To understand Trump (from old Europe)
In his blog Ned Resnikoff presents an interesting thesis : we can better understand the United States today - Trump and the American people - by reading Hannah Arendt. What did she say? German people voted for the NSDAP and for Adolf Hitler in the early 1930's; nevertheless, the elites accepted the nazi ideology without any reluctance... Those Germans - wealthier classes, intellectuals - preferred respectability to ethics and courage. Trump triumphed in the United States due to a single principle : respectability. , That line is taken from “ Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship ,” a lecture that Arendt delivered in 1964. She was one of our great theorists of personal responsibility and the human faculty for judgment, and I have found myself repeatedly coming back to this lecture in particular in the months since Trump’s second inauguration. Along with Dorothy Thompson’s immortal “ Who Goes Nazi? ”, I believe “Personal Responsibility” is one of the great prophetic es...
