Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@pascaline Right, I see where you're coming from, but I still don't feel that the motivations are too important even in that context.

I personally think the structures and mechanisms are more important to understand than the motivations; there are plenty of people who are power-hungry, and they all have their own strategies, but what made them *succeed*? How could they turn their (unspecified) motivations into actual power?

Looking at historical fascist governments in democracies, the picture looks roughly the same every time - there is heavily centralized power in a government that's nominally benign, there's a culture of "listen to all sides no matter what" that fascists exploit to manipulate people emotionally, and eventually the fascists gain power over those centralized power structures in a nominally legitimate way (by the rules of the democracy anyway), and immediately turn it on the people and tear down the democracy.

From that perspective, there are two main problems:

1. "Listen to all people no matter what", basically the centrist view that treats all opinions as equally politically valid no matter what. Even if that opinion is oppressive or outright genocidal.

2. Central government with a lot of power; lots of institutions, laws and processes that can be used as weapons if they were to ever fall into malicious hands. This is and always will be a juicy target for power-hungry people.

I think the problem can be addressed through either of those two points, but I suspect that solving the latter is the more durable option, because it's harder to undo with propaganda. Either approach would solve the problem by removing (one of) the critical angles that fascists exploit.

(As a sidenote, the rise of the nazis before WWII happened in pretty much the exact same way. Exploiting the apathy of existing systems of power to gain a lot of power very quickly. So this definitely isn't the first time.)

@pascaline Honestly, I don't think he has a coherent plan. Keep in mind that he's extremely arrogant; he may well believe that he can somehow magically convince everyone to do his bidding no matter what he does.

His past history doesn't make it very likely that this is all part of some grand scheme on his part either; perhaps other party members may be scheming and Trump is being convinced to do their bidding, but I think Trump himself is simply someone who has a lot of power but no idea what to do with it, and so he just does *something* that sounds vaguely right.

It's something you see all too often at a smaller scale with middle managers in companies. They hear about some new idea, and they must do *something*, and that new idea is something, and therefore they do it. That's the end of the reasoning. And everyone else is left to pick up the pieces of whatever business process they destroyed.

(I also think it's not too helpful to try and find a grand scheme; it mostly just ends up distracting from concrete steps that people can make today to interfere with his power trip regardless of the underlying motivations)