This is the QOTD from a commenter at LGM. It’s in response to the DOJ’s decision to back Trump’s immunity claim against E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him for saying that “she isn’t my type” in response to her charge that he raped her years ago. It’s a gross decision as a matter of simple decency but even on the principle, which may be defensible in the abstract, it speaks to something very troubling that’s happening in the bigger picture:
I’ve been struggling to find the right words the last few days. The word “Weimar” keeps popping over and over in my head, though that’s not quite right.
I guess all I can come up with is that the Democrats have basically submitted to Trump. Not that they want him to win or be President, but the large majority of elected Democrats have all agreed to act like he was normal, real, legitimate. They don’t see any need or desire to act like there’s a real threat there. He was just a President.
The analogy here would be Nazi judges. People who were judges in the Weimar Republic, who were not Nazis when it started. But then Hitler took power and banned alternative parties, and the judges just…went along. They just continued doing their job, submitting to Nazi rule and acting on their behalf, because ultimately their job was to be judges, nothing more.
We talk all the time about how we can’t let Trump be normalized, but he has been. And the highest levels of Democratic governance are not just letting it happen, but actively abetting it. Why are they doing this? I dont know. It’s hard to say. But the recent escapades of people like Manchin has made be belief that many, many liberal and democratic leaders are stupid and shallow people. They have better values than their fascist counterparts, but not all that much else.
I don’t know how else to put it. It can’t be more discouraging. Lots of people get on me, yell at me about “oh, so what’s your plan genuis!” I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a solution. All I can do is observe what’s happening and note that we will be annihilated because of it. Politically, of course. But maybe people will die because of the coming fascist onslaught. And we’re just watching it come.
I would just say that we have already lost 600,000 of our fellow Americans, the majority of them because we had an authoritarian crackpot in charge when a major global crisis hit. We all watched it, stunned at how many Americans decided to treat it as a cheap political trick (especially the president) seeing as a slow motion disaster that we still haven’t fully grasped as the disaster it really was. And it’s not over…