Paul Krugman on a Trump military coup and GOP cheerleaders
The modern G.O.P., however, is nothing like that. Many of its leading figures — people like Senator Tom Cotton — are every bit as authoritarian and anti-democratic as Trump himself.
The rest, with hardly any exceptions, are loyal apparatchiks, intimidated into obedience by an angry base. This base gets its information from Fox and Facebook and basically lives in an alternate reality, in which protesters demonstrating peacefully against police brutality are actually a radical horde that will begin a violent insurrection any minute now.
The point is that today’s Republican Party wouldn’t object to a Trumpian power grab, even if it amounted to a military coup. On the contrary, the party would cheer it on.
[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/trump-nixon.html|
Emphasis mine
You can certainly see this in how the cowardly fascist fuckers are trying to duck any questions about Trump shitting all over the constitution at the moment.
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Their goal is self-enrichment; the corrosion of the rule of law is the necessary means. As a shrewd local observer explained to me on a visit to Hungary in early 2016, “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”
appropriate yet, its use sabotages itself. They are using many classic fascistic tactics to gain power, and I'm with you of course in believing that left unchecked it would become dreadfully appropriate.
Fwiw, David Frum has gotten around this in his new book by creating a new word "fascoid," (not faschioid, and I'm imagining him brooding over pronounciation problem ). I haven't read it, but it clearly focuses a lot more on the very dangerous direction the Repub leaders are heading in this century.
Fascism has a natural partnership with business, but religious right extremists are determined to take control also. Who would win ultimate control? Secular money or Christian nationalists with money? My guess is a possible fascistic theocracy. There's a great deal of overlap of both among the wealthy and those who serve them, like Pence, Barr, Pompeo, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and on and on and on. Inferior status for women is intrinsic to archconservative fascism, whether secular or religious. But how would at least 150M nonwhite and mixed-race people figure in for all these predominately white male supremacists?
And would it even become or remain a fascist state if religion lost and the wealthy didn't need to control the labor supply as in the past. Or would the nation we were born to ultimately be replaced with a brutal authoritarian state that allowed millions of unnecessary and unwanted people to live and die off as long as they obeyed when required and didn't cause trouble?
