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Comment by Terr_

4 hours ago

> What is scary about it is the same thing that's scary about the AfD in Germany...

Without downplaying or excusing the US' problems, I hope everyone in other countries thinking "that can't happen here" realize that's what most Americans thought just a decade ago too.

Turn that disgust with the disease into preventative treatment.

Frankly, the government that America has right now is nowhere near as extreme as AfD. I wouldn't be surprised or sorry if the next President of the US sanctioned goods out of Saxony. But we have both types of populism here. Both of them incredibly stupid. Our true war is against the foreign social/mainstream media saturation which is pushing our population away from reading and away from analytical thought, manipulating them into the arms of either type of extremism, for the benefit of the autocracies who want to cause us to fight amongst ourselves. Trump is just one manifestation of that. "It can't happen here" relates to a particular sort of fascist or authoritarian takeover of society, and I still think it can't in America. Trump's approval rating is under 35%. I live in Oregon, the most progressive state in the country, and spent 2 hours on the phone today buying insurance from a guy in Georgia who got excited talking about what guns I owned (and what he owned). I think the idea of a hard takeover in America by the far right is ...bullshit. And I even wrote a novel about it happening 20 years ago. But the rest of the world can't keep going through the vicissitudes of America's increasing whiplash at being manipulated and dumbed down this way. What has to change is something in the American mind before it allows its empire to collapse.