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July 21, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser
51:34
Noam Blum | What Makes A Democracy Become A Dictatorship? | OAP #35
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Time Text
Do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night.
Good day.
Welcome to One American Podcast.
are you and what are you doing here?
Are you asking me or them?
Are you asking me?
I'm Noam Bloom, CTO of Tablet Magazine and, I don't know, Tweeter Galore, I guess.
The thing that probably everybody watching this would know me from is Twitter, I guess.
I should have put my Twitter name in the little thing instead of my actual name, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I don't think it could be changed post facto.
Oh, no, but I'll definitely make sure that it's in the, I can do it.
Okay, it's a neon taster, right?
Yeah, it is.
Is that right?
Yeah, correct.
Boom.
There you go.
Solving problems for you right and left.
Yeah, in real time.
So, so you're the CTO of Tablet, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So what is what does your role entail then as the CTO?
Well, I mean, I'm just in charge of all of their different various technical aspects, website management and some other things that go on there sort of behind the scenes.
That's sort of, you know, like the mainstay of my job.
I'm also kind of a little bit of, what do you call it, utility player?
Yeah.
Because I've been, I've, I've done a couple of other roles there.
And so I'm always kind of helping out with other tasks, tasks and things like that.
And it's great.
And like I've done some writing for them in the past and hopefully in the future as well.
So I don't know much about Tablet.
I kind of came across it just through you, especially when Israel, you know, Israel was getting bombed.
So what's the scoop?
What's the scoop over there?
I mean, it's just a really great place.
It's a, you know, like it's a, it's a sort of a sort of Jewish and Jewish-centered publication, but actually specifically aims at a broader audience and has kind of, I don't know if morphed is the right way because they've always kind of had that aspect,
but it's come more to the fore recently about, you know, stuff like talking about the new digital reality of things that are happening and, you know, cultural events of the day, because all of it does impact the Jewish community and Jews in general, you know,
like talking about stuff like, you know, cancel culture and things like that and where Judaism fits in this whole system of progressivism and the culture wars, because, you know, as you know, and as you've seen probably,
it isn't, it doesn't really conform to the traditional sort of narratives that have developed in like American cultural discourse, you know, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also as it involves like Jews and their experience in the United States.
For example, you know, the fact that Jews year after year are the, you know, lead by a lot, the chart of like victims of hate crimes or religion-based hate crimes, actually, if you want to be more precise about it, because the FBI does divide it, has different charts.
And, but that isn't really a largely discussed topic, for example.
Yeah, it's because you guys are all white passing.
I mean, that's sort of, it's that discourse, especially recently.
I don't remember it ever being as present as this.
That type of discourse has kind of crept into it and the idea of like white Jews and Jews of color.
I never really heard that.
Well, they didn't have a word for it before, but everyone still kind of felt that way.
Well, there has been, I mean, if you want to, if you want to get into it a little bit, like Israel has, since its establishment, this sort of still open wound between, I guess, a similar situation of what you would call like, you know, like white and black.
The dichotomy was the immigrants who came from like European countries versus immigrants who came from like North Africa and other Arab nations and how, yeah, they were like when Jews of lower socioeconomic status came from like Middle Eastern and Arab countries, they were kind of relegated to lower class settlements and places that were kind of like away from the sort of rich whitey areas.
And there is still that.
there is still, there are still wounds of that.
It's just not exactly the same.
I mean, it's just a different country, you know, halfway across the world with an entirely different set of circumstances.
There is also the whole idea of Jewish sects and how, you know, like varying levels of religion create these conflicts and stuff.
There is a lot.
This is way more complicated than just trying to superimpose your kind of traditional American culture war narratives on it.
There's a lot more going on there.
Yeah.
I wonder why that is, though, that why do you think it is other, do you think the white passing thing is enough to explain, not justify, nothing can justify, but explain the discrepancy in the amount of coverage that hate crimes on Jews get.
Do you think that's really like at the bottom of it, what's going on?
Or do you think it, do you think it's actually anti-Semitism?
Or do you think that nobody's worried about who Jews are going to vote for?
And so they just, nobody taught, nobody, you know, campaigns on it.
Well, I think that sort of ironically, it's actually, it helps prove something that those, by the way, I just froze.
Oh, that, that, that same crowd will say isn't true, which is that many different sort of conflicts that are blamed on stuff like race are actually economic.
And so I do think that the fact that Jews are generally in the sort of higher socioeconomic brackets make them less sexy as victims, especially like in, you know, when you're trying to present a media story or trying to present an attractive, interesting, compelling media narrative, the fact that people who are like upper middle class get called the dirty Jew at one point on the street is not exactly a sexy story to sell.
And yeah, and yes, there are, see, I'm, I, my tendency is not to say like, oh, it's because of anti-Semitism.
Oh, and everybody who died, everybody who ignores it is just anti-Semitic.
And it's just what it's, it's, it's most, more often than not, it's not that.
It's, um, it's the, it's the sort of tacit acceptance of other elements that are anti-Semitic.
You know, like, I don't think that being a progressive is anti-Semitic, certainly not.
But there are sort of, there are anti-Semitic elements within sort of the social justice movement and progressivism that are kind of left to their own devices.
They're kind of like tolerated there with courtesy hand waves at their opinions and all kinds of like explainy paternalistic.
I mean, they're still doing it for Elhan Omar, which kind of blows my mind.
I mean, she's sort of my age, has kids and was like a policy fellow at the University of Minnesota or something like that.
And still when she says something that's sort of anti-Semitic or echoes anti-Semitic narratives, it's excused by like infantilizing her and saying like, oh, she doesn't really, Nancy Pelosi will say something like, oh, she wasn't, she didn't really understand the gravity of what she was saying.
It's like, really, why are you like, she's, you're, you're acting like she's an idiot.
Like I give her more credit.
I think she's smarter than that.
And therefore, I think her motives are worse than just being oblivious.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
That's why, why do you think it is, though?
Because like if the data is actually showing that there's more explicit racism toward Jews than any other race, especially particularly hate crimes, when I say explicit racism, why do you think it is that the Jewish community doesn't see the same sort of standard of living as other communities?
Well, I mean, there's been entire books written about why Jews are so liberal, especially in the United States and stuff.
And because Jews are historically, have always been sort of like an underprivileged group and sort of a targeted group almost everywhere they've been.
They've always featured on the front lines of like social change movements, including like, you know, communism.
I mean, if you want to get into it, it's funny that people who are sort of communists hate Israel so much, considering that it was established by Soviet communists, kind of like they came there to like till the land and dry the swamps, like based on Soviet principles.
If you look at old posters of Israel, posters of like the pioneers of Israel, they are like classic communist posters, except that they're, you know, instead of like the Soviet or the Chinese like classic graphic images,
there is the image of the Sabra, which is the nickname for like the natural born Israeli, this new creature, you know, this person who like was born in Israel and grew up a secular pioneer, not a religious,
an ultra orthodox religious Jew who lived in the, in a few of the ancient holy cities, but someone who lived in a literal commune in a collective farming community and like grew up a farmer and was like, you know, a collectivist and stuff.
And so it's like I said, it's funny how the world turns.
And now people who kind of champion those values look at Israel as the opposite of that as like a colonial power that like combated those things when it actually started exactly like the thing they wanted.
Wow.
Yeah, man.
I mean, history is weird like that.
I mean, there are, and like I said, it breaks especially what goes on in Israel, sort of breaks the narrative of this sort of classic weak versus drunk, a post-colonial narrative to the point where, by the way, there is a thing, if you look this up, there is a there is a term that's used in progressive circles,
PEP progressive except for Palestine, which they use to kind of outgroup people who have progressive values, but don't think that these narratives of social justice apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They say it's actually more complicated than that.
Those people are dismissed as progressives except for Palestine.
Like, oh, no, these people have like a blind spot in their worldview.
And that sort of clash has to do with the fact that it really doesn't, if you get into the nitty-gritty of it, and if you don't just like learn about it from Twitter, you see that it really does flip a lot of these sort of classic ideas on their head.
So why do you think it is that despite the constant oppression, for lack of a better term, of Jews throughout history and well into and throughout the 20th century, why do you think it is that the Jewish communities always seem to thrive financially?
I mean, that's a good question.
And it's been, I mean, there's a, again, if you want to get into things that have had many, many books written about them.
I haven't read them.
Well, there are so.
Oh, no, sure.
So, I mean, I'll give you, like, I'll give you an example.
There's, unfortunately, there are, it's, it's kind of funny, but there are, you know, there are like myriad reasons for this, obviously.
But one of them has to do with like the tradition of which professions were traditionally Jewish.
And the reason that some professions are traditionally Jewish, like bankers and stuff like that, was because in the Middle Ages in Europe, there were professions that Jews were not allowed to have, namely anything that was like guild related.
They could be craftsmen.
But Jewish people aren't wealthy in America today because their ancestors were allowed to loan money on interest.
Well, so I'm, but right, but I'm saying like you're, you're talking though, you're talking about hundreds of years of like sort of a cultural attract, you know, like it kind of, it kind of becomes, you know, like there's this whole meme about, oh, the Jewish mother who wants her son to be a doctor.
Oh, you're going to be a doctor.
Where does that come from?
There is a, again, we're talking about like hundreds of years of like tradition of like doing these jobs and your father did the job and now you did a job and it was respectable, right?
And the person who, if you're a merchant of some sort, if you're a banker, if you're a clerk, you know, like what now is like lawyers, it used to be people who did like clerk jobs, what you would call like a notary now.
Like you would need to get documents certified or things like that.
And those were the things that Jews were allowed to do.
And so like did them for many, many years.
And I mean, you can, you can, there's also, I mean, there's a lot of talk about, you know, like how sort of Jewish culture sort of preaches for sort of seeking of the intellectual and the, and so they're good at math.
I mean, I don't know, like there is, it's sort of a, it's sort of this eternal question.
It's also the idea of, you know, like how Andrew Yang got in trouble where he kind of leaned into the stereotype of Asians being good at math.
And I mean, where does that come from?
You know, like, why does there a stereo?
And it's not really a stereotype because it's not that if you're Asian, then your genes make you better at math.
It's the idea that in, well, yeah, in East Asia, there is like a, like the sort of the, the schooling system is very intense and there isn't and sort of an intense focus on that.
And there is a culture of, you know, like there was that whole thing years ago with the tiger moms, the idea of like Asian parents who are very strict and demand excellence from their children.
And yes, that is a cultural thing that goes back decades.
It's not a racist idea to suggest that.
This is something that's sort of kind of well documented and to a certain extent, like shifting and changing as time goes by.
You know, like Japan, there's a lot of sort of traditionalist trends that existed in Japan forever and are like kind of breaking down slightly as society modernizes.
And I mean, especially Japan, which went through, as you know, like a sort of a traumatically transformative event, you know, in the past century that kind of radically, you know, like shifted the course of their natural development.
Same thing kind of happened with Germany.
That's also, by the way, you know, like if we can go on a quick tangent for a second, like, you know, because there's all this talk about with Afghanistan now and, you know, like the idea of like, we're going to pull out of Afghanistan and what happened and what did we do there over all these years.
And unfortunately, I do think that the reality, I'm not saying that this is what we should do, but I do think that history has proven that like the only way to solve a crisis like that is to be like utterly destructive and just like leave a smoldering rubble of ruin and just like rebuild it from scratch.
I mean, the only kind of two examples we have of a sort of a globally evil force being like turned around into like a totally normal, good, you know, like normative member of the international community involve doing the most awful things to them ever that you can't that like you can't possibly morally justify doing now, especially not if you're like doing it specifically to cause that.
You know what I mean?
Like World War II wasn't the idea of like, oh, we got to crush Japan and Germany into the dirt so that then we can rebuild them as that wasn't a tactical thing.
The idea was like, we're fighting to the death and we're going to, you know, the person who destroys the other one first is the winner of this awful war.
In hindsight, we now see that that also kind of, you know, like the reform efforts after that kind of succeeded.
But that certainly doesn't mean that we should go about doing that now to achieve those results and be like, well, we're going to have to go kill tens of millions of people.
Well, and both those areas, Germany and Japan alike, had a couple of things that were different about them, I think, than the Middle East.
The first is before they were already sort of first world countries.
You know, they were successful economic powers.
And the second thing is they had a tremendous amount of internal cultural consensus.
Like there's still German values in Germany.
There's still Japanese traditions in Japan.
You know, not the anti-Semitism values of the Nazi Party, so to say, but things like the idea of, you know, like a married family and I don't know.
Well, no, no, no, you're right.
And like Germanic traditions and folklore and stuff goes.
Yeah, no, no, like pride.
Yeah, absolutely.
They do.
They still, a lot of things that like were prevalent in the Germany of 200 years ago still being members of social clubs.
That's a big German thing and having your pin, your social club pins and all kinds of stuff like that.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And again, also we should look at that as like, as being lucky, not as saying like, look, this was a good thing.
It's saying like, we lucked out that after all of that horrible stuff that happened, like something good was able to like be born of the ashes of that.
And not like, well, see, that's the way you take care of business.
It was like, no, no, no.
You can look at that as like the silver lining in that whole awful, awful situation.
Yeah.
Well, and what were we supposed to expect, though, like in Afghanistan or Iraq, if you level a place that already has a tremendous amount of internal strife and power struggle, that like, what do you think is going to happen if you just, after you level it?
Do you think this is going to go, you know, they're going to have some sort of agreement on what they want their new country to look like?
Right.
That's true.
Because German unification was in 1870, which is, you know, almost 100 years before, you know, like it's, you know, it's like 60 years before or 60 or 70 years before World War II starts.
And so you're right.
It is a nation.
Germany by that point is a nation that actually already fought a gigantic world war as a nation and came together because they were blamed for it.
You know, like they, that actually kind of caused them to kind of coalesce more.
I mean, there was a lot of internal political strife, but it was over, it was mostly over, you know, like how to deal with the fact that Germany got screwed over by the world.
It wasn't so much that people in there were, you know, in Germany were going around going like, yes, it is our fault that World War I happened.
Like nobody in Germany thought that.
Everyone thought like, this sucks.
We're being blamed for a thing that's not our fault.
It was just a question of like, what do we do about it?
And how do we get ourselves out of this mess?
But yeah, like the idea in like Afghanistan, like, you're right.
It isn't, it isn't a thing like that.
You know, all of those Afghanistan, also like the what they call the fata in sort of in the Pakistan area, like the federally administered tribal areas, Balochistan and all that area.
It's like there is no, there is no central authority.
There's like clans and local leaderships.
And if you watch, was it Restrepo?
Was that the movie where you watch them having to like negotiate with these clan leaders and like play nice with them?
And oh, this guy's cow got tangled in barbed wire.
So now we got to go buy him another cow or they're not going to let us patrol in their areas.
It's not like, oh, government, there's the government there.
We're going to go in and we're going to install a military governor and now we're in charge.
That's not, that's not nearly how that place works at all.
Yeah, I don't, and you know what?
I don't know.
Like I have, I have no good, I have no good like ideas on that.
It's just can I ask you about the big lie?
Like the election, you mean?
No, no, no, like the big lie, the original big lie from Mein Kampf.
Okay.
So do you think that the Nazi leaders actually believed that losing World War I was the Jews'fault?
Or do you think they just lied?
That's a very interesting – I think the voters believed it, right?
But voters believe whatever – anything, anywhere.
But the actual leaders – Sure.
I mean – And by the way, there were not – Like there were other parties aside from the Nazi Party that were in some ways like even worse, like even further to the right than the Nazi Party were a couple of – I don't remember now.
Like they all have acronyms.
Like the Nazi Party was like the NDSP and then there was the SPD and then there was the KPD, which was the German Communist Party, which much like the Nazi Party had like groups of street thugs and they would go beat each other with baseball bats in the street.
It was kind of crazy right before Hitler came to power.
But I mean again, you're talking about the eternal question, right, of like what motivated and whether or not it was true or not.
I would not doubt that Hitler believed that sort of that Judaism – I mean kind of like you can trace this racism down to everybody.
It's the idea of like it mutates into this idea that like the thing you hate has its tentacles in everything, right?
And it's not just anti-Semites, by the way, and it's not always – Well, right now, like everything is Marxism like from the right.
I mean, oh, yeah, I was just going to say it's not always like racial bigotry.
It's also – right.
And by the way, from the other end too, like where everything is white supremacy, right, where everything like – oh, the fact that attendance of national parks happens to skew white is a sign of latent white supremacy.
That's kind of the same – it's the idea that like everything that's broken in the world, like you find a thing.
You find this thing where you feel like if just – if I could just fix that one cog in the system, everything is going to flow right again.
And yeah, and it starts with something.
It starts with the idea that, oh, wow, you know, a lot of people who happen to be involved in this thing I hate happen to be Jewish.
You know, like, I'm sure that whatever Hitler's bigotries were developed over time.
It's not that he woke up one day and he was like, it's Jews, goddamn it, right?
There was this.
I think some of his patrons when he was an artist were Jews as well.
Some of his more regular patrons.
I mean, there isn't immediately anti-Semitic.
There's a lot of, and there's a lot of examples like that, by the way, of people where, you know, like, you know, like Bin Laden, who is willing to like kill thousands of Americans is, you know, like allied with Americans years earlier.
You see things like that.
And I, again, I don't know what it was that drove that in him.
And it might have been, by the way, it might have been, it might have been born from the loss in World War I. If you read in hardcore history, in the Hardcore History Podcasts World War I series, he reads, he quotes something that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about his experiences in World War I and just about how not even like not talking about race,
racism actually was just talking about like soldier level camaraderie and how you develop into this like group of brothers and how you go into the trench, a boy and you emerge a hardened man, you know, stuff like that.
And I do think that the sort of the trauma of Germany being blamed for World War I and being forced to pay for it and being humiliated probably drove so much anger in him and people like him that whatever sort of biases existed in them before just kind of got latched onto that and became yes and became super, super amplified.
Like the, I think it's hard to describe.
It's probably hard to explain like what like the mentality that that costs.
And then their economy crashed too.
And so everybody's out of a like the things are holy.
And if you think about it too, there was a tremendous amount of patriotism after that happened, right?
Because of the tremendous amount of sacrifices that the German soldiers made and German fans made.
And so when you think about the Jewish community, you don't necessarily think of them as patriots of any country that they're in, even if they are.
Well, that's exactly inherently Israeli, right?
Well, I mean, this was from the perspective.
But you're right.
The idea that they were still before then.
Well, the idea that, you know, the idea that Jews are sort of stateless, it makes them a convenient scapegoat for anything that's sort of treasonous, right?
And the idea that like, how could Germany capitulate under to these conditions?
Like, how could they ever agree to this?
Nobody who, you know, no true German would ever, ever agree to this.
It must be someone who either has an agenda or doesn't mind.
That's why this, that's what it's supposed to call, the stab in the back, right?
That was, that's what they called it.
And the idea was who, who, Germans?
No way.
There's no way that a, a Juncker, somebody who's Prussian would ever do that, right?
It's got to be the Jews.
And, you know, the communists as well, because the whole idea of communism was that it was a, you know, like a pan-state kind of movement.
It was an the internationale, like the idea that German communists were not loyal to Germany.
They were loyal to communism.
They were loyal to the global revolution of communism, which again was, by the way, a thing in World War I, where people who are like socialists in both trenches would like sing the internationale to each other across no man's land, you know, like workers of the world unite, the idea that like, yes, we're fighting for our imperialist masters, but we're actually brothers.
And that scared the fuck out of nationalists.
And so, yeah, communists and again, communists, a lot of them were Jews, prominent communists, the Soviet revolution.
A lot of them were Jews because as we said before, Jews, because of their son of status, happened to be on the front line of a lot of social justice movements, including the civil rights movement here, which had a lot of Jews sort of right in the front lines of it.
Well, it makes sense given what happened, you know, 20 years before.
Yeah, I mean, there were, there were, and, and there was, I mean, there's also a lot written about that, about the wedge that at some point got kind of driven between the black and Jewish communities, driven by people like Al Sharpton and stuff.
But yeah, like for before that, um, and I mean, things are a little different now, but like, but yeah, but yeah, before all of the Crown Heights riots and all that stuff, like back during the actual civil rights movement, there was this sort of bond of, yeah, of like this sort of the brotherhood of the oppressed or whatever,
where it was like, yeah, we know it was, there's a, the comedian rich, the comedian Rich Voss, who's a Jewish, he sort of famously played the Apollo once and said, I know, I know the struggle was his sort of joke.
Like, you know, like Jews, we know the struggle was the, was the, the, the sort of the slogan.
Um, and, and, and so, yeah, like they, and so, yeah, communists and Jews was sort of the big thing, which was ironic because, oh, yeah, go on.
Well, I, you know, earlier you just kind of in passing mentioned, uh, or associated the Nazi party with right wing, right?
And you said there were other parties that were further to the right.
Right.
Do you, why do you think, why does everyone think of the Nazi party as right wing?
Because when I think of right wing, I think of like individual liberty, low taxes, like in like an American sense, like what's so right wing about national socialism.
And so, so there were, I mean, God, this is such a, this is such a sort of a hot potato topic.
The things are like, I don't want to.
No, no, no, it's fine.
I'm just asking because I want to know what you think, man.
It's, it's perfectly fine.
Here's, here's, here's what I say.
Cause, you know, there's this whole debate of like, oh, were they, were they socialists or were they, were they right-wing or were they left-wing?
And actually, I think the best way to describe it, if you want to talk about nowisms, if you, because, because I think that calling them right, when I call them right-wing and I say there are parties that were further to the right, I'm actually talking about the spectrum of German politics at that time, because there was center, center, left, the center party.
There was a party called the center party.
And then, you know, the SPD, the social democrats, and then there was the KPD and there were socialist and communist parties.
And parties like the Nazi Party were like the diametric opposite to them.
And so because we consider communism to be far left, Nazism, which is like the antithesis to it, is sort of by default the right wing, right?
The thing about the Nazi Party, especially if you go back to their name, their idea was in there, the sort of the smart, the shrewd political thing about them, was that they were able to kind of play both sides and be both both talk about like, oh, we're the party of the German worker.
I mean, that's what they were called.
They were called German Workers' Party.
And so they were able to stoke both nationalism and kind of the socialism, not global social.
That the idea.
That's why they were called the National Socialist Party, because the socialist movement was international.
And they were like, no, no, no, we want to help German workers, right?
We want to help the downtrodden men.
We combat the forces of global capitalism, but we're not an international movement.
We're specifically a German movement for Germans.
I'll tell you what, though, they certainly played it very international when they started invading everybody.
I mean, they were all, again, they're all, you know, like in the movie American History X, where Edward Norton has his sort of, his sort of moment of realization that his worldview is wrong is to see the neo-Nazis in prison deal drugs to the Mexicans because it's like, because it makes sense.
And he goes to the Nazis and he goes like, what are you doing?
Oh, you're doing business with the Mexicans?
And they said, what are you crazy?
Of course we are.
This is not, what do you, some, and they kind of, they almost like laugh at his idealism.
Like, what are you nuts?
And so it's, and it is kind of like that.
It is that, you know, like the, you know, Molotov-Ribbentrum agreement where they were like, oh, we're not going to, you know, they're not going to attack.
And both of them knowing full well that they were going to at some point.
And so, and like I said, so in the debate of like whether, were the Nazis left or right wing, I think it's, I think that's a bad, it's, it's an agreement that's, it's an argument that's mostly in bad faith.
So that someone can say like about the other side, the Nazis were on your side.
Right.
You know, they're trying to like pass the Nazis off on the other part, where in truth, they kind of corrupted the ideas of both sides to become this sort of populist monster.
Like that was the idea.
The idea was like, let's get, let's kind of become popular by all measures because the second, the second Hitler was able to sort of grab power, it happened very quickly.
It's another thing, by the way, that people in Twitter discourse say about Nazi Germany, which is categorically false and everybody just repeats it, is the idea that like authoritarianism in Germany came slowly.
And that's totally false.
That is not true at all.
In fact, like the Nazis with not a majority in parliament at all, sort of kind of manipulated essentially Hitler into becoming appointed chancellor by Hindenburg and then very, very quickly like canceled the elections and did these like emergency laws that gave him absolute power like two months later.
It wasn't.
No, no, Germany, there were elections, like two months before Hitler were like appointed, like there were elections.
Germany didn't do suit.
I mean, they did fine.
I think they got like 30% of the vote or something like that.
There were no, by no means like a crazy majority, but what they would do is they would like deadlock.
They would essentially like deadlock votes.
They would not show up to anything kind of like what's happening.
You know, they were like sort of the equivalent of what they're doing now with like quorum busting, right?
Where they're like, oh, we're leaving the states that you can't do a vote.
That's one of the problems with a two-party system is that when you have a third-party system that comes in, that third party, even if it only has 10% of the vote, has a tremendous amount of leverage because nobody can get anything done without their endorsement.
And he did something that kind of happens a lot, but he manipulated it in a, you know, in like a severely authoritarian way.
But if you look at like what happened in Israel now, where this very, very rickety coalition got sort of formed in order to like depose Netanyahu.
And now the person who's prime minister, his party got almost no votes at all.
It's a tiny party, but he had this like he held everything on the balance.
And so he became prime minister.
I mean, there's going to be a rotation.
Lepid's going to be prime minister at some point.
They're going to like switch.
But the idea that somebody whose party gave, it's funny that you say that because at some point there was going to be a coalition agreement with Netanyahu that was going to be like that.
And they demanded his resignation letter be pre-written and like put in escrow so that he wouldn't be able to like back like back off.
Yeah.
Everybody took over in Egypt too.
And now they have like basically a military dictatorship.
And so yeah, but so like the, so the prime minister, the current prime minister of Israel has a party that got, I think, you know, five members out of 120, like a tiny, tiny party.
And so the same sort of a same similar situation happened where basically Hitler came to like the, you know, the president, I think it's the president.
Hindenburg was like the president, whoever opponents points chancellor.
Right.
Prime Minister.
And him and it was like Bethmann Holvig or some other German politician.
The idea was like, look, there's this political deadlock.
Here's a good compromise.
Appoint Hitler chancellor, right?
And we're going to, and then we'll be able to like go back to normal operation.
Then the Reichstag fire comes.
He signs a couple of laws that like cancel everybody's rights.
And that was it.
That, you know, it was like, it was all like almost overnight.
And so again, the idea that like creeping authoritarianism isn't, isn't really, doesn't really hold there.
Well, I think you're right, but I also think that when you're, when you have a political climate where 30% of your population is unemployed, that really paves the way for some interesting things to happen in terms of radicalism.
So I believe, I can't remember the, the exact, I can't believe, I can't remember the exact number, but in those elections, the 19, what was it, 33 elections, the early 1933 elections, way more than half of Germans voted for parties that were explicitly anti-democracy, more than just the Nazi party.
Like a lot of party, like democracy was not particularly popular in the Weimar Republic.
It was like a mess.
Things were a big mess in the interwar period in Germany.
And a lot of people just wanted a, you know, like a dictator, essentially.
Like they just wanted somebody powerful who would not be bogged down.
Because again, what happened was kind of like what happened in Israel over the last couple of years, there became this political stagnation.
And they had another election and another election because there were no clear majorities and there was all this mess and whatever.
And so it was this like, and some people were just like, we just want somebody strong who will just get us out of this and like do the right thing and not have anybody stand in their way.
And yeah, like there is a, so the, the, the bed was fertile, but I don't think anybody expected, or I mean, not nobody, but certainly I have a feeling that a lot of people who were sick of the idea of democracy were not happy with what they got in its place, you know, kind of like what happened in Iran, where, you know, it's not like things were peachy keen in pre-revolutionary Iran, right?
They, it was a, it was an authoritarian country with the secret police that, you know, tortured and killed regime opponents of stuff.
But I, I think a lot of Iranians would trade that in for what they got instead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, that's interesting.
So do you think that the United States is vulnerable to that sort of tyranny?
And I don't mean like Nazis specifically, because I think every country has its own unique form of the way that tyranny manifests and expressed.
But do you think that we're, we're, we are positioned for to see something like that happen in the next 50 years in the United States?
I don't think so.
I don't think that, so I, I, I do think that we, the way this country's, is built is uniquely sort of unsuited for certain things, but it also grants it sort of a unique defense that other countries don't have.
For example, I think we were, our country was structurally like because of the way it is built is inherently like less able to combat something like a pandemic, for example.
Like I do think that a lot of the problems that we had where now things are kind of regressing to mean, like if you look at us compared to like Europe or other places, it hit us really hard initially, but now other places are kind of catching up for lack of a better term.
But I think that the way that because we're a collection of states, we're a union of states, as opposed to a central, a big, one big central authority, some things like setting policy that is followed across the board consistently by everyone and stuff.
Yeah, it creates this problem with something like a pandemic where, you know, a country like Israel was like, okay, the health ministry says here is the quarantine rules and then the quarantine rules apply everywhere in the same way.
We're here, I remember early in the pandemic, there was a great picture of like a Florida beach that showed a county line and one county had closed the beaches and one county didn't close the beaches.
And it's an imaginary, you don't, there is no line like on the world.
It's literally, yes, there was literally like an imaginary line after which the beach was just empty and then the other side was just packed with people.
And it was like, and I remember looking at that and thinking like, yeah, the United States has a sort of a systemic issue with something like a pandemic that's not really its fault.
But like I said, the flip side of that is you're not going to have like an overnight coup where all of a sudden we're an authoritarian nation.
You know, like there was an argument about this on Twitter today about, I think Ben Shapiro got flack for saying something like that, our democracy was not in danger on January 6th.
And I happen to think that he's entirely correct.
And that's to the credit of this nation that a mob can't come along and just like do a thing.
And then after that, it's just no, there's no takes these back Z's, as they say.
Like it's the idea that like a mob can force Congress to like not certify the election.
And there's nothing to be done about it.
They voted and we can't rescind the vote as though we can't say no, a vote that was taken under duress doesn't count, you idiots.
Right, right.
Right.
And so, and, and so they got carried away, in my opinion.
Way too carried away.
I, I, I, like, I think, I think I would, I would speak about it in more severe terms.
I think, again, I think the, I, the, the, the idea that someone is it.
No, I'm saying I think, I think the fact that a thing like that happened is like, is deeply shameful and yeah, deeply, it was dangerous in a, in a, the safety of lawmakers way.
There was, you know what I mean?
Like there was danger of physical harm to lawmakers, which is like a, to me, like a shameful stain.
But to act like it endangered our institutions is giving it way more credit than it deserves, right?
Our institutions are very strong.
It's by the way, I used to say this like when Obama was president, people said, oh, no, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is ruined.
And I said, I think the U.S. is to say that is to discount that relationship.
I think it's robust enough so it'll survive any one president who isn't particularly pro-Israel, or maybe an Israeli prime minister will come along who will say like, no, fuck what the United States says.
We're Israel and we're going to do whatever they want.
We can survive.
I think we have more in common and we have sort of more of a sort of more shared interests and sort of commonalities in certain worldviews, not in others, but in some that, you know, any kind of several year period of chilly relations is not going to ruin that ever.
And in that same, in that same way, I think our country has a lot of safety measures in place that, like you said, can create this idea like in Egypt where, oops, the military is now in charge.
They came and they arrested the prime minister.
There's nothing to do about it.
Or like what almost happened in Turkey, where the military tried to do a coup where they were going to shoot down the president's plane and that was it.
And then the military is going to be in charge.
That doesn't happen here.
That won't, that can't really happen here.
Even if, you know, for example, like even if like the one branch of the military decides to do it, you got like national guards, which are under the purview of governors, not the centralized military authority.
There is, there's like so many ways that we can, that we can resist an attempt like that.
And that's, that's great.
And like I said, that to me, that's, that's to the credit of our country and to the discredit of any kind of sort of pathetic attempt to to undermine it.
Right.
But, you know, that kind of comes with its own disadvantages too, because to the same extent that, you know, one sort of authoritarian can't just sort of take the reins in this country.
We also have a situation where it's very hard to do any long-term planning nationally, like in terms of things like climate change, for example.
Like if the solution takes 100 years of consistent behavior, it's very difficult to make that happen in the United States when we have 10 or 15 different presidents over the course of that time.
You're absolutely right.
There was an article in the Washington Post many years ago that I still recommend to people.
I think it's called something like how the U at the U.S. bet on Maliki and lost Iraq.
Now, regardless of what you think of the arguments in there, the central sort of point that you will glean from it is exactly that.
It's the idea that like an administration changed while we were in the middle of executing a long-term plan.
And the new administration that came in, we're like, no, we're doing something different.
Yeah, the United States.
I'm not involved in any wars that take more than four years.
It's as simple as that.
Like four, man.
If you can't win it four, don't do it.
And again, and that's, and you're right.
It is a, it's, it's a, it's, that's, that's why it's hard to talk about these things in like good and bad.
It's just, it's a complicated situation in which we have a country, like you said, that has transitions of power.
And meanwhile, China can do, can set out, you know, like a 25-year plan or Saudi Arabia can say like, you know, here's our, because, you know, they have a plan, like it's like 20, Saudi Arabia 2030, Saudi Arabia 2050.
You know, they can have like these set of five-year plans, kind of like the Soviets did, because they don't plan on having somebody different there.
It's just going to be, there's going to be this sort of continuity of rule and priority.
One of the challenges there, too, is that none of the leaders in the CCP will sleep with any of our spies, like no matter how hard we try.
I know it's terrible.
They're uncorruptible.
You send Stormy Daniels over there and they like, they're way too intimidated.
I don't know.
I don't know what the deal is.
Exactly.
But yeah, that is the thing.
We are we sacrifice certain things, you know, because we're a free country or an aspiring, aspiringly free country.
You know, like, it's like, it's like Penn Jillette, who's a sort of a big libertarian once said, you know, he said something like, you know, he said, I, if I argue that, you know, I, I, I don't think that you should get checked by the TSA before you board a plane, you know, he says like that, if I support that, I support that with the full knowledge that it puts me in more risk because, you know, freedoms, something about how like freedoms, risk scales with freedoms.
Sure.
Like the more you're free from like people looking in, checking in on what you're doing or what you're doing, that opens more abilities for abuse.
And so the idea is you got to weigh with yourself.
Like where, where does one stop and the other begin?
Should everybody, should there be a big basket of guns that you give everybody a gun when they go on the plane because then everybody's going to be too scared to use their gun because everybody else has a gun?
You know, like that's ridiculous, obviously.
But you got to, you know, or the idea that like, well, we shouldn't have any traffic lights because it's not libertarian to tell me when to stop or go.
I don't know, whatever.
Yeah.
That's something that would certainly be a radical libertarian perspective.
Yeah, it's more like an anarchy.
It's more like an weird anarchist opinion.
But yeah, like the idea is there's always some kind of math that you do.
Right.
So two plus two equals five.
Yeah.
No, but there are four lies.
It's by the way, that argument is funny because it actually a good argument that is corrupted because it was turned into like a cultural argument.
The math because the whole system argument's a good argument.
No, no, no.
So the thing that became the two plus two equals five argument comes from an old like visual gag puzzle that has a square.
It's like a pre-Orwell's 84.
It's this.
Hold on.
We're going to do a thing.
It's this, right?
Right.
They ask you how many squares you see here.
And the answer is five because it's, there's four and then the outer one is a square two, right?
And so the idea of saying, oh, two plus two, because you put, and so the thing is like, oh, you take these two squares and you put them together with these two squares.
And the answer is that you get five squares from that.
And so the idea of this is to teach you to think in abstract, to like think outside the box.
Well, that's exactly it.
what you're doing but you can't the the if you look at the formula two plus two equals five because what is squares two plus two squares like one of these squares is you know you know like four times the size of the other squares that make it an equal square to the other squares like you don't have enough information and so something that actually became like an effective argument about try to look at things a different way think about things sideways just turned into this annoying thing of white people are very rigid
and because they think that two plus two can only equal four you might be racist if you're punctual it's just yeah well i that's a whole other that's a whole other thing where yeah for some reason there's a there's a tendency to associate a lot of things with whiteness that that it's it's sort of harmful that you want to avoid those things under the guise of whiteness right like you said like a lot of these weird brochures that say like being punctual and being polite is or you know because
it's the idea that like it's demanded of you right where people will frown if you're not polite and that means that it's somehow paternalistic or condescending or something like that and again it's a shame uh because you're you know you're ultimately like hurting anyway you're hurting yourself i think by by doing that yeah or hurting the people who would listen to you it's one of those things that everybody kind of understands that even if even if not consciously everybody understands that the arguments went too far i think the whole critical theory
stuff and you know there's there's i think there are a lot of people who believe that systemic racism exists that don't believe half the you know 90 of the things that sort of come out of the crt circles that's i you know we because we we subsist online where and you're you're absolutely right where we're sort of out in a real world i just i meet people whose opinions are so much more nuanced about this stuff and so and and because again people hear people on twitter specifically express their opinions in
extremely reductive snappy ways that are also sort of deliberately attention getty and um uh can be antagonistic or meant to get a laugh by being exaggerated but then are kind of morphed into real points it's like claptor it's like if you watch one of chris rock's more recent specials where he'll say something and he'll get a round of applause instead of a laugh you know you know he'll be like on the drug companies they're the real drug dealers and people will like applaud and then
it's like wait is this a political rally or is this a stand-up show right and it's sort of it's that's kind of what it's like so where can people follow you find you okay so i'm on twitter twitter.com slash neon taster i'm kind of neon taster almost everywhere you can i've been streaming on twitch which again which again I stream video games, but I kind of talk about stuff.
I've also been known to stream major things like award shows or stream during like debates and stuff.
That's twitch.tv slash neon taster.
And just go to my YouTube, youtube.com slash C slash Neontaster as well, which has like, again, highlights from my Twitch old podcast and whatever more I do goes up on there.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really have appreciated having you here and you taking the time to do this.
And I get your perspective on some of the stuff.
It was great chat, man.
Yeah, cool, man.
Thanks a lot.
Absolutely.
Take care.
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