Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the Daily Wire and author, discussed the dangers of concentrated power and other variables to liberal democracies, citing historical tragedies, in a lengthy podcast with host Lex Fridman, which aired on Monday.
Shapiro emphasized the risk when Fridman asked if there were any lessons to be learned from Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in the 20th century.
According to the author of “The Right Side of History,” “the first thing I feel people have to know about Hitler attaining power is that the authority had been entrenched in the government before Hitler obtained it.”
Shapiro, a 38-year-old historian, recounted how power became more centralized in the hands of the chancellor and eventually under Hindenburg following the collapse of the Weimar Republic. A terrible actor’s ascension to power was inevitable.
The growth of radical sentiments facilitated Hitler’s immediate ascension to power during the war between the Reds and Browns in pre-Nazi Germany. The host of the show stated, “He was elected.”
In addition, Shapiro stated, “without a doubt,” that the Communists might have seized power at the time, adding that this may have led to a new type of misery. In Soviet Russia at the time, the Holodomor was being perpetrated by communists, he said.
The radicals were luring moderate parties into partnership with them, according to the conservative, to avoid the worst-case situation from the other party.
“It does speak to how a democracy falls,” Shapiro added. As in, “I’m referring to the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, which was a rather liberal democracy; how could a liberal democracy descend into absolute Fascism and ultimately genocide?”
According to Shapiro, Franz von Papen, the Republic’s vice-chancellor and Hitler’s immediate predecessor, was “stumping for Hitler” despite being a vocal opponent of the dictator. “Papen thought Hitler to be a fanatic and a nut job,” but also “an idiot whose services may be valuable to the right forces in preventing the Communists from obtaining power.”
“It’s easy to get caught up in the rock’em, sock’em robots that may, in theory, allow you to support a horrifying and ugly person to stop a more frightening and ugly person,” he stated.
Speaking generally of the Western world, you hear more and more people say things like, “My political enemy is an enemy of democracy, my political enemy will end the Republic, my political enemy will be the person who destroys the country we live in, so this individual must be stopped by any means necessary.” The author emphasized the danger of such material.