I would like to be able to agree, but I’ve met my own parents, and I really don’t think it describes them. Their views are moderately conservative in the classical liberal/small government sense, and they disliked Trump, but voted Republican out of…habit? susceptibility to decades of Fox News and talk radio Clinton hating? I’m honestly not quite sure, but I think it’s more “refusal to see obvious implications” than “fascist.”
Frankly I think a lot of people fall into the “your stated views are mutually incoherent, and also don’t align with your voting behavior” category, and they don’t see it as a problem. More than a little scary from my perspective, but very different from “fascist” or any other “-ist.”
The Head of State is the top level of the State apparatus, i.e. the government by the ruling party or coalition. I happen to live in a country where there is a concept of “loyal opposition” and where we had a revolution in 1688 and a Reform in 1832 which defined the political role of the HoS to being subservient to Parliament. It is a fudge - and it is about to be tested again.
Since the US Secretary of State no less has just announced that in his view on some issues Trump speaks only for himself, I have support for my view from that direction too.
Why? Perhaps because of being British, I don’t subscribe to isms or notions of how government “should” be. The government of the UK is a permanent argument.
You seem to take an idealistic view of how governments should function. I don’t. No snark is involved.
I wouldn’t call it idealistic as such, but I think in terms of evolution and development towards ideals - so you hit a nerve there. I think modern representative democracies often evolved towards that the sovereign is the people, and only represented by elected politicians. The HoS, in this kind of understanding, is also elected - but elected to serve all people of the country, by definition of the written constitution.
That said, monarchies are different. And we still got a lot of those in Europe. I don’t want to insult any monarchist, but its really not a modern concept - even with constitutional monarchies and all the frills and lace, it goes back to the chieftains and clansmenship days, and religious roots.
I once performed in a Slam Poetry championship, using a poem I’d written about Tom Midgley.
I don’t remember the words, but the general theme was “think of all the great authors who never learnt to read, the great musicians who never learnt an instrument, the great lovers who died alone…and now look at this fucker. There ain’t no justice”.
I don’t believe that the people living close to the death camps didn’t know what was going on, from personal experience of another horrible situation.
I was in the middle of the 2001 British foot and mouth epidemic, I was living in the closest city to the farmers auction where the disease spread, and my grandma was dying of cancer in the same town as the auction. The smell of cremated cow and sheep was everywhere (it does not smell like beef or lamb, it was more like burning hair), it got into your hair and clothes. Washing only seemed to work for a few hours.
Maybe they lied to themselves and started believing their lies, but at some point they must have known .
