Viele lehnen Hitler-Vergleiche reflexartig ab, wofür es angesichts des inflationären polemischen Gebrauchs derselben gute Gründe gibt. Eine der besten Texte über den Aufstieg Trumps zeigt aber, wie wichtig und erhellend diese historischen Parallelen sind. Geschrieben vom Philosophen Adam Knowles wünsche ich ihm so viele Leser wie möglich: Philosophy in the Contemporary World: The Moral Imperative to Assume the Worst—Philosophy’s Response to Donald Trump.

Ein kurzer Auszug:

We must accept that we live in dire times of which nothing good will come. There will be no moral victories for liberals who hope to come out of the other side with a clean conscience. There will be an increase in hate crimes. There will also be tactics of gradual escalation in order to secure complicity from those not subject to such violence. We should not try to speculate what Trump’s true aims might be, but instead calculate what they could be based on the most extreme scenario. We must resist any outward claims of moderation and out them as a classic strategy of totalitarian regimes. The so-called ‘good’ white people (especially men) of America, those for whom normalization is a possibility, must also resist allowing Trump to be normalized in our names and on our behalf. Yet we must also ensure that our resistance is not parasitic on the aesthetic spectacle of the Trump phenomenon.