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July 21, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser
51:20
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. Gorbach tear down this wall.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night and good luck.
Good night and good luck.
Welcome to One American Podcast.
Who are you?
and what are you doing here?
Are you asking me or then you're asking me?
Yeah.
I'm uh I'm Noam Bloom, uh CETO of Tablet Magazine and uh, 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 I don't think it could be changed post facto.
Oh no, not but I'll definitely make sure that it's in the uh oh, you know, I can do it.
It's gonna be so neon taster, right?
Yeah, it is the ranking.
Is that right?
Yeah, correct.
Boom.
There you go.
Solving problems for you, right and left.
Yeah.
In real time.
So you're the CTO of tablet, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So what is what is your role entail then as the CTO?
Well, I mean, I'm I'm just in charge of all of their different various technical aspects, website management and uh uh some other things that go on their sort of behind the scenes.
Um that's sort of you know, like the mainstay of my job.
I'm also kind of uh a little bit of um uh what do you call it, utility player?
Yeah, because I've been I've I've done a couple other roles there, and so I'm always uh kind of helping out with other tasks tasks and things like that.
Um and it's great.
And I like I've done some writing for them in the past and hopefully in the future as well.
Um so I don't know much about tablet.
I kind of came across it just through you, uh, especially when um uh Israel, you know, Israel was getting bombed.
So what's the scoop?
What's the scoop over there?
I mean it's uh it's just a really great place.
It's uh it it's a you know, like it's a it's a to the of a sort of Jewish and Jewish-centered publication, but actually specifically aims at a broader audience, uh, and has kind of uh 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 like the the new digital reality of of things that are happening and and uh you know cultural events of the day because it all of it does impact um the Jewish community and Jews in general, you know,
like talking about stuff like you know, cancel culture and things like that, and where uh where uh Judaism fits in this whole system of uh progressivism and uh and the culture wars, because uh you know, as you know, and as you've seen probably,
um 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 uh uh involves like Jews and their experience in the United States.
For example, you know, the fact that Jews year after year are the uh you know lead by a lot the chart of like victims of uh 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.
Um, and um, but it that that isn't really uh a largely discussed topic, for example.
Yeah, it's because uh you guys are all white passing.
I that I mean that's sort of it it's that discourse, especially recently.
I don't remember it ever being as present as this 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 wanna 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 our and other Arab nations?
And how, yeah, they were like the when when uh Jews of lower socioeconomic uh 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 it's a different country, you know, halfway across the world with a an entirely different set of circumstances.
There is also the whole idea of Jewish sects and um how you know, like varying levels of religion create these conflicts and stuff.
There is a lot, it's just a lot way more complicated than just trying to superimpose your kind of traditional American culture war narratives on it.
Uh, there's a lot more going on there.
Yeah, I wonder um I wonder why that is though that uh why do you think it is other than do you think the white passing thing is is enough to explain not justify nothing can justify, but explain the um discrepancy and 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 gonna vote for?
And so they just nobody taught nobody you know uh campaigns on it.
Well, I think that uh sort of ironically, it's actually it helps prove something that that's here by the way, I just froze.
Oh, right.
That that that same crowd will say isn't true, which is that uh many uh different uh sort of uh conflicts that are blamed on stuff like race are actually economic.
Um and so I do think that the fact that Jews are uh you know 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 not exactly a sexy story to sell.
Um and yeah, and yes, there are see.
I'm I 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 whatever.
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.
For like, you know, like I don't think that being a progressive is 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 Ilhan 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, she it's excused it with but 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 you being oblivious.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
That's why do you why do you think it is though?
Because like it if if the data is actually showing that there's more explicit racism toward Jews than any other race, especially particularly hate crimes, probably when I say explicit racism.
Why do you think it is that the Jewish community um doesn't see the same sort of uh standard of living as other communities?
Well, I mean, there's there's been you know entire books written about you know, like why Jews are you know, like so liberal, especially in the United States and stuff.
And and you know, like because Jews are historically uh you know, like uh uh an 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 that uh 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, the pie in the 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 uh classic graphic images,
there is the image of the Sabra, which is the nickname for like the 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 a 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 of this sort of classic weak versus drunk at 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, uh, 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 lo, these people have like a blind spot in their world view.
Um, and 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 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 uh that's a that's a uh 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.
But I've I haven't read them.
Yeah, well, there are like so oh no, sure.
Well, so I'll I mean I'll give you like I'll give you an example.
There's uh unfortunately there are it's it's kind of funny, but um 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, what uh 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 gonna 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 clocks 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 and and I mean, you can you can there's also I mean, there's a lot of talk about you know, like how a sort of Jewish culture sort of preaches for sort of seeking the of the intellectual and the and so did they're good at math.
I 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 the stereotype of Asians being good at math.
And I mean, where does that come from?
You know, like where why does is there a stereotype?
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, and I know in East Asia, there is like a like the sort of the schooling system is very intense, and there isn't an 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 and um and uh to a certain extent, like change shifting and changing as time goes by, you know, like Japan, there's a lot of uh 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 uh a uh 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.
Um 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 gonna 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, involved 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 gotta 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 gonna just 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 that certainly doesn't mean that we should go about doing that now to to achieve those results and be like, well, we're gonna have to go kill tens of millions of people.
Well, and and both those 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.
Um you know, not 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, and you're right, and like Germ Germanic traditions and folklore and stuff goes here.
No, no, and like pride, yeah, absolutely.
Like they do, they still a lot of things that like were prevalent in the Germany of 200 years ago, so are 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 and again also we we should look at that as like as as being lucky not as a 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 right 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, what do you think is going to happen after you level it?
Do you think 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 almost 100 years before.
It's like 60 years before, or 60 or 70 years before World War II started.
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, you know, 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 one 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 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 fat what they call the fada in in sort of in the Pakistan area like the federally administered tribal areas Baluchistan 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 want, 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...
not nearly how that place works at all um yeah I don't and 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 the yeah 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 question.
I think the voters believed it, right?
But voters believe whatever, you know, anything, anywhere.
But the actual leaders.
Sure.
I mean, and there were, 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,
like even further to the right than the Nazi Party were a couple others I don't remember now like I've that the they all have acronyms like it just like the Nazi party was like the N Dsp and then there was the SPD and then there was the KPD which was the German communist party which right much like the Nazi Party had like groups of street thugs and they would go 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 I mean again you're the you're talking about the eternal question right of like what what motivated and whether or not it was true or not I you know I would not I would not doubt that Hitler that Hitler believed that um that that sort of that Judaism, I mean, kind of like I, you know, you can trace this racism down to everybody.
It's the idea of like it it mutates into this idea that like the thing you hate is has its tentacles in everything, right?
And it's not just it's not just anti-Semites, by the way.
And it's not it's not always right now, like everything is Marxism, like from the right.
I mean, oh yeah, it's I that's I was just gonna say it's not always like racial bigotry.
It's also right.
And all and by the way, and from the other from the other end too, like where everything is white supremacy, right?
Where everything like uh, oh, the fact that uh 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's gonna flow right again.
And yeah, and it starts with something.
It starts for with it starts with the idea that uh, 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, god damn it, right?
There was this I think some of his patrons when he was an artist were were Jews as well.
Some of his um more regular patrons is and they're not 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 One.
If you read I in uh in Hardcore History and the Hardcore History Podcasts World War One series, uh he reads, he quotes something that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about his experiences in World War One.
Uh and just about how not even like not talking about race racism, actually, it was just talking about of like uh like um uh like soldier level camaraderie and how you develop into this like group of brothers and how you you know you go into the trench a boy and you emerge a hardened man, you know, stuff like that.
And and I do think that the the sort of the trauma of Germany being blamed for World War One 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 it got latched onto that and became yes, and became super super amplified.
Like the I I think it's hard to describe, it's it's probably hard to explain like what like the mentality that that cost, and then their economy crashed too.
And so everybody's out of a job, like the things are horrible.
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 fancy space.
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, just because it's inherently Israeli, right?
Right.
Well, I mean, this was like perspective.
But you're right.
The the idea that's before then the idea that you, 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 called, 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 Junker, somebody who's Prussian would ever do that, right?
It's gotta be the Jews.
And you know, the communists as well, because the whole idea of communism was that it was a uh, you know, like a pan state kind of movement.
It was an uh the international, like the idea that German communists were not Uh 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 One, where people who are like socialists in both trenches would like sing the international 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 uh, 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 sort 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 a sent that at some point got kind of driven between the black and Jewish communities, uh driven by people like Al Sharpton and stuff.
But yeah, like for but 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 the actual civil rights movement, there was this sort of bond of yeah, of like this sort of the brotherhood of the oppressed or or whatever,
where it was like, yeah, we know it was there's uh 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 well, I uh 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, uh right.
Do you why do you think why does everyone think of the Nazi Party as right wing?
Because why think of right wing?
I 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 I mean so there were it.
I mean, God, this is such a this is such a sort of a hot potato topic.
The thing I like just asking because I want to know who you think, man.
It's it's perfectly fine.
Here's here's here's what I say, because 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 now is if you 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 so 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 the red German workers' party.
And so they were able to stoke both nationalism and kind of the uh 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 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.
They 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 uh 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, And 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 right?
Nuts.
And so it's and it it is kind of like that.
It is that, you know, like the demo, you know, Molotov Ribbentrop agreement where they were like, Oh, we're not gonna uh, you know, we're not gonna attack, and they're but both of them knowing full well that they were gonna at some point.
Um, 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 a it's an agreement that's it's an argument that's mostly in bad faith, so that you someone can say like the uh 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 uh authoritarianism in Germany came slowly, and that's totally false.
That is not true at all.
In fact, uh uh like the Nazis with not a majority in in parliament at all, sort of uh kind of manipulated essentially Hitler into becoming chan into being 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.
Can't do it.
It wasn't the taxes too by the way.
No, no, Germany, Germany, there were elections the you know, like before like two months before Hitler were like appointed, like there were elections.
Germany didn't do so, 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 a crazy majority, but what they would do is they would they would like deadlock, they would essentially like deadlock votes, they would not show up to anything, kind of like what's you know, they were like uh sort of the equivalent of what we're they're doing now with like quorum busting, right?
Where they're like, Oh, we're leaving the state so 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 he did something that kind of happens a lot, but he manipulated it in a you know, in a like a severely authoritarian way.
But if you look at like what happened in Israel now, where this very, very rickety coalition got be 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 a gonna be a rotation.
La Pete's gonna be prime minister at some point, they're gonna like switch.
But the idea that somebody who whose party gave got I it's funny that you say that because at some point there was gonna be a a coalition agreement with Netanyahu that was gonna be like that, and they demanded uh his resignation letter be pre-written and like put in escrow so that he wouldn't be able to like back back off.
Yeah, yeah, everybody.
That was I remember reading about that.
And now they have like basically a military dictatorship right now.
And so yeah, but and but so like the so the prime minute the current prime minister of Israel has a party that got I think five, you know, five members out of a hundred and twenty, 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 the pres I think it's the president Hindenburg was like the president, whoever points points chancellor, right?
Right now, and him and uh it was like Bethman 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 gonna, 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 I think you're right, but I also think that when you're when you have a 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 I can't believe the I can't remember the exact number, but in the in those in those elections, the 19 uh 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.
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 and because there were no clear majorities and there was all this mess and and 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.
Um 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 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 um you know it's not like things were peach keen in pre-revolutionary Iran right they it was a it was a 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 positioned 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 do think that we – the way this country 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 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 I'm in the sand.
Right, but it's just packed on the one side.
But it's literally – yes, there was literally like an imaginary line after which the beach was just empty and empty.
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 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 you're not gonna 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 there's no takesies backses, 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 it was just a protest that got carried away, in my opinion.
Way too carried away.
I think I would speak about it in more severe terms.
I think, again, I think the idea that something like that happened is – I'm not trying to minimize it.
No, I'm saying I think the fact that I think that that happened is like is deeply shameful and yet deeply – it was dangerous 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 will survive any one president who isn't particularly pro-Israel.
Or maybe an Israeli prime minister will come along and will say like, no, fuck what the United States says.
We're Israel.
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 interest 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 way, I think our country has a lot of safety measures in place that, like you said, can't create this idea like in Egypt where, whoops, 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.
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 uh that we can resist an attempt like that uh 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 attempts to to uh to undermine it right that you but you know that kind of comes with its own disadvantages too because to the 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 chains 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 you know 10 different 10 or 15 different presidents over the course of that time.
You're absolutely right there was a uh uh an article in the Washington Post many years ago that I still recommend to people I think it's called something like uh how the U at the US 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.
Right.
And the new administration that came in, we're like, no, we're doing something different.
Yeah.
The United States shouldn't be involved in any wars that take more than four years.
It's as simple as that.
Four to eight years.
If you can't win in four, don't do it.
Yeah.
And again, and you're right.
That's why it's hard to talk about these things in like good and bad.
It's a complicated situation in which we have a country, like you said, that has transitions of power.
And meanwhile, China can set out like a 25-year plan or Saudi Arabia can say like, here's our – because they have a plan.
Like it's like Saudi Arabia 2030, Saudi Arabia 2050.
You know, they can have like these set of five-year plans, kind of like the Soviet state did because they don't plan on having somebody different there.
It's just gonna be there's going to be this sort of continuity of of rule and priority 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 it's terrible.
It's that they're just they're un they're uncorruptible.
You send Stormy Daniels over there and they're they they like they're way too intimidated.
I don't know.
I don't know what the deal is.
Exactly.
Um but yeah, that's that that that that is the thing.
We are um um uh we we sacrifice certain things, sure, you know, because we're a free country or an aspiring aspiringly free country.
Um, you know, like it's like um it's like Penn Gillette, who's uh a sort of a big libertarian once said, um, you know, he said something like, I, you know, he said, I if I argue that, you know, 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 gotta weigh with yourself, like 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 gonna be too scared to use their gun because everybody else has a gun.
You know, like that's ridiculous, obviously.
Um but you gotta, 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 that would certainly be a radical libertarian perspective.
Yeah, it's more like a it's more like an anarchy, it's more like an like sort of like an a 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 um there are four lights.
It's by the way, that that are that argument is is is funny because uh it actually a good argument that is corrupted because it was turned into like a cultural argument.
The math is the whole argument's a good argument.
No, no, no.
The the the the so the the thing that be 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 gonna 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 too, right?
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 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 be 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 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 uh 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 and being polite is are you know uh 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 it's uh 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 with 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, you know, because we subsist online where, and you're absolutely right, where we're sort of out in the 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 can be antagonistic or meant to get a laugh by being exaggerated, but then are kind of morphed into real points.
It's like clapped or it's like, if you watch one of Chris rocks, 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, oh, and 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 standup 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?
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 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 taste and just go to my youtube youtube.com slash c slash neon taster as well which has like again highlights from my twitch pot old podcast and
whatever more I do goes up on there.
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