years ago (with the caveat that we don't have to stop with progress here).
Obama would never have gotten the nomination in 2008 if the caucus system was still the norm. The leaders of the party wanted Hillary.
That said, I think this approach would work better if there were more than two viable parties. If you don't like who the Democrats nominated, look the Green Party or Progressives Party or Send Billionaires to Guillotines Party. If they all put a candidate out there selected by party insiders, that's fine, just vote in the general for whomever you think is the best out of a wide range of options. It's far harder for corrupt party insiders to game the system in this scenario--for example, it'd be harder to have a place in all parties and setup the candidates you want so you win no matter what. It's only a problem because we have exactly two parties that matter. Treating multiple parties as private organizations who can nominate whomever they want under any system they want would be fine.
Nope, Obama dominated the cactus states...
https://www.infoplease.com/us/government/elections/campaign-2008-primary-and-caucus-results
That's not the only thing you just said that I disagree with, it's just an objective fact and it's pretty much what the rest of your comment is based on.
Roll back to where caucus were 100 years ago. Obama would not have won those. That system was more grossly corrupt.
Yeah, if you had said something completely different you might not have been wrong, I agree with that.
But what you did say, is objectively wrong.
Except that I was quite clearly citing historical context in everything.
I actually think I vaguely remember this.
Thanks for reminding me.
Don't forget that there are many, many appointed superdelegates who each have around 8,000 voting power each.
There were 618 pledges from DNC superdelegates in the 2016 nomination, equaling 4,944,000 voting power (meaning votes equivalent to ~5 million regular voters in the DNC). These are not delegates assigned to states but to specific groups and people in positions in the DNC itself.
For reference, 16,917,853 of the popular vote itself went to Hilary Clinton and 13,210,550 went to Bernie Sanders according to this eye cancer of a website. If all of the DNC superdelegates voted for Bernie Sanders, he would have won the 2016 DNC primaries, even though the DNC voters regardless that the actual regular DNC voters voted for Hilary.
Anyway, I'm only making a point that system was broken.
The DNC did reform this afterwards, in that, if the first ballot doesn't have an absolute majority then superdelegates will cast votes but otherwise, cannot (as a superdelegate).
Nice rundown.
At the end of the day, I think the United States is just too damn big to run this type of system.
Red states are so entrenched in their beliefs and blue states are so entrenched in theirs, there is no way to cap them off with one cohesive federal government.
By design, every advancement is a crucial blow to the other side.
And then the real rub.
We have been at it long enough that there are not 2 parties. There is one mob of selfish egotistical asshats who struggle and toil keep federal office the best place to get richer and more powerful.
We keep calling it a government divided. IT ISNT. They are of one mind, taking a foot but making sure not to take a yard. Giving up a foot but making sure not to lose a yard. And every time the ball moves one half of The mindless masses feel validated, one half of The mindless masses feel violated, and the whole effort had an earmark on page 1672 of 3000 that assraped EVERYONE except the rich and the politician.
My betting money is on the fact that we will crumble like the USSR before I die. No grand civil war two electric Boogaloo. Just a pathetic crumbling.
The difference between US and the USSR is that we don't have a pre USA history/culture to fall back on.
Not sure entirely about that. Nazis were still a party that held up to 44% of seats in the reichstag (before they were all nazi) with like 6 different parties. Hitler wasn't isolated. The population voted for him and his party. Hindenburg didn't like Hitler but essentially passed away at a terrible time and Hitler outplayed Papen who was meant to keep him in check. Hindenburg felt he had to since they had the closest to a majority in the reichstag.
Yes, there was support in the population, but there was also a lot of violence to suppress dissent. The historical consensus, as I learned it, is to call it the "seizure of power" ("Machtergreifung" in German), because Hitler wasn't simply voted into power by a majority.
This somewhat misleading, Hitler and the NSDAP were indeed voted into the position to seize power by democratic means which they then abused, the voter supression mainly happened in later elections when the undermining of institutions and the consitution was already well underway. "Machtergreifung" is the propaganda term the Nazis used themselves to describe the process of what happened after the fact, which in reality was much more cloak and dagger-y than the term suggests.
P.S.: Germany didn't have a two-party system, so having a majority wasn't that important. You would form coalitions of parties after an election which then had a majority, or even form a minority government that then has to actively hunt for their missing votes from other parties to get any legislation passed.
That is not correct. Neither according to Wikipedia, not to what I learned in school. The term "Machtergreifung" was avoided by the Nazis, they used "Machtübernahme" as to not alienate their moderate conservative supporters. But "Machtergreifung" is much more fitting, when applying it to the process that was started in January 1933.
And yes, Hitler convinced Hindenburg to appoint him as the head of a coalition government, as the NSDAP had lost votes and came in "only" at around 33%. The normal rules of how to govern in a multi-party system don't quite apply, because it was never Hitler's goal to rule as part of a coalition, having to compromise.
They used both terms as well as "Machtübergabe" (transfer of power) to refer to Hitler being appointed chancelor, but that was neither the beginning nor the end of the multi-step coup the Nazis enacted, which is what I wanted to highlight. The term makes it seem like a singular event, when in reality it was a longer process.
You really expect a politician to tell the truth, especially when it comes to history? She and the rest of the US political elite for decades now are just mouthpieces for interest groups, mostly military groups who make money with wars abroad. Together with the media, they sell you wars abroad, while waving any currently popular flag at home for votes. The US elections are so loud, you don't hear the sounds of pain and misery those events create abroad, especially in Middle East.
After the reports of Israeli invasion in Gaza, the first smile I saw in media was that of Hillary. When the wars and killings across northern Africa and Middle East started during the Arab Spring, her smile was the most prominent one for months.
Every time this slime of a human being crawls out of a crack in the wall in Washington somewhere, a war is either being prepared or needs justifying for the american voters. All that with a smile, while the cameras are rolling.
Manufactured concent is a bitch.
That's super interesting. I did not know that