I have mentioned this before but I want to put it out there again in case some of you missed it. This issue in The New Republic on what an American fascism would look like is a must read. It’s worth the subscription.
Here’s an excerpt of editor Michael Tomasky’s intro which begins by noting that there is a lot of reluctance in our political discourse to draw this comparison as if it’s hysterical to acknowledge the threat:
We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
We unreservedly choose the latter course. And so we have assembled herein some of our leading intellectual historians of fascism; a member of the fourth estate who learned firsthand what the Trump lash feels like; a leading expert on civil-military relations; a great Guatemalan American novelist with a deep understanding of immigrants’ lives; one of our most incisive cultural critics; and a man with all-too-real experience in living under a notorious authoritarian regime. The scenarios they describe are certainly grim. We dare you to say, after reading these pieces, that they are impossible.
There is also:
The Permanent Counterrevolution: On politics and government in a fascist America by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
The End of Civic Compassion: On education in a fascist America by Jason Stanley
Each one is extremely well-written and illuminating. And, needless to say, chilling.
We can’t look away.