FuhrerPrinzip

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Free people don’t look for “leadership.” But that’s what every candidate for the presidency – regardless of partei – is offering to give them.

Such people deserve what they will get.

They have, after all asked for it.

Most Americans do not know what the German word, fuhrer means.

It does not mean “Hitler.”

It means, leader.

Hitler was Der Fuhrer; the leader.

The Germans of the Hitler era loved having a leader. Being led.

And leading, too.

They even had an expression for it: fuhrerprinzip, the leadership principle. You obeyed your superiors and your subordinates obeyed you in turn – with the leader (Der Fuhrer) at the apex of the pyramid.

Americans today are like the Germans were.

Ready for a leader.

And to be led.

The one requires the other.

This sickness in man was – is – not unique to Germans. It is a canker humanity picked up somewhere from ape to now that itches and comes to the surface regularly, pustulating and red. Germans (Prussians, to be precise about it) were particularly afflicted but the disease is easily spread.

Americans – who have become today’s Prussians – positively crave leadership. Decisiveness, but nor their own. To surrender to a superior will, kind of like you-know-who’s. It explains the almost orgiastic reaction of the audiences at Trump’s events. He is cocky, belligerent, abusive. A business suited version of you-know-who. A leader. He radiates the arrogance of someone who believes he has been anointed to tell others what to do. He is a Great Man.

And the people cheer.

If you listen closely, you can hear the echoes of history; the stamping of feet, the hysterical shrieks of triumph and abasement. Our savior!

Unsere fuhrer...

The others are no better, just less charismatic.

The personally unpleasant Hillary Clinton is just as ready to provide leadership. Desperate to provide it. She, like Trump, knows just what to do.

And her supporters are just as desperate as Trump’s for her to get on with the business of doing it.

Ditto the rest of them. All with “plans” and practically bursting at the seams with eagerness to get their hands on the levers and dials of state power. They each know best.

Better than you, at any rate.

Even Rand Paul – the “Libertarian” Republican – is ready to give you all the leadership you can stand. For instance, he wants to “save” and “fix” the greatest intergenerational wealth transfer scheme ever implemented (you know, Social Security) by double-defrauding younger workers for the benefit of the greedy geezers who demand “their” Social Security payola. Both groups will be told what they’ll do – and what they’ll get. There will not be a “no thanks, I’d rather provide for my own retirement” option. It is not open for discussion. The only debate is over what you’ll be told. Not whether you’ll be told.

Leadership.

Rand also “stands with Israel,” the lamprey on the flanks of the American taxpayer, which he describes as “America’s longtime friend and ally.”

Because, of course, he must.

Else he will not be allowed to provide leadership.

Regardless, leadership we will get. Whether from Trump, Hillary, Rand, Jeb or whoever turns out to be the next avatar of the vox populi.  They will natter amongst themselves, like vultures pecking at the corpse of a musk ox.

Which by the way is us.

There is no alternative to leadership in latter day Weimar America. No candidate running who not only doesn’t want to lead but also despises the idea of being followed.

The whole thing – running for office – necessarily excludes people who don’t want to perch on the corpse (so to speak) and tell you what to do … who have no interest in being told what to do. Such people have no interest in elections.

But – as in Germany all those years ago – such people are now in the minority.

The majority now wants what the Germans once wanted.

And, like them, they’re gonna get it.

But like the Germans of once-upon-a-time, they do not see themselves as the erectors of their own brick ovens (and yes, it will come to that – because it must come to that). When it is all over – if it ever is – they will look back and blame the leaders. Who told them what to do.

After all, they were only following orders. Doing their jobs.

They are already saying such things, without the slightest trace or historical irony.

Even the chroniclers or once-upon-a-time missed this critical point. The saltpeter without which the gunpowder can’t be made: The people who demand leadership.

The leader – brownshirted or business-suited – is a non sequitur. The hole in the dam through which the water bursts.

It is the water that decides everything.

And the pressure is building.