How about Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? Were they lefties?

suzdude 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

By U.S.A. standards, authoritarian leaders who use violence as a means of political gain does not align with the Democratic Party of today.

During Jim Crow, at the State level in the south, it would be applicable, but that doesn't mean much in today's terms.

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GuinansEyebrows 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hi Bob, we’re talking about American politicians.

	▲	CamperBob2 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		'Sup, 'brows. Tell me, what's special about American politicians as opposed to those in the rest of the world, in your view? Education? Religious values? Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon genelines? A more-enlightened electorate? Nothing but your own empty prejudices and comforting assumptions? It can happen here, and it can happen to your party, too. It just didn't this time.

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ceejayoz 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same shit as Trump - the self-proclaimed label and the actions are wildly disparate.

They - and Hitler - are notable for their totalitarianism. I bear no illusions that folks like Stalin wanted anything more than power.

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brandall10 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Communism is far left, fascism far right. Both often slide into totalitarianism, which commonly includes camps.

FDR’s era, the furthest left the U.S. has been, true to form had this element... showing how concentrated state power, left or right, risks curtailing freedom.

In modern times, we've seen Guantánamo survive multiple admins on both sides.

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wqaatwt 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Well far-right and far-left usually put people in camps due to ideological or related reasons.

In this case I’m not sure if that was inherently related to Roosevelt’s progressive/left policies. A moderate or rightwing government likely would have done something similar at the time.

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brandall10 8 hours ago | parent [-]

They also tend to put the 'other' in them.

My argument is that New Deal policies paved the way - culturally, institutionally, legislatively - for the United States to quickly mobilize for war, which also significantly reduced the friction for something like this to occur.

So yes, it could have happened under more centrist regimes entering the war, but the scale and timing would likely have been minimized in comparison.

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wqaatwt 8 hours ago | parent [-]

In the sense that the government had the logistical capacity and capability to do something like this, yes.

Culturally I don’t see it as somehow exceptional. US government regularly employed highly authoritarian policies to suppress or remove people based on racial or ideological grounds since the very beginning.

Even in WW1 German Americans had the benefit of being white and forming a very significant proportion of the population so anything like this was obviously infeasible. But their cultural and linguistic identity was suppressed and they were forced to assimilate under the threat of violence.

When you take the Sedition Act and other similar policies in relation to how much of a threat US faced in WW1 compared to WW2 I’d day what Roosevelt did wasn’t that extreme.

	▲	brandall10 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree repression has always existed in the U.S, but the difference is scale. In WWI the country was smaller, less centralized, and suppression was cruder - local violence, language bans, mobs. By WWII the U.S. was far larger, more cohesive, and had a strong federal state; without that scale and central capacity, something like internment would have been much harder to pull off.