> Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).
Well, no. "History" is both an academic discipline (humans narrating what happens), and the process of events itself. That process involves a lot of non-human factors, which are deterministic. And human action itself is arguably also deterministic, especially in democracy, because the masses can most certainly be manipulated, and respond quasi-mechanically to mass stimuli.
> Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.
But they know people won't take action against them. Why? Because their attention-span, taken as a crowd, is too short. They respond to immediate stimuli, not longer-term phenomena, and to emotion, not reflection. Democracy takes place on Twitter, not in the reading room of the British Museum.
> Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.
Sorry, not buying it. All the classical political theorists agree on this one point, that once you establish democracy, you're catering to the lowest common denominator, and that mass of people is very easy to direct with the right tools (mass education, mass media, mass incarceration,...).
> Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting.
Wrong. Historians agree that Germany got a very raw deal at the Treaty of Versailles, which led inexorably to the Weimar Republic, and therefore a European war of some kind was on the cards from day one. If it hadn't been, France would not have spent two decades building up the Maginot Line. It's Hitler's very mediocrity that best illustrates the strength of the historical forces pushing him along.