Donald Trump’s Fascism and His Appeasers
Donald Trump’s Fascism and His Appeasers
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A jab at America. (Andrew Dallos)
“It can’t happen here? My friends, it is happening here.” So says New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia near the end of the “The Plot Against America,” the Philip Roth novel from 12 years ago that re-imagines American history if the isolationist, Hitler-sympathizing anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh had become president instead of Franklin Roosevelt. And so “the right-wing saboteurs of democracy–the so-called patriots and the so-called Christians” of the Republican right, Roth writes, make their march “under the sign of the cross and the flag.”
“It Can’t Happen Here” was the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel that imagined a fascist senator who beats Roosevelt to the presidency on a promise to, you guessed it, make America great again: “To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again,” the imaginary Buzz Windrip tells a crowd that includes his paramilitary “Minute Men,” who beat up dissenters and open fire on them. (The paramilitary vigilantes who still “patrol” the Mexican-American border on this side of paradise also call themselves the Minutemen.)
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If the poison has always been around, it’s never been enough to poison the entire country. Sinclair Lewis himself thought America too strong a democracy to allow a fascist take-over. He’s right, for now. Donald Trump isn’t going to win in November. By then the hordes of Bernie Sanders supporters who are making Hillary Clinton’s negative numbers look almost as bad as Trump’s will have fallen in line.
As unappealing as Clinton can seem, especially if you tune in to the hysterics of reactionary propaganda—the same machine that managed to turn John Kerry’s war heroics into treachery and Ronald Reagan’s administration, the most corrupt since Ulysses Grant’s, into a paragon of conservative values—she’s in a league of her own. Comparing her in any way to Trump isn’t apples and oranges, two quite evolved fruits. It’s more like comparing a human being to a single-cell organism to, with Trump’s single cell defined by one thing: his vengeful racism.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/06/11/donald-trumps-fascism-and-his-appeasers
