America’s democracy has been deeply flawed from the get-go and the Republican Party hasn’t been the “party of Abraham Lincoln” since the 1960s when it merged with George Wallace’s Dixiecrats and their Klu Klux Klan racist, fascist, and nativist beliefs. In the 1970s, Republican President Richard Nixon broke the law and acted like a dictator; the Bush regime unleashed a $6.5-trillion war spree and deregulated Wall Street until it wrecked the global economy, and in 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, John McCain chose wacko gun-lover and extremist Sarah Palin as a running mate. Then in 2016 Republicans picked New York punchline and law-bending despot, Donald Trump, as their leader and won.
At first, he was ridiculed but then it wasn’t so funny when he demonstrated he could tap into the underlying fascist and racist pathologies of the nation. Jokes about him were eerily reminiscent of a comment written in 1933 by an otherwise astute foreign correspondent demeaning Adolf Hitler. “This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.”
Today, America’s democratic structure is being openly eroded by an oligarchy of racists and fascists. To some, this is a surprise, mostly because America’s history is gloriously misrepresented and the country’s powerful undertow of anarchy, racism, and fascism has been glossed over. But consider its roots. The country began after a bunch of hot-headed tax evaders threw the tea in the harbor. Its constitution was written by a gaggle of educated slave owners. Ten of the first dozen Presidents of the United States owned slaves. Even after slaves were emancipated after the Civil War, nothing much changed for a century until the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Dishonest history is dangerous. The reality is that throughout its existence America has teetered on the edge of fascism, regionally and nationally, and now alarmingly so. I’m not one to throw around word bombs like fascism, but it applies. The definition of fascism is a movement backed by those who support far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of opponents and autocratic government. To convert this from a movement into regime-change, certain conditions must be met such as a demoralized nation, a collapsed economy, a non-existent opposition, propaganda, and military support. That’s not the case here. For now.
Racism and fascism have been rampant and continue. In 1860, there was one slave per person in the Deep South and racial abuse and apartheid everywhere else. Besides that, the country was like Dodge City without Wyatt Earp. There were gangs, mafias, and violence. Many states and municipalities were run by crooked mayors, legislators, city councils, and robber barons. The graft was political currency and the rule of law dispensable. Arms were everywhere.
This maelstrom was punctuated by a hideous Civil War, fought along moral lines, which was immediately followed by genocidal Western Indian Wars, which weren’t moral in any sense. Led by a bloodthirsty Union Army General from Massachusetts, Philip Sheridan, the wars exterminated and relocated America’s indigenous people – while annihilating their food supply, the buffalo – in order to clear the land for railway expansion and white settlers. The buffalo head, which was used on the American nickel coin until 1938, commemorated this slaughter.
The aftermath of these wars was as unsuccessful as have been America’s 20-year occupation and nation-building attempts in Afghanistan or Iraq. Native Americans were shunted onto reservations or starvation, and the post-war Reconstruction of the South didn’t bring about reform or advancement for newly-freed slaves as promised. That is because the minute the North’s army withdrew, an American terrorist group formed and called itself the Klu Klux Klan.
The Klan grew out of a social club of bitter ex-Confederate soldiers, hardened by their fight against the emancipation of the blacks and hatred for federal intervention. When they met to terrorize the place, they donned “uniforms” consisting of white gowns with hoods that symbolized the “ghosts” of fallen Confederate soldiers. They intimidated and murdered black and white folks, derailed emancipation, took over governance, flouted laws, and still exist. However, today’s “Klan” members wear suits and ties, hold public office throughout the South and the West, and have become the poisonous tail that wags the dog, otherwise known as the Republican Party.
The 19th-century conditions that gave birth to the Klu Klux Klan in the South and beyond, now fuel the Grand Old Party and are classic fascism. Jason Stanley with Yale University, an expert on the causes of fascism, explains: “If you have a dominant group that feels it was robbed of a glorious past or that it has to be ashamed of its past, that is often the source of the committed fascist movements. Fascism is usually a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, and leftists.”
Doesn’t this sound like a Trump speech or one made by Confederate President Jefferson Davis or Alabama’s racist George Wallace, an avowed segregationist? Or sound like that Republican blow-hard next door or in your office or at the local bar? The point is that Trump didn’t forge a new belief system. He merely tapped into an existing one then amplified it with evangelical rhetoric to grab power. The base has been there forever. It just needed a Fuhrer.
The result is that Trump’s success has fostered hundreds more neo-fascist terrorist organizations such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, the American Nazi Party, Wolverine Watchmen, scads of para-military militias scattered throughout the country, Christian Identity and a host of anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-woke, anti-black gangs.
And now this citizen “army” has an arsenal of new weaponry such as social media, Russian assistance, and a Republican Party controlled by the 16 states of the Deep South. These jurisdictions have gerrymandered and manipulated the country's democratic machinery, vote as a bloc within the Republican Party, and control the agenda.
In essence, America is no longer a democracy. The 16 Southern states have a population of 125.58 million or 38.3 percent of the total. But of the 211 Republicans in the House, 121 are from the South or 57 percent; and of the 50 Republicans in the Senate, 26 are from the South or 52 percent. Not all are fascist and racist, but most are.
Trump also used his four years to capture the judiciary and electoral process. He appointed three Supreme Court Justices and replaced 226 Federal Court judges, outpacing, in one term, his two-term predecessors. He and his fellow Republicans have also thrown out Democratic state legislatures, state-level attorneys general, sheriffs, and thousands of electoral adjudicators —- from those who serve on election commissions to lower-level officials who supervise polling operations such as voter identification procedures, balloting processes, appeals, and recounts. This is in preparation for the 2022 mid-terms and beyond.
“Donald is a fascist, and the Republicans are an autocratic, anti-democratic, counter-majoritarian party that would be perfectly happy to establish some kind of apartheid in this country,” said Trump’s niece Mary Trump in a fiery interview recently with Germany’s Der Spiegel to promote her latest book "The Reckoning: America's Trauma and Finding a Way To Heal."
“They are actively trying to destroy our democracy. If they win back the House in 2022, it would be fatal to the American experiment. I wouldn’t be surprised if they make Donald, two years before the Presidential election, Speaker of the House. And then there will never be another Democrat allowed to win an election,” she said.
Trump, like any Fuhrer worth his salt, is a genius at marketing and appears at rallies where he rants and raves like a political Elmer Gantry. Even out of office, and deprived of social media due to bans imposed on him for inciting violence, he continues to work behind the scenes effectively through autocratic understudies like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and hundreds if not thousands more.
“The Democrats don't understand the seriousness of the threat,” said Mary Trump. “They are playing by rules in a rulebook that the Republicans lit on fire. There are no rules anymore. They need to start fighting like their lives depend on it. But they're just not willing to do that. There is an unwillingness – also in the U.S. media – to use the kind of language that is accurate and necessary to get people to understand the seriousness of the threat.”
Her warnings must be heeded but aren’t even republished in the mainstream press. It’s about the planned takeover of the United States by fascists and racists who would claw back all the hard-won victories that have also made the country a place where equality, opportunity, liberty, education, and public safety exist and are underpinned by laws. Their first coup d’etat attempt flopped on January 6, but there will be more.
And eventually, if unimpeded, they will win.
My newsletters will arrive in your inbox Monday and Thursday mornings.
IMPORTANT: When you sign up please add dianefrancis@substack.com to your contact list or the newsletter will be blocked by your spam function.
“The Democrats don't understand the seriousness of the threat,”
The GOP announced to the world 20 years ago that they were planning a soft coup when they published Redmap. The reaction of the elite was much the same back thean as now, yawn, nothing to worry about.
Very worrying but much truth and social media a big contributed.