I think we can put a peg in this. For years everyone’s being “we’re going fascist.”

It’s done. It’s over. The US has gone fascist.

  • Purges of the military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to install personal loyalists;
  • Troops in the capital, armed, with law enforcement rights, and a promise to do the same in other cities;
  • Vast personal corruption by the man at the top, including blackmailing companies into personal bribes;
  • Masked men who often don’t show badges or warrants roaming the lands, forcing people to prove their citizenship (and often ignoring proof) and seizing people and throwing them into unmarked vans;
  • Full executive immunity;
  • A supreme court which has or appears poised to legalize all of the above; and,
  • Threatening ABC and NBCs broadcast licenses.
  • Yada, yada (add your examples in comments)

There isn’t much point in dancing around this. Perhaps there’s a technical case that this isn’t fascism, but some other form of nasty right wing government ideology, but whatever it is, the constitution and the important pieces of the constitution and bill of rights are dead or dying, including habeas corpus, the principle that no one’s above the law, the idea that troops shouldn’t be used domestically, etc, etc.

This has been coming for a loooonnnnngggg time, and plenty of people have warned about it. The fascism experts from Harvard who fled the country, much as many sneered at them, weren’t wrong in their diagnosis. Remember, a lot of people who left it too late to flee Germany (or Pinochet’s Chile, or your choice of example) got a permanent plot of land, a long government paid for stay in a small room or in Argentina a helicopter trip ending with a spectacular fall

(Pinochet is notable for training dogs to rape the wives of his opponents. Hopefully Trump won’t sink quite that low.)

I would suggest that the UK is almost there, and so is Germany. The EU as a whole, with its growing habit of just making protest and unwelcome parties illegal is trending hard. (Or, if you’re lucky, they’ll just make you a non-person, making it illegal for any bank or credit company to do business with you, or anyone to give you money.)

I don’t expect to spend a lot of time on this, though I’ll keep covering it. It’s been coming for a long time, it’s not a surprise and in some ways it’s not news. But a lot of people with suffer as a result.

For those who say “but Kamala” I note only that to win she had to either:

  1. Not say that she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden; or,
  2. Come out against genocide.

Apparently supporting genocide was a red line for her, and fascism in the US a secondary issue. Neoliberals will always choose fascism over anything remotely left wing, including the left wing value of opposing a new Holocaust.

This is where we are.

 

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