WHAT ARE THEY SMOKING IN THE SALON?

I'm referring to that online forum of leftist fantasies.  Mike Lofgren was a Republican once, but now he's reduced to drawing erudite analogies to peddle the notion that Donald Trump is the next coming of Adolf Hitler.  No, seriously.  "The GOP made the same bargain the Prussian generals made in 1933 — and the consequence is their total destruction."

Herewith the erudite analogy.

When World War I went bad — a war the German army had largely provoked through its hair-trigger invasion plans — the Prussian officer corps called for an armistice, forced the abdication of the Kaiser (to whom they had sworn obedience) and blamed civilian politicians for the defeat. They intrigued throughout the Weimar Republic period, unseating governments, conspiring with enemies of the republic and, in 1933, helping to give the final shove that toppled democracy.

The army tacitly understood Adolf Hitler, the new chancellor, as a pliable figurehead whom they and the monied classes could control. Yet within a year, they were lined up and forced to swear an oath of “unconditional loyalty,” not to Germany, but to Hitler personally. The rest, as they say, is history: The fabled general staff were reduced to the level of office boys as Hitler unleashed a war that destroyed them as a warrior caste and destroyed Germany as a state. Most of the generals knew he was leading them to destruction, but they could not break the habit of obedience — in the aftermath, some of them pathetically claimed that they could not betray their oath to Hitler.

Relax, he's not going to assert that Donald Trump is a pliable figurehead ... all you have to do is look at Dementia Joe to see who the pliable figurehead for Valerie Jarrett is.  No, he has an exaggerated sense of the power of Republicans, or is it of the vast right wing conspiracy?

The fate of the German army is a serviceable analogy for the Republican Party. Since the 1980s, the GOP has been able to “wire” the Boston-Washington axis and other American power centers like the Texas oil patch, while taming the media and creating an immersive right-wing counterculture of think tanks, alternative media, educational institutions (such as Hillsdale College and Liberty University) and “experts” for hire. The massive financialization and deindustrialization of the economy that has transformed the country followed the Republican blueprint to the letter. They control much of the national agenda, whether they are formally in power or not.

That "right-wing counterculture" hardly packs the cultural punch of the Ford Foundation, the palace guard media, or the Ivy League, let alone the political clout of the Professional Managerial Class, no matter how frequently the Wise Experts get it wrong.  As far as "financialization and deindustrialization," do we lay that off on union excess, the cult of the M.B.A., or the striped-pants types with their international institutions?  Goodness, that sounds like the coherent bits of a Trump rally, doesn't it?

The lazy view of the history of the last four decades (that is, how it is commonly perceived) is largely delivered through Republican optics: Reagan won the Cold War and conquered inflation, Clinton’s two terms are barely remembered save for his philandering, 9/11 remains a symbol of righteous victimhood, Obamacare is a bureaucratic tangle — and then we have Hillary’s emails.

The Republican Party, remarkably, has been the default governing party, at least in psychological terms, during this whole period, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

Yes, contrasted with a Democratic agenda notable for softness on crime, welfare dependence, open borders, stagflation, and now the Weimar freak show the Jarrett regency has on display every day, a stance of free minds, free markets, the end of Communism, and the restoration of a 600 ship navy looks pretty good, doesn't it?  Perhaps Mr Lofgren might know of people who criticized the Clinton presidency as the "best Republican president," an echo of Dwight Eisenhower as the Republican who consolidated the New Deal (and came up with several ways of squandering the victory dividend?)  As far as that presidential popular vote, how many times since Ronald Reagan in 1984 has the winning president garnered a proper majority of the national vote?  That matters: but for Ralph Nader in 2000, Jill Stein in 2016, there might have been a different outcome to the electoral vote, and the presence of people willing to give up the choice in a tight election suggests, at the margin, people prefer to have more choices.  Mr Lofgren hints at the possibility that the Republican establishment missed that message.

Just as the German army did, Republicans bet on what they thought was a malleable figurehead who would shower money on the plutocracy, shovel resources to the military and bust the unions. In both cases, they mostly got what they wanted. But in both cases, they also failed to foresee that their intended stooge would not only break free of their control but exert such total domination as to reduce them to cringing toadies forever protesting their loyalty.

No, Donald Trump ran a hostile takeover on the Republicans, but only secured the presidential nomination, and that only barely, and who knows how many establishment Republicans were happy to let the ongoing investigations go on?  In a representative republic, the people are notionally in control, and every so often they let the elites know that something is wrong, whether that's the street crime, or the endless, indecisive, nation building wars, or the social spending that enriches the rent seekers.  Mr Lofgren misses that as well: according to him, the Trump voters have no real reason to be angry, and they're such juicy targets for the Professional Managerial Class to sneer at.

Given the inordinate status-seeking and social-climbing that permeate American life, it was inevitable that the foot soldiers of America’s authoritarian populism would be the middling sort: well enough off by traditional standards, but aggrieved at their perceived lack of influence and alienated from the very country they claim to be theirs. They never cease to be jealous of those people, the demon-figures of conservative propaganda who haunt their dreams.

Naturally they would form a cult around a self-described successful businessman whose own elitism is camouflaged by his vulgar tastes in food, décor and lifestyle, replicating the mob’s kitsch fantasies about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Compared to the tacky glitz of Mar-a-Lago, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. So weak is their sense of self that any perceived criticism of their chosen billionaire-deity sets off a flood of hysterical denunciation, harassment and death threats. Our experience with the last decade suggests we must invert Hannah Arendt’s dictum and acknowledge the evil of banality.

That might be, and yet, that will not persuade the sorts of disaffected Militant Normals who are telling pollsters they want more Donald Trump, that shambolic first term and those ongoing investigations notwithstanding.  As long as the commentariat persist in acting like there is something wrong with the voters, the voters are likely to keep favoring the disruptive candidates in those surveys.