M.S. Bellows, Jr.

2024-09-27 21:59:13

Hey, you know those folks who periodically pop up claiming both parties are equally bad and even if voting third party helps Trump win it would just hasten the necessary collapse of neoliberalism?

I have a new answer for them. It's a quote from William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," which I'm currently reading:

"The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubious theory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be only temporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which the Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dying capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge!”

That didn't work then, and it won't work now. Politics in a democracy IS compromise, and the lesser of two evils is less evil.