Did any other US Americans hear this shit growing up from pretty much every teacher or authority figure? Maybe I did just because I grew up in a conservative area. Like, you can talk about how overwhelming majorities of Americans support increasing the minimum wage or universal healthcare. But the response is always something along the lines of “well sure but people aren’t smart and you can’t just going along with giving people what they want. That’s how you get another Hitler!” I’m sure there’s a lib version of this argument but growing up I heard this particular variant from conservatives around me.
And yet these same people tout how wonderful our “democracy” is and how anything other than liberal bourgeois democracy is “authoritarianism”.
FWIW I also sort of grew up among people who while not rich, were usually upper middle class and fairly comfortable. There was always a decent amount of classism / hatred of the poor in what they said. As if they are the wise parents telling children they can’t have any candy or something. Hatred of the poor is such a huge driver of political opinions in the US, but that’s a topic for another thread.
As a kid I always remember my dad talking about “Tyranny by majority” and how it’d be like “4 wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner”. For people who value “democracy” so much they really, really don’t seem to like it when it comes to the conclusions that they don’t like
that’s no difference between universal healthcare and the genocide of jews actually
We can’t just give people a home, food, and healthcare, sweaty; that’s akin to eating ice cream for every meal.
Grew up in a very lib region, the attitude is pretty much the same but just a gentler framing: “sure it would be nice if we could help people, but this is the real world and we need to make tough decisions so my taxes don’t go up.” My libdad once told me: sure communism looks great on paper, but in reality it just doesn’t work.
Every dad says communism looks good on paper but doesn’t work in reality. They have never looked at what communism is on paper or in practice.
My theory (since my dad is a boomer) is: communism on paper = I dropped a bunch of acid in college and realized we’re all one with the universe. Communism in practice = scary USSR wants to blow us up and take our toothbrushes.
My dad would be like…late boomer born in 61 and never went to college or did drugs (I suspect he maybe did some blow in the 80s). He just went to school during the cold war and never made an independent effort to learn anything further. He’s all over the place but gradually coming around by which I mean conceding to every point I make while not changing his views at all which is basically very liberal socdem. He’s grilling, it’s fine. Dude can retire next year and just give.
I always got told about the dangers of mob rule, except they never even tried to give me an example of what that would look like
In my experience the rise of the Nazis in Germany is the only example they have and they fall back on it 100% of the time. Of course they ignore all the other context of how the Nazis came to power, as if one example somehow proves the rule anyway.
Also Nazi’s weren’t the majority when Hitler took power. He took power through undemocratic, parliamentarian compromise.
