I don't think anybody thought that it would, but here we are. It is quite amazing how time and again we seem to enable little narcissistic men to gain hold of positions of power. And I can't even really complain because NL has Geert Wilders to deal with right now and his foaming-at-the-mouth band of supporters who believe that everything that is wrong with this country can be traced back to immigration. On top of that they believe that this is the fault of 'the left', when in fact we haven't had a left wing government since I was riding a 16" wheeled bicycle.
Except perhaps for the Dalai Lama who enjoys adoration out of religious reasons, I know of no other state (and definitely no other big economy) other then Germany where public infantilization reached such advanced states.
But Germany has a left-wing government. And it is pushing this week to enact a law to prohibit speech that is not extreme enough to be against the constitution or otherwise criminal.
I get it may feel so for an American, since America is the strongest exporter if culture in the world - the whole world for example consumes American movie and songs, with the consequence that most people have some kind of approximate idea how it is to live in the US, what moves Americans etc .
On the other hand, by this same fact, that Germany isn't such a strong cultural exporter, few Americans really know what moves Germans, since these topics are rarely talked about in movies, songs, radio that Americans consume.
From this vantage point, I think it's hard for Americans to imagine just how left-wing Germany became compared to the US.
For example, the US doesn't have a system for wide social security benefits, relaxed border controls (I never understand what the US is fretting about in terms if immigration, you can basically just walk in over the to Germany and register as a refugee - as millions have since 2015), and
all other amenities that are typically "left" causes.
Furthermore, while Germany may not have a legal framework regulating what you can say, it has a lot of implicit rules, how to talk about foreigner, an implicit "speech police" so to say.
(The issue is actually not having all of thr above -because, after all, they are very nice things to have- but it's that they were allowed to be abused and overused at the expense of the general population, who keep paying more and get less if these services, and these initially nice ideas end up hurting now many more people. )
Yeah, Trump wont drop out unless he dies. He desperately wants to stay out of prison. And people behind him want to stay in power. Fingers crossed we all dodge a bullet this year.
Because if we end up with Presidente Marine Le-Pen, President Trump and an AfD-let German government, well, things look grim. Poland gave me some hope so.
If you really drill down the numbers, there are the cibstant 25% or so actively supporting it, regardless of country, with enough others tagging along passively to get the 25% dangerously close to actual power.
> I said it before, if Trump gets a second term, he will have a third. And then democracy as we know it in the Western world will be dead.
It’s not so simple. The Democratic party strategy has been to use hypothetical situations like this to justify (to the public) the arrests, ballot disqualification, deplatforming, and any other unprecedented means to hinder the chances of Trump winning in a fair election.
They already spied on his campaign in 2016 without repercussions (you probably don’t understand how serious that is), and lied about the Russia hoax, and countless other examples. I don’t know if a third term will happen, but a large portion of the public is mad about this.
So I can’t take this argument seriously, but a significant portion of the public apparently does. That’s an actual, not hypothetical failure of democracy. Rules for thee, not for me.
