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The Playlist From Hell

Outside the Capitol, the crowd cheered as rioters stampeded into the building, 2:10 p.m.
Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

Michael Brenner in the Washington Post:

A mob of several thousand outraged people rampaged through the streets of the city after a long rambling speech by their leader inciting them to do so. Some used violence. Windows were broken, shots were heard, there was bloodshed. The leader of the pack demanded the political swamp be drained. After a tumultuous few hours, order was restored and elected officials emerged from their hiding places.

No, this is not Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021. This was Munich, Nov. 8, 1923. The instigators did not come to Munich to support a president who was voted out of office. They did not gather in front of the nation’s seat of power, but rather started their rally in a beer cellar where a young Adolf Hitler seized control after silencing the politicians and the crowd assembled there with a pistol shot to the ceiling. Obviously, the circumstances surrounding the storming of the U.S. Capitol are very different from those of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. But Germany during the 1920s offers crucial lessons for us today about how democracies become imperiled.

That, to say the least, is the biggest understatement of 2021 so far, and likely to remain so.

Timothy Snyder in the NY Times:

 The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

This is one reason I could barely sleep or concentrate last week. Not only because of what was happening, but because of what will happen.

Snyder again:

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history.

The Beer Hall Putsch. The Stab in the Back. The Big Lie. They’re terrible songs in a playlist from hell. Never heard these songs before? Then for God’s sake, for Buddha’s sake, for the sake of yourselves, your families, your friends and lovers — everything you hold dear — read The Death of Democracy now.

I love being wrong but what I’m seeing is a deliberate, carefully plotted attempt by prominent Republicans to emulate the precise, appalling steps of Hitler’s rise to power, to use the Nazis’ story as the perfect template for their own mad ambitions. And we are responding exactly the way Weimar did, with politicians extending olive branches, facile mockery, and the desperate wish that we all just get along.

Unfortunately, none of that will work. Krugman:

…if history teaches us one lesson about dealing with fascists, it is the futility of appeasement. Giving in to fascists doesn’t pacify them, it just encourages them to go further.

So why have so many public figures — who should have known what Trump and his movement were — tried, again and again, to placate them by giving in to their demands? Why are they still doing it even now?

So far, the lesson for Trumpist extremists is that they can engage in violent attacks on the core institutions of American democracy, and face hardly any consequences. Clearly, they view their exploits as a triumph, and will be eager to do more.

For this isn’t over.

Indeed, it is not. We’re only at 1923. It took ten more years for the Nazis to consolidate power and start setting up the infrastructure for the extermination of millions. But in the Internet age, unless we wake up and are very lucky, it will be 1933 again before we know it.

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