"... historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell."

[CousinIT]

A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany
“If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

Usually, comparisons between Donald Trump’s America and Nazi Germany come from cranks and internet trolls. But a new essay in the New York Review of Books pointing out “troubling similarities” between the 1930s and today is different: It’s written by Christopher Browning, one of America’s most eminent and well-respected historians of the Holocaust. In it, he warns that democracy here is under serious threat, in the way that German democracy was prior to Hitler’s rise — and really could topple altogether.

Browning, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, specializes in the origins and operation of Nazi genocide. His 1992 book Ordinary Men, a close examination of how an otherwise unremarkable German police battalion evolved into an instrument of mass slaughter, is widely seen as one of the defining works on how typical Germans became complicit in Nazi atrocities.

So when Browning makes comparisons between the rise of Hitler and our current historical period, this isn’t some keyboard warrior spouting off. It is one of the most knowledgeable people on Nazism alive using his expertise to sound the alarm as to what he sees as an existential threat to American democracy.

Browning’s essay covers many topics, ranging from Trump’s “America First” foreign policy — a phrase most closely associated with a group of prewar American Nazi sympathizers — to the role of Fox News as a kind of privatized state propaganda office. But the most interesting part of his argument is the comparison between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg, the German leader who ultimately handed power over to Hitler. Here’s how Browning summarizes the history:

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

McConnell, in Browning’s eyes, is doing something similar — taking whatever actions he can to attain power, including breaking the system for judicial nominations (cough cough, Merrick Garland) and empowering a dangerous demagogue under the delusion that he can be fully controlled:

[Iliyah]

1. Yep.

[dem4decades]

2. Where is the next "Greatest Generation" to defeat this assault on our democracy?

I mean really, young people are going to have to live with bullshit long after I'm gone. Where are they?

Are they voting?

[Funtatlaguy]

3. And the fact that he's married to a minority somehow makes it worse for me.

[dalton99a]

5. He's using her

http://fortune.com/2014/03/20/the-secret-to-mitch-mcconnells-millions/
The secret to Mitch McConnell's millions
By Tory Newmyer
March 20, 2014

The challenges Mitch McConnell is facing from the left and right in his reelection campaign have at least one thing in common: Each opponent is making an issue of the wealth the five-term incumbent has accumulated in office. McConnell over the summer reported a net worth somewhere between $9 million and $36 million (lawmakers are required only to list their holdings in ranges) — a substantial leap over the six-figure sums he reported in his early Senate years and enough to make him the 11th-richest member of the chamber.

Campaign innuendo aside, there’s a simple explanation for how a fellow in public service gets rich: He marries into it. In 1993, McConnell, whose first marriage ended in divorce, wed Elaine Chao, an up-and-coming Republican operative then serving as the president of United Way of America. She’s also the eldest of Chinese-born shipping magnate James Chao’s six daughters. Her father built a fortune as founder and chairman of the Foremost Group, a privately held outfit based in New York City that moves iron ore, coal, scrap metal, and wheat around the world. And Chao père delivered the bulk of the couple’s wealth in a 2008 gift valued between $5 million and $25 million. The Chao family has also been a reliable supporter of McConnell’s campaigns and the Kentucky state party, contributing $391,000 over the course of his career.

...

[volstork]

6. She's also his beard.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rogers/what-is-mitch-mcconnell-h_b_137083.html

[dalton99a]

7. Yep.

[smirkymonkey]

4. It's not enough the McConnell goes down in history as a villain.

I want to see him suffer now for the pain and disaster he has caused. I want him to experience karma in this lifetime. He is pure evil.

[dalton99a]

8. I wish him every suffering he has inflicted on poor and sick Americans

throughout his government career