Getting very Weimar-y

Andrew Sullivan reports from a nervous Washington:

The thing we most need to understand right now is how you deprogram people who have been in a cult. By cult, I mean a group of people living out an imaginary world view created by a charismatic leader. These things sometimes end with the guru hopping on a private plane to escape the authorities; others end in mass suicide; still others go up in literal smoke, as David Koresh did, or sometimes they collapse in a welter of claims of abuse and corruption. But when the cult is political, and when the guru is the sitting president of the United States, it all gets a little messier.

That’s what the core of the Trump movement is. Not all Trump voters, by any means. But the core: a cult. And these lost souls will believe anything and everything the leader says. Trump is currently denying there was anything in his speech that could be understood as incitement. But this is what he told them, just before they stormed the Capitol: ‘We beat them four years ago. We surprised them. We took them by surprise and this year, they rigged an election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before… We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it any more and that’s what this is all about. To use a favourite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal.’

So the one thing you cannot say about that mob that stormed the US Capitol last week is that they were crazy. From their point of view — a rigged election, fomented by Democrats and weak Republicans, suppressed by Fake News in league with Big Tech — they were being perfectly rational. If it were true, after all, that a vast left-wing conspiracy had used specially constructed voting machines to rig the election so that Trump’s landslide victory was erased, why would you not storm the Capitol? It would, indeed, be obligatory for a patriotic American to fight in such a case of treason.

The centre of the most powerful democracy in the world, invaded by members of a cult whose leader is....the President himself! Did Hollywood ever come up with anything quite that weird?

The other day, a friend asked if I would be leaving DC for a while. He was taking himself and his husband to the Delaware coast until the risk of violence subsided. Others are packing their bags. Walking the streets of my neighbourhood, I’m beginning to see the shop fronts being boarded up, as they were last summer. We’re told there are multiple pro-Trump marches on state capitals looming, and a big crowd in DC expected on 17 January as well as 20 January, the day Biden is supposed to be sworn in. A briefing for Democrats from the FBI about the plans for far-right attacks has left them aghast, we are told. Anti-fascist groups will organise a response: they created mayhem during the Trump inaugural. Just imagine if they confront a mob of Proud Boys and far-right militias next week. It’s getting very Weimar-y.

Comments

[Dom]

Sullivan’s quote from the Trump speech is a little misleading. The sentence immediately before the quote was “Big tech is now coming into their own”. Trump was talking about big tech, not the democrats like Sullivan implied. He probably meant big tech’s censorship of any mention of Hunter Biden’s ties to foreign companies.

The speech was bad enough, though. I think trump is tone deaf. He doesn’t know what he’s saying most times.

[Gunker]

Surely this cuts both ways. We have been told for 4 years that Trump is literally Hitler. Who would not support a violent overthrow of Hitler in the thirties ?