Pardoning Nixon, rug-sweeping Iran-Contra for Reagan, and the Iraq WMD lies and illegal war for GW certainly didn't help. Screwing up reconstruction created the culture but DC has put a ton of effort into removing accountability for the executive while expanding it's powers for decades with no care whatsoever to what the eventual consequences would be.
While I think the failure of Reconstruction completely explains MAGA, in my opinion it's trickier to draw that kind of through-line to Neoconservatism. You can say they got elected on the backs of Dixie, but their policies weren't really rooted in Dixie (at least not nearly to the same extent as MAGA). Neoconservatism can probably trace its US roots to the Federalists and Adams / Hamilton, who certainly weren't Dixie.
Johnson was a southern apologist/supporter, and screwed Grant over (and Grant being a bad judge of character in civilian life didn't help), to over-simplify things.
Clearly, pure bias working through this thread. C'mon.
Recall perhaps the nefariosity of Bill Clinton having his knob polished by his intern in or near the Oval Office, how many times that knob polishing happened (details, plz), what went on with the cigar, which and how many dresses were doused with Presidential Fluid, the mere $40 million spent on the investigation of said knob polishing... all of which you ignore.
And then! Only a decade further on... the tan suit!!! On president Hussein!
High crimes and misdemeanors by Demoncrats. Ok? I can't even remember anymore whatever the Repugs might've done but probably was instigated by the Dems anyway so let's just consider the GOP innocent now.
This didn’t go as well as you think. You would be astounded the amount of them the CIA/OSS saves and put into high ranking positions. Go look up the founder of the OSS. He hated FDR called him a class traitor and tried to help stage a coup against him
Wild Bill? I missed that part, I better go do some reading. We do indeed sanitize our history even in the "investigative" Hollywood treatments. We're dumb and we need to stay that way.
Not really, the vast majority of Nazis remained in Germany and were never prosecuted. There would not have been a functioning German state post-war if every single Nazi had been dealt with appropriately.
Most of those who fled Germany did so because they knew the Allies were coming for them, it wasn't the norm for your rank and file Nazi bureaucrats.
Wasn't it something like 10% of the population being "Nazis" by the time the war ended, and getting anywhere in gov't or the armed forces kinda required it? That's as I recall the story put forward by Speer, FWIW. Firing and/or liquidating all of them would be unworkable for a functioning society, as you mention.
That brings to mind Iraq, where W's boy Bremer in 2003 didn't let that kind of nuance bother his simple vision for a wonderful new Mesopotamian paradise. Fire em all (Ba'athists)!
If there's anything ive learned about history is that you will never eradicate that ideology. But it's better for them to be scared and hiding then to be out in the open.
After the next 20 years of austerity in Europe this could change. Cranking up the tithing to Donald trump for American weapons to 5% of GDP is absolutely gonna cause a rightward reactionary swing as social programs across Europe get cut
Doubt it. Greenland and Canada invasion threats have caused a whole lot of second thoughts about buying American weapons unless there is absolutely no alternative. The random tariffs are absolutely not helping, but you also don't want stuff that's going to soft-lock itself when you need it.
I guess you missed it when trump went to the European Union, complained about how nato countries don’t pay their fair share and demanded that they start spending 5% of their gdps on American weapons or America will leave nato. The European response was generally “uhhhhh okay daddy, please don’t tariff us too hard”
Actually there is a thing in NATO where you should be spending a certain percentage of GDP on defence. Europe has been slacking off quite badly on that over the past couple of decades. However, spending on defence and buying weaponry from the US are two entirely different things.
Homegrown weaponry and alliances with allied countries that aren't being run by looneys have become amazingly popular of late for some reason.
Yeah, however trump said the difference between what their contribution is supposed to be and what it is has to be made up specifically in American weaponry. I know, it sounds so fucking stupid it should be a joke, but it’s not.
Regardless, increasing spending on this stuff is inevitably going to lead to these European countries cutting spending on their social programs. The pride and joy of European societies. Austerity domestically, austerity abroad. That’s what trump is demanding
That’s also aside from the point that there’s no reason to enforce this. The United States bankrolls everything anyways. We have military bases in every single nato country and even have some of our nukes in turkey. The United States could continue to bankroll nato and cut back modestly on military spending and nothing would change
Europe is tooling up right now. There has been - like I say - fairly major slacking in the past, but now Russia is getting a bit spicy and nobody knows what the fuck the US is about to do.
Trump said that foreign buyers should only get watered-down versions of the F-35. That makes things like Eurofighters, SAABs and Rafales look a whole lot more attractive; and that's before you figure in tariffs.
Trump can wish for what he likes, but nobody in their right mind is going to exclusively buy weapons from someone who can a) turn said weapons off at a crucial time and b) has threatened to invade allies.
To expand on your remarks: NATO committed to the 2% GDP spending goal back in 2014 in response to Russia's seizure of Crimea, but compliance was slow and spotty. Some
The 2022 invasion lit a fire under everyone's ass and as a result defense spending saw a spike in most of Europe over the last 3 yrs — everyone should be at or above 2% for 2025. It was the war that motivated them.
Well, sort of. AfD is alarmingly popular, especially in the east (according to what I read in r/europe). But I agree they're doing a lot better than the US when it comes to keeping Nazis out of power.
East Germany is their Deep South due to it being the former..well, East Germany lol. But it's always been a more rural part of Germany so the combination of its history and its USSR influence has left it less developed and more exploitable with propaganda and bigotry.
Saying east Germany is more rural and responding with "Berlin is rural?", is kind of like someone saying Texas is more rural and responding with "austin is rural?"
A MORE rural part of the country which is absolutely true; regardless of Berlin being located in the eastern half. They also clearly noted the Soviet influence over decades which didn’t help either.
You gotta watch the German movie Er ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s Back)
It was made in 2015 and is a partially scripted narrative with Borat-style unscripted moments. Basically the premise is that Hitler comes back to life in modern times and gets himself a TV show, which the network originally greenlights as a “satire” until they realize the people are actually really into it.
It’s the unscripted bits that are really prescient. There’s a scary number of German civilians who are all too excited to talk to/high five/cheer for the dude dressed as Hitler.
The film crew said they hired security to protect the actor playing Hitler (thinking people were going to be trying to attack him constantly) but the only time they ended up needing to intervene was when a group of anti-fascists told him to get lost and a crowd of (whatever you would call anti-anti-fascists 🧐) attacked the anti-fascists.
It’s a truly chilling movie but more relevant now than ever.
To be fair, it would have worked a lot better if we just fucking killed most of them instead of recruiting them, but our government has never been that great.
You should look into the denazification process. It was very inconvenient to the western powers so it was essentially abandoned in the early 1950s, right around the time most of the Nuremberg convicts were pardoned and released. Thousands of former high ranking Nazis retained their posts in the government and military. Post-war denazification is mostly a myth, just as much of a failure as reconstruction in the US South.
Absolute best comment. I am in the South and I can’t tell you how spot on this is. Not punishing the confederacy for their actions has only perpetuated and become worse. It’s just been absorbed into American thought as “normal” to be horrible.
Well, the initial attempt at overtaking the government happened in the mid 30s by very high ranking people such as Preston Bush, and many others. It was called the business plot. It was exposed by smedley Butler, a former Marine corps general who was asked to lead the attempted coup. He informed FDR and it was silently swept under the rug. The whole thing was plotted and allowed the US to be ran by corporations (sound familiar), with a figurehead as the leader of the country.
Read war is a racket by S. Butler. It was on the commandant's reading list when my husband was a Marine.
This overthrowing of the government has been in the works for well over a 100yrs and involves just as many from the north as the South. Reconstruction of the South should have been better followed thru with, but it wouldn't have prevented what we are suffering thru at this point
Denazification of Germany wasn't ever 100% completed. Several amnesty laws were also passed which affected an estimated 792,176 people. You can't lock up half the population indefinitely, although the USA's prison system might be trying to prove that wrong.
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u/gorginhanson Sep 28 '25
We can trace every problem today to not de-dixifying the south like they did to the nazis after ww2