Or, “You Don’t Need a Hitler”
It’s encouraging to see the article “Surviving Autocracy” by Masha Geffen getting a lot of airplay. I've seen a quite a few friends saying "Well, at least we can't really take Trump's election promises seriously," citing his flipflopping nature and what liberal leanings he has.
Take his campaign slogans, chants and promises seriously.
Some good things have already been written about this by people who would know. I won't bring up pre-WW2 Germany, because everyone is sick of hearing of that, but I will bring up Rwanda and the Hutu Power movements. Their autocrat, Juvenal Habyarimana, was actually taken out just before Hutu Power unleashed hell on the people of that tiny nation... and for a few years leading up to that fateful moment (April 6, 1994), they had repeatedly said exactly what they were going to do. (The only person who believed them was Romeo Dallaire, the general who was stationed in Rwanda with UN peacekeeping forces at the time.)
Hutu Power didn't need an autocrat by the time they were ready to commence what they wanted to do. In fact, their autocrat was actually a “legitimately” elected despot who was a moderate compared to them (because he had a country to run). Habyarimana’s sudden removal (and for many years it remained unclear who had done it, although the latest evidence seems to implicate anti-Hutu Power forces under Paul Kagame) was the “Let’s roll!" moment for Hutu Power.
America is of course a very different country than Rwanda, fortunately with more diverse and stronger (though tattered) institutions to absorb stress and nonsense. But the Rwandan violence was executed by hundreds of small fry local leaders using bands of thugs and virtually every non-thug citizen they had, and that can still happen on a local level here in the U.S.
Today, few could name names off the top of their head about who was in charge of Hutu Power, and it's sometimes hard to remember Habyarimana's name even if you have studied Rwanda a bit. Fear Trumpism, not Trump -- and take seriously what is said by these people. Assassination and imprisonment of political opponents, censorship of the media, and expulsion of foreigners have already been promised.