Trump just fired the head of the Kennedy Center for the Arts in DC and installed himself to make sure the performers and performances meet his specifications. This seems like a small thing committed by an egomaniac, looking like a tin pot dictator of a third-world country, but it sets the tone of the arts funding and preferences for the rest of the nation's arts organizations and is a furtherance of MAGA's attempt to control the hearts and minds of the rest of half of America not in the thrall of DJT. .https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-kennedy-center-board-chairman-1235260546/
In modern times, dictators achieve their position and keep it, not by ovens, or even gulags. They do it by controlling the message: "The central goal remains the same: to monopolize political power. But today’s strongmen realize that in current conditions, violence is not always necessary or even helpful. Instead of terrorizing citizens, a skillful ruler can control them by reshaping their beliefs about the world. He can fool people into compliance and even enthusiastic approval. In place of harsh repression, the new dictators manipulate information. Like spin doctors in a democracy, they spin the news to engineer support. They are spin dictators. How Do Dictatorships Survive in the 21st Century? | Andrew Carnegie Fellows | Carnegie Corporation of New York
Taking a lesson from history, we have experience with dictatorships that do more than just control the mechanics of government: They control those they govern's hearts and minds, too.: Communist takeover in Europe post World War II followed another dictatorship in Germany, Hitler's. The ideology was different, but the techniques to get and maintain the hearts and minds of those they ruled were similar. It was more than just the form and practice of a government. One was "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and the other was fascism, but they both required ideological purity of the hearts and minds in all aspects of their subject's lives, not only in their daily work-a-d ay jobs and obeyance of laws but also in their heads and hearts, beliefs and arts. We called it "totalitarianism" once, a term that has not been used lately. It is not just control of the reins of government. It is the control by the government of thoughts, personal lives, who or if they worship, which news and what slant of the news they get, what music they hear, what literature they read, which kind of movies they see, and what kind of art is politically correct, all in service to the political leadership. Diversity of thought and lifestyles are suppressed or access denied. That is the worst kind of dictatorship, one that demands conformity of entire lives, or else. It is time to dust off the term "totalitarianism" as an extreme form of dictatorship and to recognize it as an evil to fear and to resist. We are not there yet, but we could be.
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