American Progressivism - Kristallnacht, The Gestapo, Torchlight Parades, And Hatred

There was jubilation at the Tenley Spa and Health Club after the recent American mid-term elections. Democrats had won handily, and the solidly progressive club membership was absolutely delighted.  They, to a man, were Trump haters and resolute liberals. Conservative corruption, greed, racism, misogyny, and hate was everywhere, they said, in every Republican alley, infectious, hateful, and vile.

Under Donald Trump the black man had been oppressed worse than under Jim Crow, George Wallace, or the grandees of the antebellum South.  Gay and lesbian Americans, finally out of the closet and breathing a sigh of relief that the days of homophobia were ending and an optimistic age of gender fluidity was finally at hand, found themselves rounded up and sent off to northern gulags. 

Needy, hopeful immigrants were penned and deported in cattle cars.  Trump's ICE gestapo troops were more vicious, brutal, and murderous than Genghis Khan's legions.  The environment was raped, pillaged, and left to burn by capitalist energy-mongers. 

Trump was evil, a Satanic visitation, a demon who must be eliminated.  This midterm electoral victory was just the first step. 

The insensate hatred that had built up during the short Republican reign since Trump's election in 2024, now poured forth. Any collegiality, community, or locker room neighborliness disappeared.  Allegations, conspiracy theories, vicious ad hominem attacks, and universal derision were loud, insistent, and angry. 

It was surprising, however, that club membership, drawn from Washington's elite cadre of lawyers, judges, retired senior government officials, chairmen of influential lobby groups and non-profit organizations could have elected such an intellectually vaporous Congress - candidates that ran only and uniquely on Trump hatred. 

Listening to progressive poster boys Talarico of Texas and El-Sayed of Michigan was like attending a Nazi torchlight parade. Both men charged Donald Trump with imperialism, militarism, brutality, thievery, anti-democratic autocracy, prurient gender deviance and much more.  The litany was long, the allegations were limitless, the fury unabated, the crowd delirious. 

It takes two to tango - or, complicity in politics is the rule.  Daniel Goldhagen wrote Hitler's Willing Executioners, a history of the Nazi complicity of 'ordinary' Germans who had to know about the deportations, the camps, the gas chambers, and the ovens.  

These 'ordinary' Germans were at first taken with Hitler's nationalism and National Socialism - he was the man to restore German sovereignty after the punitive post-war period.  He was the leader who would restore Germany to its rightful status as a world-dominant power. 

This interest turned to allegiance which turned to blind faith.  Whatever the Fuhrer was doing had to be in the nation's interest. If the Jews were suddenly absent from Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk, the Fuhrer must have had a good reason - perhaps putting them to work in arms factories to support the war effort. If Hitler's cries became more fevered, hateful, and frightening, so much the better as Germany's enemies retreated. 

The situation in America now is no different.  Conservatives, an insidious, traitorous, anti-nationalist group bent on destroying the Republic, say progressives, must be defeated, stripped of their clothes, belongings, and gold teeth and sent to the ovens. 

These are not just the sentiments of politicians who are simply spokesmen for Trump hate.  It is the millions of Americans who have bought the progressive canon and its seditious, burying, hateful invective who are responsible for the political downfall to come. 

Ordinary Americans - and especially the Tenley Spa and Sport Club's well-educated, professional members - have been duped by the same rhetorical, unfounded hatred spewed by their Nazi forbears. 

It is particularly ironic that those who branded Trump a Hitler are in fact the National Socialists of the 21st century.  The similarities are unmistakable - branding a social group as vile, treacherous traitors who must be destroyed; the public invective, the torchlight rallies, the gestapo-like j'accuse calling out conservatives, shaming them, dismissing them, bullying them; and then touting their empty platform devoid of anything but hatred. 

The American Left must be given its due - its marketing and promotional campaigns have been brilliant. Progressive planners understand the credulous gullibility of the masses, and know how easily they can be swayed by lies, distortion, innuendo, and presumption.  They are the descendants of Alexander Hamilton who argued with Thomas Jefferson about the will of the majority.  

The people at large cannot be trusted, said Hamilton. They are too simple, too uneducated, too limited by parochial interests, and far too gullible to be given unlimited electoral power.  They will always be an easily manipulated, collectively weak, craven lot. 

Jefferson was willing to compromise and the Senate was created; but Hamilton must be turning over in his grave to see how this upper body has become as venal, self-interested, and intellectually crippled as those whom they represent. 

Be that as it may, today's progressives have mobilized exactly those whom Hamilton feared and turned them into 'ordinary Germans', howling and shouting and raising their fists at political rallies.  All the unwashed need is hate, Hitler knew, and so it is with the American Left. 

American progressives started off right a century ago, fighting for the working man, improved working conditions, increased pay and benefits.  The working man was the heart and soul of America, said Brandeis, Gompers, and Lafollette and without him capitalism would collapse.  Give him his due! they insisted and thanks to their advocacy and insistence factory conditions improved. Helped by Henry Ford who saw improved working conditions as the key to increased productivity and profit, the early progressives achieved their ends. 

There was a moral imperative as well as a solid intellectual and philosophical foundation to the movement.  Although the labor movement became corrupted and antiquated, moved aside by right-to-work conservatism and capitalist entrepreneurial policies, early progressives were serious men. 

The modern progressive has nothing in common with Brandeis.  He has no ethical, moral anchor.  No foundational ethos, no program or initiatives for social reform.  The Democrat party has run on slogans, airy propositions and political fantasy.  There is no such thing as a gender spectrum, the black man does not belong atop the human pyramid, socialism is a discredited, failed system, Diversity Equity Inclusion is no more than social myopia. 

And the Democratic calling card? Trump hatred. 

The health club members have quieted down, and chitchat has returned to football, construction tie-ups on Wisconsin Avenue, and upcoming trips to Greece; but the vileness is still there.  This National Socialist complicity, once ingrained, does not simply disappear.