Amerika

One thing to know about humans: they act for short-term benefits, and then blame someone else when things go wrong as a result, rather than looking into what will work eternally, with a few exceptions (we call those aristocrats and tend to execute them because we are a monkey species).

Almost no one wants to face the reality that whatever the voters think will solve a problem will in fact perpetuate that problem. This occurs because the voters do not think in cause-effect relationships, but in terms of effects alone and how a human can make the bad feelings stop, usually by writing a check and worrying about finding more money …tomorrow.

Human history shows us many examples of the worst kind of traps, namely those where everything seems to be going well until catastrophic collisions with reality occur. The Donner Party misreads a map and takes too long of a route, the Hindenburg encounters a spark, or the Titanic lacks the ability to seal off portions of the ship damaged by icebergs.

Democracy seemed to be going well. The herd wanted the aristocrats gone, and figured it could rule itself. Wiser minds warned that it would soon spend itself into poverty because people pay off problems and perpetuate them rather than oppose them. It took a couple centuries for this to reach crisis status.

American democracy hit its peak during the Clinton years. It had enough money to buy off all the aggrieved foreigners and other special interests, it outsourced manufacturing to China to get past its esurient unions, it had enough military power to assert its currency across most of the world, and its diversity advocacy made it feel good about itself.

But then all those little problems that the voters bought off came back in force. The diversity realized they were still not living the good life like Western Europeans; the foreigners agitated for taking over the world; the Chinese got their own unions or the equivalent thereof, and it was revealed that democracy had self-destructed (again).

Now people are turning on the idea of democracy. Instead of a riot of tolerated differences, they want something closer to uniformity because that creates less confusion. Instead of weak leaders, they want strong ones who will fix problems even if that requires doing unpopular stuff (which it always does). Democracy failed, and people want to move on.

Not surprisingly, that has resulted in a rejection of historical guilt, mostly for WW2 and the Civil War. If you wonder why Democrats want to start CW2 and WW3 at the same time, it is to re-assert their narrative of Hitler bad, Confederacy bad, and only Keynesian liberal democracy good. But Hitler is being rehabilitated:

Nearly a quarter (23%) of Americans think Adolf Hitler was a good person, with Democrats at 18%, Independents at 20%, and Republicans at 33%, according to a recent poll published by YouGov on November 4.

As a side note, moralization in the Abrahamic sense has nothing to do with reality, therefore produces bad results in collision with reality, therefore is immoral. Distinctions like “good” and “evil” are symbolic and unrealistic. There is no point sitting in moral judgment over Hitler, but we have to instead look at results in reality.

While the National Socialists did some inspiring things — crushing unions, supply-side economy, nature preserves, ethno-nationalism, active eugenics — their system was never going to work for the same reason that Communism fails: the heavy burden of the bureaucracy plus the ease in which people can find do-nothing jobs through ideology.

Most of what has been said about Hitler are lies, but this is common after a war against an enemy that almost won. The Holocaust was work camp deaths and partisan executions; the Soviets were in fact planning to invade and destroy Europe. History will remember Hitler for holding off the worst excesses of liberalism while falling prey to its basic failures.

People are becoming more open-minded because the side that won the war, that of “liberal democracy,” has now failed and people are seeking alternatives. This includes ole Adolf who is seeing a surge in popularity:

In the poll, conducted on November 1 among 1,077 U.S. adults, 23 percent of respondents said Hitler was a “good person or an equally good and bad person” or “a bad person who did some good things,” data from YouGov showed.

A majority of respondents described Hitler as a “completely bad person,” though the answers were split slightly along party lines. Of the Democrats surveyed, 75 percent said Hitler was completely bad, while 60 percent of Republicans said the same.

Voters only start noticing failure as a group when the situation becomes so untenable that it is near falling apart. Then they review the other options they passed by, like people leafing through yearbooks after too many mimosas one night after work.

A sizable portion of the electorate now thinks that Hitler did “some good things” and that he did not intend Abrahamic evil. He wanted to do what was right for his people. Things turned out badly because his system, which was really a more aggressive extension of the Bismarck system, was unstable. Well, so are our current governments!

Most interestingly, younger voters have escaped the WW2 aura that the Greatest Generation foisted on us which held that we saved the world by defeating fascism and national socialism. Almost no one believes that anymore because of the obvious fact that the world needs saving again… and the people Hitler opposed are back with Communism, again.

How else do we explain the Sino-Russian alliance, the third world that wants to use guilt for colonialism to both extract payments and invade us with refugees, or the continued failure of diversity simultaneously in Europe, the UK, and the USA? Hitler was right about diversity, even if he got other things wrong, and Gen Z recognizes this:

A DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners poll found that more than one in five (21 percent) of both Gen Z and black voters and 19 percent of Hispanic voters agreed with the statement.

When broken down by age group, 21 percent of those under the age of 29 said Hitler had good ideas, compared with 16 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49, seven percent for voters between 50 and 64 and just five percent for those over 65.

This approval comes in parallel with the recognition that the world wars for democracy were probably not the moral actions that we thought but self-serving acts by our political class. The Greatest Generation saw themselves as Jesus Christ, Superman, and Gandhi all at once, and Boomers rebelled against them but agreed, but newer humans disagree.

That may cause problems for our political class because the WW2 mythos — stunning and brave tolerant inclusive liberal democracy against evil oppressors — has gone out the window since the problems we fought to reduce have grown in size because our solutions create the same problems. Diversity is the cause of racism, not the other way around.

Consequently many question the WW2 mythos and are seeing it like any other actions by democratic states, as self-serving politics disguised behind the camouflage aegis of moral good:

The poll found that a whopping 18% of participants were unsure if Uncle Sam should’ve participated in WWII, in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deployed troops to fight the Nazis and the Japanese Empire in 1941.

Meanwhile, 14% thought fighting in the “War Against Hitler” was a mistake while 62% believed that contributing soldiers was the right decision.

Republicans were the bigger proponents of US involvement in WWII with 77% backing our decision compared to just 63% of Democrats.

Note that Republicans, still in many ways the party of the 1860s, are more supportive of the big proud Great Patriotic War. The Left tends to oppose war — one of their few sane ideas, although applied in a blanket sense that is insane — but the Right likes wars that make America look strong.

Paired with the rejection of the WW2 narrative, the Holocaust story has become less important, mainly because Jews were the diversity victims of the 1940s, but we now have Africans and Asians who are higher on the pity scale:

A new poll commissioned by a Jewish organization reveals big gaps in Americans’ historical knowledge. According to that survey, two-thirds of millennials and 4 out of 10 Americans overall don’t know what Auschwitz was. And while 6 million has long been accepted by historians as the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, nearly a third of Americans think it was far fewer. And just over half of Americans think Hitler came to power by force. In fact, he was democratically elected.

The problem with lies is that people will use them as long as they have utility, but once they become a burden, the critical thinking emerges. History is going to go with the 300k dead Jews in concentration camps version of the Holocaust, not the six million gassed in showers and burned story the Soviets cooked up.

All of this adds up to an electorate that finds itself to be no longer willing to be manipulated like a light switch with “good” and “evil,” where anything that is tolerant liberal diversity democracy is good and any time someone mentions Hitler, we shun whoever they were talking about.

People are okay with the idea of Hitler as a mixed bag who did some good things and some bad things, sort of like any other leader, and they want some of his good things in our leaders:

Only 12% of Democrats, 20% of Independents, and 41% of Republicans say they would be willing to vote for a candidate who said Hitler did some good things.

It took time, but the WW2 mythos has finally strangled itself because democracy has revealed that it is not “good,” causing us to doubt the good/evil binary itself. History is more nuanced than moral categories and symbols, and we are realizing that we have been in a cult called democracy and it is time to deprogram ourselves.

Tags: adolf hitler, national socialism, WW2 mythos