Ferguson’s argument rests on several distinctions: 1. Weimar constitution was wildly different 2. Weimar elites supported Hitler, unlike Trump 3. Most German adults were WW1 vets, most US ones are not 4. The economy was way worse 5. Hitler had global military ambitions
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I think most people don’t make the analogy in such precise structural terms but a broader mood. Both countries, for different reasons, and via different paths, were vulnerable to far-right populism. The effect is also different because tech to achieve goals is better.
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You don’t need hundreds of deaths in the streets when social death/reputational assassinations have similar results. You don’t need to launch an industrial world war against the world if you can fight an institutional war against global institutions that matter way more.
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I’ve been wondering lately if people overindex on the death count as the kpi of political conflict severity. From a humanitarian perspective 10x more deaths may be 10x more tragic, but from a political effectiveness perspective, one viral death on social media = 100 1930s deaths
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In a way “human life” is like the gold standard of moral currency. We’re no longer on it. We’re in sort of Breton Woods weird hybrid stage of gold+dollar. Gold = human life, dollar = fiat institutional capital base of global orgs. And we may get off gold standard entirely.
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By which I don’t mean human life will become worthless. It will just become a precious hedge commodity like gold today, but with no special status. It will allow us to gauge seriousness of low-fatality crises properly. It will make humane euthanasia laws politically viable.
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Sounds ugly but “way fewer people are dying” should NOT be a reason to take a political crisis less seriously. People dying is not only not the only way people can suffer, it is not the worst way. The worst way is people being forced to *live* in intolerable conditions.
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I should work out this analogy in detail (gold standard = human death standard).
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