Last night I found myself thinking a great deal about this, and how the other-directed harm visited upon minorities and out-groups in Trump’s America is the mirror image of the self-harm visited upon rural Texans.
As a free market capitalist in both idea and instinct I don’t often find occasion to quote Trotsky, a brilliant thinker whose very forgivable primary intellectual sin was to be wrong about whether We The People were capable of utopia. Nevertheless, his unflinching criticism of both fascism and Stalinism were penetrating and prescient, and they are worth reconsidering at this moment.
Last night I watched the county court meeting where citizens of Kerr County demanded that FEMA money not go to flood preparations. It reminded me of polemic, “What is National Socialism?,” written while in exile from Stalin’s Russia in 1933, a few months after Hitler became Chancellor while many in the United States, France and England (including Churchill, to his eternal shame) were still ignoring the truth before their eyes.
The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ve been thinking about these three passages: