'Fascism' might be too strong. But this doesn't feel like a healthy democracy. [View all]

[marmar]

‘Fascism’ might be too strong. But this doesn’t feel like a healthy democracy.
By Jeffrey C. Billman


(Detroit Metro Times) Despite the recent proliferation of memes, the early 20th-century novelist Sinclair Lewis probably never said, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

But he would have endorsed the sentiment.

Watching Hitler's rise to power in Europe while the antisemitic Father Charles Coughlin and the swaggering, dictatorial populist Louisiana Senator Huey "The Kingfish" Long ascended in the U.S., Lewis cobbled together a dystopian near-future for his novel It Can't Happen Here, which envisioned a Kingfish-like politician winning the presidency on promises to lift up the Forgotten Men — the white working class — and installing a totalitarian regime wrapped in Americana, including a Gestapo-type force called the Minute Men.

.....(snip).....

Amid the constant chaos of the Trump administration — the Mueller probe, the Twitter bellicosity, the impeachment and Trump's recriminations — we became inured to these encroachments on the rule of law and numb to statements and deeds that would've generated weeks of outrage in any prior administration but barely register now. (The president has been relentlessly pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that a media critic is a murderer, and it's little more than background noise.)

Throughout history, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written, authoritarians try to do three things: capture the referees, sideline key players, and change the rules. Trump has done all three: He's tried to capture the referees by purging his administration of the disloyal, most recently inspectors general who conducted investigations he didn't like. He's sought to sideline key players by intimidating the media, including by bullying the Post Office to charge Amazon more because he has a grudge against the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. And he's tried to change the rules by claiming that efforts to expand voter access are rigged against him and having Attorney General William Barr game the justice system for his allies. ................(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/the-f-word-it-can-happen-here/Content?oid=24699144