Trump is the face of American Fascism

When memes become true.

I do not want to write this column, but I must. I can remain silent no longer. There is a name for a government that:

·      Concentrates power in a supposedly infallible leader

·      Surrounds that leader with a cadre of fanatical loyalists

·      Worships militarism

·      Manufactures external and internal enemies

·      Uses violence and the threat of violence to rule

·      Strives to become a monolithic one-party state

·      Seeks to eliminate all critics and opposition

·      Co-opts social institutions such as business, churches, and the media

·      Uses fear to manipulate the masses

It is called fascism and the United States of America is tottering on the edge of a fascist precipice. Der Fuhrer Trump and the fascist Republican Party are pushing from the front and the only the thing preventing the fall is spirited but shrinking rearguard opposition.

Surely not in the United States, you protest, the U.S. defeated fascism in World War II. No, it defeated German, Italian, and Japanese fascism, but its American variant thrives.  Trump is the culmination of plans hatched in the Progressive Era to oppose business regulation, immigration, and the electoral success of democratic socialism. Socialists were demonized and the Big Lie caught on: that the Soviet Union was a "socialist" state. Later we were told that Nazis were "socialists." In each case, American fascists  used a multi-faceted term, distilled it to a single meaning, and called it "reality." It was the same slight of hand that today allows any fascist who wears an American flag pin to call himself a "loyal American." But hiding in plain sight is what fascists do well.You never hear that no one was more opposed to communism and fascism than democratic socialists.

American fascists gathered force during the Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal both stymied them and instilled a sense of urgency. They were the America First crowd, the German Bund, Father Coughlin followers, the second Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow politicians, Silver Shirts, devotees of Gerald Winrod, and the few with the guts to admit they belonged to the American Nazi Party. Who knows how American fascism would have fared had not the Japanese ruined everything by bombing Pearl Harbor.

After World War II American fascists helped smuggle Nazis out of Germany, stoked the Red Scare, beat the drums of the Cold War, built the CIA, trumpeted McCarthyism, made Atlas Shrugged the new gospel, joined the John Birch Society and the Heritage Foundation, became Dixiecrats, and fashioned the National Rifle Association into one of the nation's largest lobby groups. Later these forces masterminded COINTELPRO, finagled bloated military budgets to dismantle social program through budget attrition, militarized cops, unleashed the NRA, took over evangelical Protestantism, smashed labor unions, marginalized great swaths of the populace, and built a fear-based corpocracy in which power pools at the top like fetid sewage. Their followers include skinheads, survivalists, the Klan, Aryan Nation racists, Christian identity members, unreconstructed neo-Confederates, cultural biogts, rogue investors, Wall Street predators, the American Family Association, Citizens United, Freedom Watch and hundreds of other groups that hide their intent behind neutral-sounding monikers. Rich fascists such as the Koch brothers fund them and the Republican Party has become their public vehicle.

Perhaps you protest that you've always been a Republican, and these people are not you. But they are. You can no longer pretend you support the Republican agenda of the 1950s or 1980s. You are like the villagers near Auschwitz who claimed they had no idea there were extermination camps. They knew. You know. Pipe bombs have been mailed: to the Clintons, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, former CIA Director John Brennan, investor George Soros, Representative Maxine Walters, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz. More bombs are being discovered as you read. No one has been harmed—yet. But you know who is really responsible.

We also know how this will end. We've seen it before. Eventually someone will be arrested and Republicans—through their official propaganda organ, Fox News—will tell us that he (and it's almost always a he) was a "lone wolf." A back-story will emerge, probably some combination of job loss, a workplace dispute, trouble in high school, mental health issues, a broken marriage, and a record of previous encounters with the law. If fascists hit the jackpot, he will have had a bad experience with an immigrant. They will tell us that he is "unbalanced," but there was no way to predict that he would attempt such a "heinous crime." They will pat themselves on the back for catching this "deranged criminal" before he did any serious damage.

It is the same story we heard after every school shooting. We also heard it after gunmen murdered 59 in Las Vegas, 50 in Orlando, and 27 in a Texas church. We heard it when James Alex Fields plowed his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia. It is a lie. Do you remember how President Trump said there were "bad actors on both sides" after Charlottesville? This time he said, "We want both sides to come together in peace and harmony." That lasted all of 24-hours before he reverted to the fascist practice of blaming the crisis on a convenient enemy: the media. The culprit will not be a lone wolf. He will be from a rabid pack that contains Gregory Bush, Nickolas Cruz, Omar Mateen, Dylann Roof, George Zimmerman, and dozens of racist cops who murdered black men "in the line of duty." Surely, you will say, leftists have done such things. Yes, three percent of the time; in 71 percent of mass violent crime cases a right-wing extremist is the culprit. I'll lay odds the pipe bomber is not a journalist or leftist.

Fascists always try to change the tune. They rally outside the Clinton compound to scream, "Lock her up." They take to the airwaves, keyboards, and streets to proclaim they are battling to "make America great again." They repeat and re-Tweet Der Fuhrer's every utterance. They scream, "fake news!" when they are evidence-challenged. They claim everything except their real agenda: to preserve with their last breath and bullet a white male-dominated America. They know that history is against them; America is already a multicultural society and is on the cusp of becoming a minority majority nation. The only way to derail this is through violence. And fear.

If you thought Nixon's enemy list was distressing, check Trump's target list: Muslims, fraudulent voters, illegal immigrants, liberals, socialists, gays, the transgendered, protesting sports figures, scientists, intellectual "elites," hysterical women, Democrats, journalists…. Trumpinistas change enemies at the drop of a hat. Latinos marching toward the US border in hope of crossing are mostly Hondurans fleeing brutal right-wing repression. Trump told us that there were "Middle Eastern" terrorists in their ranks. That was so patently absurd—not to mention racist—that he decided they were Venezuelans instead, though how they got across the Panama Canal and walked more than 2,700 miles is left unexplained.

Time is running out. The Democratic Party looks a lot like Germany's Social Democratic Party before Hitler emasculated it. The SDP was once a party of the left, but moved to the center, then to the oxymoronic "center-right," and was easily toppled. America's center-right Democratic Party applauds the silencing of its left (or blames it for its own ineptitude). Can it awaken from self-induced torpor and embrace the siren call sounded by the left? We better hope so. American politics is no longer conservatives against liberals. It is fascism versus democracy, and fascism is winning. It is time to push back as if the future depends on it. It does.