293 American Democracy: an Obituary
You hate to say it but with each passing day in Donald Trump’s America Circa 2025 Goebbels assertions about democracy only become more relevant and germane. As for Godwin’s law-honestly it was always a dubious law.
While Hitler analogies can be used in apt or abusive ways to simply assert that NOTHING can be compared to the Nazis is the destruction of history-if there are no appropriate historical analogies. It seems to me that most examples of where Nazi analogies have been abused and misused have come from the Right-most from the Center Liberal Left have been apt and accurate. And useful. When the Right HAS used Hitler Nazi analogies they’ve accused liberals of being Nazis-and implied that Nazis are the real liberals…
Certainly more than ever we need to preserve some sense of history as alongside Trump’s now six month assault on democracy is his assault on truth. By definition this is necessary for any Orwellian system as Trump’s certainly is Karoline Leavitt his Press Secretary for the Ministry of Truth.
And I hate to say it but this assault on truth as had no little success. Just for one example, Nicole Sandler revealed in her weekly show with EmptyWheel this past Friday that her own daughter had bought into some of Trump’s lies about the assassination of Minnesota Rep and her husband-while State Senator and his wife were critically injured.
Emptywheel Friday (the 13th!) on the Nicole Sandler Show 6-13-25
Meanwhile the press twists itself into an epistemological pretzel engaging in the most appalling false equivalence. You have both Stephen A Smith engaging in the most reprehensible victim blaming claiming that Padilla engaged in a the terrible crime of INTERUPTTING Kirsti Noem. To be sure this just once again underscores that anyone taking Stephen A Smith seriously politically speaking is the opposite of serious. But then again allegedly “serious” people like CNN bigshot makes the same awful argument.
FN: Keith Olbermann.
Still as much as you should despise and dismiss hacks like Smith and CNN bigshot – it does underscore how degraded our public debate is at this point-if a hack like Smith a la CNN bigshot engages in such gross false equivalence it is DOES provide a barometer of where the conventional wisdom-again as a Nietzschean cum Zarathustran it’s hard to ever contemplate that phrase without considerable irony-ie that maybe it was a little wrong to assault a US Senator, knock him to the ground, and arrest him but OTOH it was wrong of Padilla to interrupt Noem’s Hitler Youth speech where she talked about “liberating” California from it’s duly elected leaders.
That’s where the public debate is Circa June 2025-where Biden not getting out of the 2024 race sooner is the crime of the century-there the media uses MORAL language Tapper and Alex speak of a “coverup” and “deception” but when we talkin about things like Trump’s Gestapo force arresting and manhandling elected officials-In the last few months we’ve seen the Trump Administration arrest a Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge, arrest the mayor of Newark, a Congresswoman-a Democrat naturally all these elected officials are Democrats-rough up and manhandle NY Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s staff member, and now we have the thuggish assault and arrest of US Senator.
Meanwhile Trump himself threatened to arrest the Governor of California and now on Saturday 6/15/2025 in a day that should and would live in infamy if there weren’t’ so many other days of infamy in the still less than six short months of Trump 2.0 The Absolute Immunity years we had an anti abortion anti LGBT extremist ie a Trump supporter engage in literal political assassination.
Yet the take from the “conventional wisdom” is both sides are doing some mean things? So we have to take a step back and ask ourselves-just how the hell did we get here? This is a question I’ve asked myself every day of this lawless and illegitimate regime.
FN: It’s illegitimate for a lot of reasons many of them covered in considerable detail in this book
End FN
But in stepping back where do we start where do we look? Looking at what Hitler’s own propaganda minister is not a bad place.
FN: Many of the McCarthyites had also been Nazi apologists as McCarthy himself had been. Yet they would accuse liberals of being fascists.
What Goebbels said about democracy is striking-he argued it contained the seeds of its own destruction. Today while we see American democracy being destroyed from within on a daily basis you can’t rule Goebbels premise out of hand-that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. Indeed take January 6-many pundits-not necessarily the most astute-have argued that Trump himself believes his J6 lies-but as Goebbels said all those years ago that’s the virtue of repetition. Think about it-no one repeats the truth as much as Trump repeats his lies.
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TOP 25 QUOTES BY JOSEPH GOEBBELS (of 105) | A-Z Quotesi
This is why today millions of Americans believe so many of Trump’s lies. Indeed it often seems as if in a sense there are structural advantages to lies over the truth-after all no one bothers to repeat the truth as much as Trump repeats his lies. Which IS a structural advantage-if what you say is true you don’t feel the need to keep repeating it:
FN: For more on the phenomenon of how a liar creates the illusion of truth:
How liars create the ‘illusion of truth’
With what happened with Padilla no doubt already many believe that Padilla was unreasonable in some way-or that he stormed in and lunged at Noem or whatever the latest Trump Admin talking point is. Many will never realize that it was a Trump supporter who targeted Democrats-and interests considered liberal like abortion providers- with surgical precision
Gobbels had a lot of these disconcerting observations-disconcerting as they’re self evidently true-we see this on a daily basis. He argued that propaganda works best when those being manipulated are confident they are acting in their own free will. Indeed-no one in America every believes they’re NOT acting in their own free will. We discussed in considerable detail the education gap in 2024-how you voted was a function of your education level-and where you got your news which was a function of your educational level. Regarding education Goebbels said argued there was no point in “seeking to convert the intellectuals.”
“There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”
Joseph Goebbels quote: There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals…
At this moment on the one hand we liberal #Resisters can take comfort that we were right about Trump all along-the leftist You Tuber Kye Kulinski has acknowledged that those of us whose hair was most on fire over Trump have been proven right beyond what would have been imaginable back in 2017-2018. On the other hand it’s cold comfort indeed it’s no comfort at all.
But now that Trump is doing the kind of things we warned about daily it becomes a real challenge for any one person to keep up with it all. Beyond the Owellian nature
of US political discourse-where it often feels as if history has simply been forgotten, indeed that maybe it’s irrelevant, there is what the lawyer and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa calls “moral disengagement.”