On The Hitlerian Manipulation of Violent Spectacle

I looked around a bit to see what people were saying about the fiasco in Chicago, the cancelled Trump appearance at the University of Illinois campus there.  Predictably, there was a strong reaction to the hate fest that the Trump campaign has come to symbolize, though I don't know why as pretty much all of the Republican campaigns I've read about are all about getting all the haters together to form a winning coalition.  That is what the Republican strategy has been for pretty much the last half century, since Nixon and others figured on taking in the segregationists who the Democrats finally said no to in 1964 and 65,   Since then Republican victories have come by widening the circle of hate to cover the reaction to the anti-war and womens' movements, environmentalism, the civil rights campaign for LGBT people.  That they were also able to gull a large number of blue-collar Democrats who, with some justification, felt disrespected and disregarded by the media-based and, to a lesser extent, political elite of the Democratic Party was a bonus paid through the conceit of people too stuck up and stupid to understand that's nothing that had to happen.

Let me note that somewhere, I don't remember where, someone mentioned that Hitler used to hire people to act as "opposition" provocateurs at his early events, knowing that they would probably benefit the Nazis, making them feel more solidarity, paranoia and producing a sense that they were oppressed underdogs.  If that's the case then this kind of thing will play right into his hands.

I don't think there was any need for anyone to go to the rally to oppose Trump, the spectacle of his supporters spouting hate, as their candidate spouts hate is probably enough to ensure his defeat in November.  You could say the same thing about the Cruz and Rubio campaigns.  Though he can hate with the worst of them, John Kasich's,  Nixonian campaign of preaching hate with a wink and a nod is rather too quaint for the hate machine that the Republican Party, its cabloid and hate-talk propaganda machines and pretty much everything about it has created.   The Republican hate machine is a robotic nightmare which could probably be turned into a killing machine given something like another major terror attack, something like the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany which was the trifecta that Hitler turned into absolute power to terrorize the German people out of any kind of effective opposition.

This is what "more speech" has brought us to, the Republicans used "free speech" and "free press" slogans also provided to them by the elite wing of liberalism a half century ago.   In the wake of Trump's cancelled, obviously planned fiasco, his supporters are bawling and crying about how his "free speech" rights were shut down by the people who are the focus of the Republican hate campaign.   And, you know what, they got that from the preening process liberals, too.  The liberals who have been fretting and worrying that, somewhere, somehow, some liberal or other person is violating the free speech of neo-Nazis, skin-heads, the Phelps cult or some other peddlers of hate whose consequences would probably be least likely to impact the lives of those white-collar professional nags.   They as much as the Republicans who adopted their 1st amendment pose, have brought us to where we are today.  And, according to their nagging standard, it was the protesters who were wrong to oppose those who want, very much, to use government to harm and oppress them.  That kind of 18th century liberalism has never, really, cared much for the effects of their policies on the lives of minorities and poor folk, in general.  Though some of them maintain a pose of sentimentality about such stuff, they know who really matters to them*.

The other day a Republican troll at Media Matters hauled out John Stuart Mill to refute a point I made about how a free press permitted to lie and libel with impunity, in the age of corporate mass media, is more likely to guarantee fascism than democracy.   Really, John Stuart Mill whose ideas were entirely theoretical, there being no absolute free speech in his experience, certainly no corporate mass media free to lie and defame and inflame people against minority groups, liberals, etc.   Just like the largely fictitious "founders" who inform peoples' fantasies about such things, Mill didn't have the first clue as to how things work in today's media environment, their theories on that may as well be considered Jurassic era fossils, impressive and able to teach us some limited things about the past but which could never be revived to live in today's world.  

*  I will just mention that photo that's going around of the stalwart of liberalism on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg riding in an elephant born palanquin with the man who did more to harm the poor, members of minorities and women in need of their rights, her buddy and fellow member of the Ivy League educated class, Antonin Scalia.  The sight says as much about what's wrong with that kind of "liberalism" as anything.