Is being a sociopath a qualification for the presidency? Adolf Hitler was a sociopath who gained power and advanced a policy of racism, militarism and war which led to the greatest war in human history and the mass murder of many millions of civilians based on the sociopathology of German fascism.
Donald Trump is a sociopath or someone giving a very good imitation of one when he calls for the mass deportation of eleven million people, undocumented workers and their families, and demands that Mexico build a border wall to keep out further immigrants. In practice, the first part of that "policy" could only be accomplished through the creation of a fascist police state, would in the very short run, lead to thousands of deaths, and in all likelihood a war with Mexico, the third largest nation in terms of population in the Western Hemisphere. But what would be the consequences of such a war, besides of course millions of deaths? Would Trump, like Hitler, see the Mexicans and all other Latinos as "untermenschen," inferior people who must make way for the superior North Americans, a murderous revival of the "Manifest Destiny" of the 1840s? Would his army and special forces begin to resettle North Americans, poor whites from the South, unemployed workers from the North, on property and businesses seized from Mexicans as Hitler's forces did with property seized from Jews, Poles, and other "untermenschen"?
If this speculation sounds crazy, it is not me but Trump who in his crazines has raised these issues. And he is what the media is talking about. They are talking much more about him that they are about Bernie Sanders for example, a point that would not be lost on Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who saw the press and radio as vehicles to repeat big lies over and over again until masses of people came to accept them passively and repeat them among themselves.
And then of course there are the others, speculating on various issues: Men pledging that they will protect women from abortions and education about sexuality, men and women invoking God as if he were both their personal friend and a registered Republican. Carly Fiorina doing a bad imitation of John Foster Dulles as she calls for "getting tough," with the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, while Donald Trump hurls sexist insults at her.
If the trickle down "theory" which the Republican right has revived and used as a rationale for economic policies that favor the corporations and the rich would be applied to their candidates' influence on society, bipolar mental disease, paranoia,, schizophrenia, borderline pyschosis, and for those less directly affected , various forms of neurosis can be expected to trickle down to the people, whose mental health would also be threatened by the increased inequality and poverty that the Republican policies would bring.
We can be sure that the ruling circles of U.S. finance capital will back any of these candidates, including Trump, to continue to accumulate more and more wealth for themselves. After all, their counterparts did that in Weimar Germany, where they were faced with both a devastating depression and also powerful albeit divided and rival Social Democratic and Communist parties.
And we shouldn't expect Hillary Clinton to offer a serious alternative to these Republicans unless we are as screwy as they are.
She wouldn't use force and violence to deport millions or actively bust unions, but she would protect the interests of finance capital as the concentration of wealth became more unequal, real wages continued to decline, and education, housing, transportation continued to deteriorate.
She would also continue the foreign policy which has produced one disaster after another along with a crippling military budget. In all likelihood, the Republican right would then grow stronger and more dangerous, just as in Weimar Germany, the Nazis grew stronger because non Nazi fiscal conservative governments refused to seriously address the mass unemployment produced by the depression.
All of this should really lead trade union activists, community activists, civil rights and civil liberties activities, those in the progressive wing of the Democratic party to realize and take seriously the dangers that the Republican right, Trump especially but the others also, represent today.
They should join the rest of us and begin to stand with Bernie Sanders who is offering concrete solutions to the economic crisis the nation faces. At least, they should begin to demand what Bernie Sanders is demanding and even if they have bought into or have been bought by the Clinton campaign, at the very least demand that Clinton identify herself with the issues that Sanders is raising and then hold her to those positions.
Those are the only sane response that one can make to Republican debates in which reason and logic have been invisible.
Image: The caricature of Donald Trump was adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Gage Skidmore's Flickr photostream: face and body.
