121–130 of 134 posts
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Dictators, in general, don't come to power unless some fairly large fraction of people actually want them to.
I've always seen that they come into power with a surprisingly small amount of support.
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I've always seen that they come into power with a surprisingly small amount of support.
I think there’s a lot of ret-reconning real history: after a fascististic government loses power (as they invariably do, due to their eventual inability to secure cooperation from the intelligentsia; their own in-fighting, and general incompetence) the people who did vote for them are likely to deny it - who would admit to voting for something universally reviled after-the-fact? That then leads to an impression among…
"I don't want the nazis to come into power, but I also don't want brownshirts to assault me and my family, and I'm pretty sure I'll be OK if I keep my head down" is an understandable sentiment, if a bit cowardly.
The law is not a formal system, it's a tool for humans to decide how to act. If those humans decide they want a tyranny, no amount of words on paper could ever stop them.
I am reminded of Matt Levine's column from the day after the 2016 election, concerning legal realism: > But in the back of my mind I thought about Llewellyn. I thought about the fact that those principles can't automatically enact themselves, that they only work if the human actors in the system choose to follow them and to demand that others follow them. They persist because the people constrained by them believe th…
Incorporate core rights of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the body of the Constitution ensuring, as Article 30, that any attempt to weaken or remove any of these rights automatically invalidates the entire Constitution. This makes it too legislatively burdensome to weaken and would unequivocally signal a coup is taking place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there’s a lot of ret-reconning real history: after a fascististic government loses power (as they invariably do, due to their eventual inability to secure cooperation from the intelligentsia; their own in-fighting, and general incompetence) the people who did vote for them are likely to deny it - who would admit to voting for something universally reviled after-the-fact? That then leads to an impression among…
You can also look at the actual vote counts. The Nazis won about 30% of their last election before taking power. They were a minority part against the liberals. "I don't want the nazis to come into power, but I also don't want brownshirts to assault me and my family, and I'm pretty sure I'll be OK if I keep my head down" is an understandable sentiment, if a bit cowardly.
Hitler gained power because non-Nazi conservatives such as Hindenburg and Papen[0] installed him in power, because they thought they could control him, and because they viewed him as a lesser evil than the socialists and communists who were also jockeying for Chancellorship, and because they saw appointing Hitler as Chancellor as an end to the gridlock in the Reichstag – the result of the election was that Nazis were the largest party but did not hold a majority, but the next two biggest parties, the socialist SPD and the communist KPD, could not unite against them because the KPD was under instruction from Moscow not to cooperate with the SPD. Leading representatives of industry and finance also pressured Hindenburg to install Hitler, because they saw it as an end to the political chaos and also as a defence against the threat of the socialists and communists, who might harm those economic interests if they gained the Chancellorship.
Although Hitler only had 37% of the popular vote, he also had substantial support from Germany's elites. He gained power because he convinced the people with the power to give it to him. Of course, after the war, many of those same elites tried to pretend that their decision to give Hitler power never happened, or that Hitler had somehow forced them into it.
[0] Papen was not a Nazi at the time Hitler came to power. He naïvely thought he could control Hitler and the Nazis; after a while he learned that not only could he not control them, they could control him, but by then it was too late. And then he became a Nazi himself.
This is the prototypical "wow the nerd tried to solve law and lawyering". Yes, the constitution can be ammended to be less democratic. It can also be entirely ignored by everyone, and things can also happen in ways that go against its text, with judges looking the other way! People are not magically bound by words on a piece of paper, so if you end up being able to go through the (extremely arduous! Moreso than many…
Wow, that's overly agressive. If you read the article, the story goes that upon asking him what government his native Austria had, Gödel commented "It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship." The judge commented that this could not happen in the U.S., and Gödel responded "Oh, yes, I can prove it". I don't see how you jump from this, to saying that Gödel, who was…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also look at the actual vote counts. The Nazis won about 30% of their last election before taking power. They were a minority part against the liberals. "I don't want the nazis to come into power, but I also don't want brownshirts to assault me and my family, and I'm pretty sure I'll be OK if I keep my head down" is an understandable sentiment, if a bit cowardly.
That 30% of vote – actually in the July 1932 election it was just over 37% – was not enough by itself for the Nazis to gain power. Hitler gained power because non-Nazi conservatives such as Hindenburg and Papen[0] installed him in power, because they thought they could control him, and because they viewed him as a lesser evil than the socialists and communists who were also jockeying for Chancellorship, and because t…
Also agree with the point about elite support. Not every supporter counts equally in terms of political support. Even in democracies this is the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That 30% of vote – actually in the July 1932 election it was just over 37% – was not enough by itself for the Nazis to gain power. Hitler gained power because non-Nazi conservatives such as Hindenburg and Papen[0] installed him in power, because they thought they could control him, and because they viewed him as a lesser evil than the socialists and communists who were also jockeying for Chancellorship, and because t…
Ah, the joys of first past the post. The largest minority takes all. Also agree with the point about elite support. Not every supporter counts equally in terms of political support. Even in democracies this is the case.
Not in this case, Weimar Germany used proportional representation.
I personally think that proportional representation is superior to first-past-the-post, but actually you could argue that PR played a role in Hitler coming to power. PR systems encourage multiparty systems as opposed to two-party systems. Multiparty systems can sometimes produce great political instability when nobody has enough seats in the legislature to form the government, and then there can be weeks or months of backroom dealing to try to form a coalition government. It is a scenario which commonly occurs in a number of countries with proportional representation (such as Belgium, Italy, Israel), and it was in that same scenario in which Hitler convinced the President to appoint him to power.
(Germany now and then is a parliamentary republic, the President is a non-political figurehead, the Chancellor is formally chosen by the President but the President is supposed to choose the leader of the largest party or coalition in parliament.)