Be wary of paramilitaries
Does Trump and MAGA have paramilitaries? Their own brown shirts? The answer is yes, sort of. The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Bikers for Trump, and others qualify. I think a lot of us “normies” tend to dismiss these guys as overweight cosplayers, pretending to be tough. But it really takes one person with a machine gun to cause utter panic and destruction. Trumpist lone-wolf terrorists like Patrick Crusius and Robert Bowers are quite terrifying without being members of an organized paramilitary. Untrained paramilitaries like the January 6 rioters are more ridiculous than terrifying. But once such a group has a small amount of training and group discipline, then you have HAMAS and hundreds of victims.
Snyder points out that governments like to have a monopoly on violence. When an authoritarian movement has its own paramilitary force, the government’s legitimacy is weakened. But Snyder points out something worse—when the authoritarian movement becomes the government, it can fold its paramiltary wing into the government. It reasserts the government’s monopoly on power with a new group of insiders. This is what happened with the SS during Nazi Germany.
The SS started as Nazi party members assigned to provide security for party gatherings. They were initially called Saal-Schutz ("Hall Security"). From such humble beginnings, they went on a bloody pogrom against Europe’s Jews and anyone else opposed to the Nazis.
Who is acting as hall security for MAGA?
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The chilling postscript to this may be the news reported today that there is an executive order draft floating around - and I'm wording it vaguely because he's not actually in a position to issue one, and who knows what level of detail he himself pays attention to - that would appoint a 'review board' of retired military leaders who would then recommend that generals they deemed - unclear what - should be removed.
If this were to happen? An outside board accountable only to the person who appointed them making recommendations, and a Sec. of Defense who is on record as saying he wants to get rid of the military leaders who've had any part in any "woke shit?"
I don't think it is hyperbole to say that if the elected president purges the military of people who won't obey his orders, and has the added benefit of a ragtag bunch of paramilitary cosplayers ready to back him up with their bullets, that this would be an extremely dire situation.
A difference between the magas and the Nazis of the 1930s is that there were tens of thousands of German veterans who had survived the trenches of WW I. They were the Freikorps which were the core and muscle of the brownshirts and the SA. But they were well trained and pre-armed. Our brownshirts (proud boys, whatever) may contain some veterans, but far fewer and less hardened.