After reading Prequel, Rachel Maddow’s most recent book, it’s abundantly clear that a free society—or free relative to other countries at least—is an easy mark for a regime, say, like the one in Germany back in the 1930s and ‘40s.
The playbook Hitler used on us appears to have paved the way for the one Putin is currently using. And Putin has better tools with which to penetrate deep into society and mess with our psyche. It was then and is now all about generating rot from within. Sowing discontent among us, spreading disinformation, picking at and widening the divide between haves and have nots, appealing to an embrace of isolationism, grooming a sense of fear and mistrust when it comes to immigrants, along with an ever-present antisemitism.
Even going so far as to sweet-talking and bribing politicians, our representatives in Congress. There’s been little in terms of bombshell accusations in this regard, but all one has to do is listen to Bannon and Miller and Gaetz and Jordan and Johnson and even MTG and the rest to realize that we’re again dealing with a faction that desires a form of government much different from what the founders intended.
One can see why Maddow wrote the book– to remind us that we’ve been here before, and that the U.S. will always be vulnerable, because of our Constitution and the freedoms it provides. Sadly, there will always be a misfit somewhere who hates us, hates democracy, and who will go to any lengths to take us down- slowly, remotely even, in unnoticeable or at least plausibly deniable ways for as long as possible, focusing on peoples’ ignorance and all that would create friction and manufactured hatred, and people taking sides.
America is indeed an experiment, a rarity on the world stage, one that demands engagement, participation, and buy-in from its citizens. And one that apparently will always invite efforts at destruction.
No, I didn’t forget about Trump. He’s just a stooge, though. A pretender who’s been allowed to hang around for too long.
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