“You’ve been on vacation for two weeks, you come home, and your basement is infested with raccoons. Hundreds of rabid, messy, mean raccoons have overtaken your basement. You want them gone immediately so you hire a guy.
A pro.
You don’t care if the guy smells, you need those raccoons gone pronto and he’s the guy to do it! You don’t care if the guy swears, you don’t care if he’s an alcoholic, you don’t care how many times he’s been married, you don’t care if he voted for Obama, you don’t care if he has plumber’s crack…you simply want those raccoons gone!  You want your problem fixed! 
He’s the guy.
He’s the best.
Period.
That’s why Trump. Yes he’s a bit of an ass, yes he’s an egomaniac, but you don’t care. The country is a mess because politicians suck, the Republican Party is two-faced & gutless, illegal’s are everywhere. You want it all fixed! You don’t care that Trump is crude, you don’t care that he insults people, you don’t care that he had been friendly with Hillary, you don’t care that he has changed positions, you don’t care that he’s been married 3 times, you don’t care that he fights with Megyn Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell, you don’t care that he doesn’t know the name of some Muslin terrorist,…this country is weak, bankrupt, our enemies are making fun of us, we are being invaded by illegal’s, we are becoming a nation of victims where every Tom, Ricardo and Hamid is a special group with special rights to a point where we don’t even recognize the country we were born and raised in; “AND WE JUST WANT IT FIXED” and Trump is the only guy who seems to understand what the people want.  You’re sick of politicians, sick of the Democratic Party, Republican Party, and sick of illegal’s. You just want this thing fixed. Trump may not be a saint, but doesn’t have lobbyist money holding him, he doesn’t have political correctness restraining him, all you know is that he has been very successful, a good negotiator, he has built a lot of things, and he’s also not a politician,  he’s not a cowardly politician. And he says he’ll fix it.
You don’t care if the guy has bad hair. 
You just want those raccoons gone. 
Out of your house. 
Now”

Over.

Accusing me of “comparing William Shirer’s time to ours” does nothing to enhance YOUR credibility. I explicitly did not compare William Shirer’s time to ours. I wrote that Nazism was:

…a particular sort of tyranny, but a tyranny nevertheless.

It is highly instructive to see how liberty is compromised in various ways, in different times and places, and what the commonalities are, and what to watch out for.

In other words: Nazism and Germany in the 20s-30s was a particular, idiosyncratic time with certain conditions that do not necessarily resemble ours. However, it is very instructive to study how different tyrannies, in different times and places, arise, and see whether there are commonalities that can be instructive in telling us what to watch out for. That is actually true of all tyrannies, and it’s one of the main reasons we study history.

The first book I recommended does just that. The second book does it for America and Nazi Germany. Neither recommendation represents an endorsement of everything in it—they are merely recommendations for books that treat the subject in a way that makes many interesting points, some of which I agree with and some of which I disagree with. I often recommend reading books I find interesting for various reasons, without writing entire posts on exactly what points of agreement and disagreement I have with them.

Peikoff – who spent a stint in Colorado because his then wife, Amy, taught at the US Air Force Academy for a few years (and I have a several friends who are, or were, both of their friends) – knows almost nothing about the dynamics of real world American politics.

How can I support such a sweeping statement?

Because logic, philosophy, and intellectual history? Those are different matters. How the latter interacts with the former (politics) in mass society requires different methods than deductive logic to grasp. Peikoff is far too reductionist to deal competently with American politics, as seen by how often his prognostications have proved completely wrong.

While intellectual historian David Gordon has done pointed work in showing how Peikoff repeatedly gets important thinkers like J S Mill and Herbert Spencer wrong, you can get a feel for the types of errors Piekoff makes in a few short blog posts by Greg Nyquist:

“The Intellectual Sources of Peikoff’s Ominous
Parallels”
http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2007/05/intellectual-sources-of-peikoffs.html

And questioning Peikoff’s idee fix that ideas determine the course of history:
http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2009/02/taking-ideas-seriously-pt-1.html

Which quotes Gordon on “The Ominous Parallels:” “Peikoff gives us a history of philosophy with the arguments left out.”

In short, Peikoff tortures intellectual history to divine political consequences much like how Noam Chomsky re-arranges facts to suit his various anti-American and anti-capitalist agendas: questionably, if not simply dishonestly.

To put my point differently, any handful of Ayn Rand’s pieces on American mass society are far more penetrating and veridical than almost the entirety of Peikoff’s.

It’s the intoxication endemic to tyrants.

Tyranny and grandiosity are the opposite faces of the exact same coin.

And it’s not for nothing that ancient tyrants ALWAYS put their face on their specie.

When the practice was initiated — it was a scandal.

For only the dead — the mythic — the gods — were previously used as specie icons. ( American coinage went straight back to the foundational practice.)

( The very first coins were struck ‘privately’ — by merchants — and no merchant dared use the Big Man’s image on his shoddy specie. The first coins minted were total ‘hack jobs’ pounded out with dies and human hammer ‘men’. — Normally teen age boys.

( The latter practice is still seen in Japanese katana artisan fabrication.

The main thing that I agree with in that article is that we are nation governed by idiots.

%%

Don’t conflate “idiots” with ‘ideologues.’

%%

Our ‘folks’ are so smart that they’ve elevated policy beyond reality.

Eric Hoffer’s True Believer is essential reading to comprehend what is happening now — what happened in other tyrannies.

Ben Shapiro has a highly illuminating presentation that shows how appearances and self-identification lead one astray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5IqH7oJ9h4

Grandiosity is a very noticeable feature of our current elite. Apart from the massive overspending (with deficits now routinely hitting $1 trillion), the military adventurism, and the expansion rather than contraction of global cultural influence (a kind of imperialism without an empire), there is the long list of crusades that our elites are currently engaged in. Grandiosity is a consistent feature in all these endeavors.

http://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/6807-grandiosity-as-a-feature-of-pre-collapse-political-leadership/

Grandiosity is collective insanity// irrationality:

“Multiculturalism, gay rights, anti-racism, the elimination of sex roles are examples of grandiosity in the social sphere.

In economics we see the growth of mega-corporations and “too big to fail” financial institutions (where too big to fail means too big to regulate).

In education we see the drive to push everyone into at the very least a four year degree, even as changing demographics makes this entirely unlikely and impractical.

Movie studios stake their fortunes on giant “tentpole” releases with massive budgets–$200 million is no longer an outlier.

…

“Why are our elites grandiose?

My initial hypothesis is that grandiosity is a feature of late-stage political leadership.

As power accrues to centralized government, elites increasingly exist in a world of their own, with only their elite peers to judge them.

Large scale governments reduce the ability of democratic constituencies to exert any influence.

Concentration of power may select for grandiosity as a side effect of political dynasties and large scale coalitions which service the needs of a growing elite political class.

Leaders fixated on “legacy” concerns lose interest in the day to day running of massively complex governments (the bureaucracies of which run on auto-pilot) and switch their attention to bold schemes and sweeping changes.

Socioeconomic complexity also increases the scale of problems faced by political leaders.

%%%

He’s entirely wrong about the latter.

Folks get grandiose when they have an unlimited check book.

That’s ALL IT TAKES.

You’ll see the exact same phenomena with LOTTO winners.

They go bonkers — and there is nothing for them to run but their imaginations.

Bill Whittle addresses the endless resources mirage in this long winded “r” versus “K” selection argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY-ueR0OLlQ

It’s a shame that Whittle didn’t whittle his argument down tightly like Ben Shapiro — because he’s actually dead on target.

The magic concept is espoused around 16:00 — but you’re advised to back up to 15:30 to get the argument.

Whittle lays out WHY LOTTO winners go bonkers… almost uniformly.

They become grandiose — just like Congress and the President.

This is taken as insanity, irrationality, stupidity, idiocy by all grounded intellects.

Goldwater was indeed portrayed as a warmonger.

But he never had a chance of winning, even without that. He was the least charismatic presidential nominee in my lifetime, and I even include Nixon and Dukakis in that. It wasn’t just lack of personal appeal, although that was important. He also was considerably more conservative than America was ready for at that time.

Here’s an in-depth study of voting patterns for Hitler and the Nazis (who of course did not receive a majority of German votes when he came to power). The whole thing makes very interesting reading. Nazi power was in the rural and Protestant areas. As for gender, here’s the way it went down [in the following, “(NSDAP” is the Nazi Party, “SPD” is the Social Democrats, “KPD” the Communists, “DNVP” the Nationalists, and the “BVP” the Bavarian party]:

Women were less likely to vote for left-wing parties than their menfolk, though there was an increase in the percentage of female votes that went to the SPD in the 1920s. In fact around 3.5 million women cast their votes for Social Democracy by 1930; and far fewer female than male SPD voters deserted to the Communists in the Depression. In the Berlin Reichstag election of 1930, 27.1 per cent of male and 28.8 per cent of female votes went to the Social Democrats; but in the case of the KPD the gender difference was more marked, with the party picking up 37 per cent of the male but only 29.8 per cent of the female vote. In the Cologne-Aachen district in 1930, 20 per cent of male and 17.2 per cent of female voters gave their support to the SPD; but for the KPD the voting percentages were 21.4 and 13.4 respectively.

The relative unattractiveness of the Left to female voters was compensated by a propensity to support those parties close to the churches, such as the nationalist DNVP in the case of Protestants and, to a much greater extent, the Centre Party or BVP in the case of Catholics. In Cologne-Aachen in 1930, 18.9 per cent of male and 33.1 per cent of females voted for the Centre Party. In Augsburg in the same year, 24.8 per cent of men and 39 per cent of women gave their support to the BVP. Desertions from the Catholic camp to the KPD and the NSDAP in the Depression were almost exclusively male.

Until 1930 women remained unlikely to vote for the Nazi Party. Moreover, in the presidential election of 1932 a clear majority of women preferred Hindenburg to Hitler. However, the early 1930s did see a narrowing of the gap between male and female voting patterns, especially in Protestant areas. Indeed, in some of these by July 1932 the NSDAP was winning a higher percentage of the female to male vote. In that month some 6.5 million women voted Nazi, many of them probably with few or no previous political ties. Where they came from the working class, they were likely to be non-unionised textile operatives or domestic workers.

So, it was in certain Protestant regions (where Nazi support was generally highest among both sexes, as it also was in rural regions) that a higher percentage of women voted Nazi than men did. It doesn’t say what percentage, but as a whole, women voted for Hindenburg in 1932.