Psychological Paths to Collaboration...
Smart observations through the lens of French collaboration after 1940 and eastern European collaboration after 1945:
Anne Applebaum: Why Do Republican Leaders Continue to Enable Trump? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/: 'The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947...
...These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own. Not even Trump's supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump's first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values....
McCain's funeral... did clarify the situation. A year and a half into the Trump administration, it marked a turning point, the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics, and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past---doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low.... A Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of---what, exactly? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School? He might meet the terrible fate of Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, who has been hired as a contributor by CBS News. He might suffer like Romney, who was tragically not invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which this year turned out to be a reservoir of COVID‑19...
.#noted #2020-06-08
