Agreed. I'm wondering if Richard will get mixed up in far right politics in this season.
Unless I'm missing something about Peter's character that indicated he was far right?
The idea is that Gregory was based on Thiel. Peter Thiel did in fact join the Trump campaign and administration as an advisor. The Trump campaign was, in fact, far-right -- which is part of why it took the Republican Party by surprise in the primaries.
However, Gregory died when his actor did (of blessed memory).
I think that a good Silicon Valley storyline on this subject would have been a great use of the character they had. I don't want them to introduce a replacement character to hit a plot-point, after going through the trouble of mourning Peter Gregory and replacing him with Laurie Bream. For me it would cross the line from affectionate parody into, in a sense, appropriation of Thiel's life.
The other issue would be that the show has no plans of actually giving us hard-biting political satire. That's not its thing in the first place.
Maybe if they picked it up with Laurie delving into far-libertarian and far-right politics as a part of inheriting Raviga Capital from Gregory? Maybe he left some will saying whoever runs the company has to get involved somehow under certain conditions? Then they can at least make the comedy of this all-business-all-the-time character Laurie seeing how Gregory's weird hobbies play out. Hmmm... and it could turn out Russ Henneman was involved in it, too, so she'd have to swallow her hatred for the guy and do weird stuff alongside him, lest other Raviga partners accuse her of failing to carry out Gregory's wishes.
HN's not the right place for these discussions, so I'd rather not dig into it more, I was just curious why you said that.
The winning candidate in at least a semi-functional democracy cannot be far-anything. Trump's a mainstream American politician by definition.
The Weimar Republic in 1933 seems like a pretty good counterexample to that. Incidentally, it shortly stopped being the Weimar Republic and became known instead as the Third Reich.
Having read a number of books on WW2 era Germany, attempting to compare the politically chaotic post-WW1 Germany, including the economic crisis, deep nationalist tensions, and the daily murders and gang fights in the streets of the capitals of Germany between the fringe nationalist socialists vs communist parties compared to America in 2016/17 is incredibly dubious.
And even ignoring the numerous lack of comparisons to the political environments before the elections and the differences of the subsequent assent to power that Hitler took compared to Trump, the differences after the elections are countless. Most notably how the courts (via a republican judge) quickly shut down the dubious middle east immigration ban - probably the only far-right policy Trump managed to push into reality - which demonstrated that checks and balances are far from being sequestered. An essential 101 indicator of proto-fascism.
This type of fear mongering is becoming less and less persuasive. Even though there are real and significant problems with the current administration it's not helping anyone to blow them out of context and pretend you're this vanguard against some modern version of Nazi germany. That's more likely to lose you support than help you achieve anything.
If anything the anyone-who-supports-Trump-is-a-Nazi brigade did more to help elect him than prevent it. I've read a number of profiles of people who voted for Trump and who now regret it who said they voted for him merely as an affront to what the opposition represents, rather than actually supporting him. Peter Thiel seems to fit into this category.
The error is to claim that Hitler became "center-right" or "middle of the road" upon becoming Reichskanzler. The center didn't move ultra-rightward (remember: the Communists also did well in that election), an ultra-rightist happened to win the plurality in a heavily polarized election.
If it is purely a matter of some random emotional tweet Trump made or some journalist filling in the gaps between what Steve Bannon may or may have not meant when he said x, then I will remain unconvinced that the US government is at any risk of being comparable to 1930-40s era fascist regimes.
There's Betsy DeVos' new move to eliminate Income-Based Repayment plans for student loans, and many state-level bills to criminalize any protests that interfere with economically significant business (including labor pickets). And of course Jeff Sessions trying to restart the Drug War when basically everyone else just wants it ended. Remember, "far-right" doesn't just mean "fascist". It also just means "extremely capitalist" or "authoritarian in a conservative or capitalist cause".
The American Right has actually spent a lot of political capital treating Trump as outside movement conservatism, as an aberrant far-right movement hijacking the Republican Party. They still have some of the William Buckley spirit to them, in which the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan get purged rather than integrated.