Leaning toward fascism?

 Stop pretending.  We're there.

Even if one doesn’t subscribe to the narrative that Donald Trump is dismantling this 248-year-old experiment in self-governance, the question should not be dismissed. It’s possible that the current political climate is just a phase the country is going through. Still, it should have a name. What do we call it?

The answer is “fascism.”

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[F]ascism is loosely described as “a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government.” Merriam-Webster offers a more precise definition:

“Fascism: a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

One million years from now, if an intellectually curious 16th-grader at the Musk-Bezos Institute of Caucasian Science asked its artificially intelligent, virtual reality, CRT-free social studies instructor to describe the American government from Jan. 20, 2025 until the moment I typed these words, it will cite page 217 of Robert Paxton’s [2004] Anatomy of Fascism:

The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

America fits the description.

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Is there a definition or description that exists that objectively exonerates the current administration from allegations of fascism? Can you name a single one of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights that this two-month-old administration has not violated?

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I’m not even sure what more it would take to convince people of these facts. Would Trump have to repeatedly cast himself as a monarch, a dictator and a strongman? Would he have to say, “I alone can fix it”? What if he kept bringing up a third term? Who would you rather believe — facts or your lying president?

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I am not suggesting that everyone should just give up and let Trump have his way. However, the first step to winning any fight is acknowledging one’s opponent and what it will take to defeat them. And when it comes to this administration, it’s too late to prevent them from turning the government into a piggybank for his MAGA monarchy. Defeating him means defeating someone with unchecked authority who has every lever of the most violently powerful empire in the history of the world at his disposal.

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He has absolute control of a less perfect Union that cannot be saved. It can only be restored. As fragile and flawed as it was, I’d much rather live in a factory-refurbished democracy than a fascist ethno-theocracy.

  Contraband Camp

Me, too.