The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, beginning from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ... the shapes and directions of American politics and culture, with occasional comments on the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.
Prologue: Why does American politics under Trump since a year before his 2016 presidential election, and after he lost in 2020, continue to resemble ithe drama and craziness of Hitler's drunken-walk caryings-on through German politics of 1920-1933?. Trump's shouts of 'foul-play' for losing the 2020 election, seem to mirror the drama of Germany in those times.
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After the unsuccessful Jan6, 2022 attempted putsch, which so far appears to be a thing of history, America’s democratic preference to let bygones be gone…, now has a breath of clean air in President Joseph Biden, who is an experienced Washington politician (Senator, 2-term Vice President, and family man). President Biden has steadied the American ship of State, though the media, right and left, quite readily have targeted his policy and even personal qualities.
Kurt von Schleicher was Hitler’s ‘fixer’ who orchestrated der Fuhrer’s decade-long rise to Chancellor (1933) after his 1924 imprisonment for sedition and attempted putsch of the Weimar Republic. Von Schleicher’s spider-webbed schemes on behalf of HItler are close to Machiavelli’s darkest political maneuverings. (But it wasn’t at all just about Hitler, the intention was to use Hitler to springboard a cabal of Germany’s industry-autocrat,..aristocrat-militarist elite into total authoritarian rule under a military head.)
In this current era, it appears that von Scleicher has been resurrected in the Steve Bannon — William Barr duo who almost pulled off a 1933 style game play in the 2022 midterms except that the Democrat vote was even more the majority (8 million plurality) than in 2016 presidential election when Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes. Now, Bannon-Barr have been replaced by the Department of Justice’s new head, Merrick Garland, a methodical legalist whose style appears to be an unbiased adherence to Constitutional principles. Garland’s style at times appears frustratingly slow (America’s collective psyche prefers quick action), but in the end solid evidence and near-faultless case closures have consistently advanced his legal pursuit of justice for Trump-and-compny’s political injustices..
Garland is an important bright spot in America’s recovery after the Trump presidency and attempted putsch.
Garland uses Democracy to defend Democracy, instead of a Bannonist exploitation of Democratic principles, through clever wordplay, to promote authoritarian rule (Bannon and Barr Trumpism… and ‘others’ whose roles are yet to come into view…but their shadows are appearing in the distant fog).
Bannon is still, even under the threat of long-term incarceration, playing the role of Hitler’s ‘Kurt von Schleicher’, a 1930s German aristocrat (plutocrat) whose political ‘game’ attempted to use Hitler as an intermediary to replace constitutional government with an authoritarian miliary-dictatorship.
Of course, it can be seen that Trump, like his literary-historical mentor, Hitler, even facing possible incarceration or at least heavy political condemnation and possibly social exile, should not yet be counted out. Trump’s “Brown Shirt’ street thug supporters, the MAGA crowd, are still active, and the recent November midterm elections did not remove America’s government from being in danger by a rightwing takeover…as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s increasing open association with extreme right-wing industrial-political groups.
In coming acts of American political drama, there are reasons to expect that the current Trumpist supporters such as Bannon will be trampled under the wheels of Trump disfavor … Trump is a ‘Natural’ for the role of a Neo-Hitler…even to the point of promoting the unsuccessful Jan 6 ‘putsch’.
But, as for who or what group is pulling the strings for America’s right-wing players, the picture is yet incomplete… but shadows are now coming into focus.
Elon Musk , the mega-entrepeneur, is one candidate to be added to that potential list of hopeful autocrats who would rule America like a gang-boss. (Although, Musk is a successful entrepreneur, his time at the political right-center stage is most likely a temporary red-Herring, the exploitation of a politically buffoonish savant.)
We will see what things take shape as this play goes forth.
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