Yes the economy is fucked, and yes the world is dangerous. That doesn't mean that just because a guy isn't in the same party as the current President he is better...Hanging out with guys like Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright doesn't make him a racist and terrorist, but you have to question why were these guys okay to hang with before he was running for President. It seems maybe he is okay with their way of thinking. ...
Originally Posted By: the G-man
Yeah, not to seriously compare Obama to Hitler or Mussolini, but the defense for both those guys at the time was that they were good for their respective nations' economies.
You can't blindly ignore serious questions about a candidate's positions, judgement or beliefs and focus only on the economy, or any other single issue. That's exactly how countries end up with crooks, liars or worse.
If you compare responses to the Depression in the 1930s, you can see how a rather frightening rhetoric took hold. In his inauguration address in 1933, Roosevelt declared that "the moneychangers have fled from the high seats in the temples of our civilisation". This was not so different in tone from Nazi talk about Jewish bankers.
Hitler and FDR came to power in the same year, and not with very different economic policies. They talked about youth and the harnessing of the will. They used government programmes of public works to restore employment.
The difference lay not only in the characters of Hitler and FDR, but in the systems in which they operated. In a proper democracy, strong leadership can coexist with constraints. By the end of the 1930s, there were no important robust democracies in the Western world, except for Britain and America. Reaction to the slump had favoured dictators. What the Nazis had called their "war for work" had turned out, because it included rearmament, to be work for war.
We cannot yet see the future dictators, but we can certainly see the weakness that gives them their chance.
