Ken Burns Suggests America Will Become Nazi-Germany if Trump Is Elected: Just Go Back to 1932 Where Everything Was Great

BRZEZINSKI: “Wow, the Emmy award-winning filmmaker joins us now. He is this year’s recipient of the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal for quote, ‘illuminating the nation’s greatest triumphs and tragedies and inspiring all of us to learn about the principles at the heart of the American idea.’ And Ken, great to have you on and I want to start right there with the American idea. I noticed that — well, everything you said, jumped out at me, but I’m going to pull. You said do not be seduced. I think that’s so important in the in the — in the age of the cult of Trump, but even more important, you used the word fragile. And I don’t think people understand just how fragile our democracy is. Can you explain how easily it could be unraveled?”
BURNS: “Well, I think all you need to do is go back to say — and good morning, Mika, thank you for having me — you could go back to where in 1932, you’d want to be where everything was great with ideas, in politics, in — in arts, in architecture, in movies, in painting, in music, there’d be no better place on the planet than Berlin. And the next January, not so much. And so what we learned from the study of authoritarianism, what we learned from the study of despots is that these democratic institutions are fragile because the covenant of democracy is a new thing. We invented it. It said, you’re not going to be a subject, you’re going to be a citizen. And that requires some responsibilities. And we’re going to build institutions in which we have to just like driving down the road, we trust people aren’t going to cross the line. We need to trust each other. And the despot —“
BRZEZINSKI: “Yeah.”
BURNS: “— is all about othering people and saying there’s them. There’s no them, I tried to say in this. And it’s really not about Joe Biden and — and Donald Trump. It’s really about this tendency for us to other and make it just an argument and not a story. As Jen was saying, Joe needs to tell a story. But we also have a responsibility. We’ve been so focused in the corner of my screen was like we’re waiting for the train wreck of the trial. We used to eight years ago, nine years ago, have an airplane hangar where he was going to arrive and say some bad things that were going to shake us up. We have not allowed — the only place where trickle down works is in media. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, did it make a sound? If Joe Biden has the third greatest legislative accomplishments in the last 100 years after FDR, and — and LBJ, and people don’t know about it, because we’ve been more interested in the argument of guilty or not guilty, or this outrage or that outrage, we’ve missed our responsibility to help. So the other thing I would add to is that in the othering everybody does it. We do it too. We need to reach out to Trump voters. We need to listen to them. We don’t need to other them either. Their guy is doing that. We need — we need to remind them that so many of the things that keep them at the level that they’re at, that paycheck-to-paycheck, are there because of things that Joe Biden and Barack Obama and other people have done for them and not allow them to be completely seduced by the story that despots always tell, that if we get rid of these people or this problem or —“
Right.
BURNS: “— that — that things will be better. I — I think it’s all of us to try to speak to each other in a way and tell stories not make arguments.”