Echoes: The Grassroots vs. The Prairie Fire

Fascist demagoguery proclaiming itself the only bulwark against communism. Communist thuggery declaring itself the only bulwark against fascist demagoguery. America 2021. Germany 1930. Everyone who warned of these echoes for decades — and was mocked out of both polite society and the ivory tower for so warning — appears to have been fully vindicated. The question is, why would any American have expected anything different, after a century of eagerly importing every German philosophical and educational idea? How did all the mainstream American academics and education theorists who absorbed and promulgated these German intellectual trends (in their milquetoast, white bread way) think tyrannies developed, anyway?

The grassroots vs. the prairie fire. This is the problem of modern politics in a nutshell: Its rival perspectives are entirely earthbound. No one decent has either the common sense or the courage to take to the air, thereby to see the fields from the proper angle. The view from above is thus owned entirely by the tyrannical souls who flatter and propagandize the masses, persuading them that they are powerful, when in truth they are nothing but useful instruments of other men’s lust for power and money.