I’ve seen a few people posting references to the 1933 Enabling Act that gave Adolf Hitler (actually the “Hitler Cabinet”, although that quickly became irrelevant) complete dictatorial power in Germany, trying to link it to the Senate’s vote on allowing the Dems to call witnesses.

Nope. Not a good parallel, for a bunch of reasons (historical, structural) – and a good one, but not for the reason those using it think.

Mostly, it’s being used as a way to logroll the uninformed – which, these days, in a culture that thinks Jon Stewart was “news”, is an awful lot of people.

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For starters, the German Constitution after WWI gave the executive branch almost royal powers. That’s because in around 1919 they clipped out references to the Kaiser (“Caesar”, in German) and replaced them with an elected “President”. And not much else; there was little or no ability, for example, for the legislative branch to “impeach” the President – at all.

Germany had an incredibly strong executive branch, and a very weak parliament…

that was further weakened by the German people’s fatigue with politics. After fifteen years where Politics very frequently devolved into street violence (between, literally, real “brownshirts” and “Anti”-fa – who were literally the direct action arm of the Communist party, and descended into same “Anti”-fa we have prancing about playing street soldier today). By the way – the Communists supported the idea of the Hitler cabinet, at least behind the scenes; they figured the violence that’d ensue would give them an opening to get back into power. They miscalculated badly, of course – worse than Adam Schiff, even. By this point in history, Germans were perfectly fine giving all the power to someone who would just make it all stop, and let them get back to trying to rebuild their economy and self-esteem

And the actual vote on the act was taken as the non-Nazi members of the “Reichstag” (parliament) were being literally threatened by brownshirts (again – literally, the same thing as “Anti”-Fa with different accessories) and the nucleus of what became the “SS”. The threats weren’t social media bluster, either; the “cancel culture” of the day was boots against head against pavement.

Future elections were abolished, the Party co-opted the Army with promises of rebuilding after its humiliation after World War 1, and that was pretty much that.

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So – it’s a terrible parallel: the Senate impeachment vote was precisely the one predicted when the Democrats first started talking about impeachment three years ago, reinforced when the GOP extended their majority in the Senate in 2018; precisely the vote the Constitution called for, with the deliberative Senate checking and balancing the popular House.

It will (!) be followed by elections in nine months, where the people will sort it out, for better or worse, electing another government that, via the inefficiency that is Federalism’s most glorious feature, stymie and frustrate any electoral majority.

If we’re lucky.

Just as the Germans learned. After 1945, their new Federal (!) Constitution distributes power between the executive and parliament, and between the Federal and State parliaments, with the sorts of checks and balances they’d learned they needed, the hard way.

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But there is a warning here, for Americans. Germany learned the need for checks and balances…

…and America’s “progressive” “elites” are doing their damnedest to get rid of them. There are serious efforts to make the Senate majoritarian (or abolish it completely), to make the legislative branch more closely mirror popular passions; to abolish the Electoral College to give the control of the Executive branch (which is waaaaaay too powerful, thanks to Wilson, FDR and LBJ) over to the will of the simple majority…

…and thus let that majority wield the full dead-eyed power of government over the minority without check or balance, or need for the niceties of legislation and debate.

To make the trains run on tim…er, I mean, move America “forward”. In your “best interests”.

There’s your “warning”.

That moment when virtue-signaling collides with reality:

49er star Richard Sherman 'doubts' he would visit White House https://t.co/JzvKzDZS6C pic.twitter.com/Jd6cxfkVbG

— SFGATE (@SFGate) January 24, 2020

I have a hunch that’s not going to age well.

By the opposite token, I’ve got a feeling this is going to have repercussions among the “woke” crowd as well.

Ben Sexsmith in Spectator on Taylor Swift’s pummeling into a deluxe, fashion-forward conformity.

While complaining that country singers are expected to “shut up and sing” because Dixie Chicks…:

Swift is shown to have been under at least some pressure to avoid being ‘political’, including from her own father, but the media she appears to be so vulnerable towards was criticizing and deriding her for not being political enough. Her reputation, which is so important to her, was suffering in the late 2010s because her silence on the Trump administration was held to represent ‘white privilege’ if not outright racism.
There was article after article about her ‘blinding white privilege’ and her ‘indifference to the struggles of people of color’. For Quartz, Swift represented ‘a dangerous form of white women’. For The Root she was ‘one of the most dangerous types of White woman’ (my emphasis). A Daily Beast writer said Swift was ‘the living embodiment of white privilege’. 
This was the greatest pressure that Swift’s reputation faced and it is hard not to suspect that her politicization did not have something to do with answering such criticism. There is no point in complaining about celebrities being progressive. You might as well complain about the winter being cold or the tides coming in. But it is preposterous to imply a celebrity’s progressivism takes courage and iconoclasm. It is expected if not demanded of them, and Swift and her friends clinking wine glasses as they toast ‘the Resistance’ is one of the most bourgeois images of our times.

About the same time I read the article, I heard this episode of the NPR “prog media” cheerleading broadcast “On The Media”, talking (approvingly) about the extent to which celebs have to go to prove they’re “woke”, and its political ramifications.

And it reminded me of the sort of exaggerated denouncements that people issued during Stalin’s show trials – when people literally virtue-signaled to save their lives. The Modern Left is a show trial that never ends – but hasn’t killed anyone. Yet.

Remember the gun buyback in Minneapolis in August of 2016? You wrote about it in a column entitled Buyback Diary.
I sold a couple of guns, got six gift cards worth $25 each, issued by Sunrise Banks. I threw them in my range box for a rainy day.  Money in the bank, right?
Nope. Sunrise Banks charges a $5 fee per year. I just talked to the bank manager. The money is all gone. Should have read the fine print.
I would say something profound, like “I won’t make that mistake again.” Except I no longer have any guns to sell, having sold those two and lost all the rest in that tragic canoe accident.
Joe Doakes

Is there anything about that buyback (read the link) that didn’t turn into comedy gold?

For info on the Deplora Ball – a benefit for the widow and soon-arriving child of MN National Guard Warrant Officer Nord, killed in a December 5 helicopter crash near Camp Ripley – go right here.

Find out more about Mayor Tom Funk’s Senate race in SD 47 – Carver County and Chanhassen, the Scott Jensen seat – go here.