When the idealist is defeated, they can at least tell themselves they lost fighting for what they believed.

THESE creatures however will just be losers that betrayed their nation for the lies of a madman… history will spit on them.

Nice post, RL. It takes courage to hang on to going high when they go low, but I think it’s going to pay off. I sniff the zeitgeist, and I sense reverse peristalsis in the air. America’s working on puking up the poison, but it’s going to be rough, like a cat bringing up a hairball.

They gerrymander, suppress the vote, stoke racial divisions, buy the politicians, sell the masses imaginary fears…

If we play by the same rules they do, then they win… because that will mean both sides decide that democracy is broken and must be replaced with… something- and if that happens, no matter which side ‘wins’, we all lose.

We can only win by showing that our democracy can overcome the barbarians- can humiliate them…

Best case scenario is we crush the fascists at the ballot box and in the jury box- make their acts a subject of scorn, so they don’t dare show that face in public again for a generation or two… like we have done in the past.

Make Racists Scared Again…

We may be the majority, but we constrain ourselves to operate within the facts, the bounds of the law, and our constitutional democracy- the barbarians at our gates have no such restraints hobbling them.

They are now systematically dismantling our institutions and looting our national treasures- gleefully sacrificing the vulnerable people they deem unworthy in order to enrich the already wealthy.

This gets far worse before it gets better- or before it gets worse than we can possibly imagine….

The boundary between economic hardship and status threat is very thin and porous, and mostly one of perspective.

My viewpoint is essentially a Marxist one, yours seems to owe more to Dr Phil, or Joyce Brothers. Sorry–I don’t really believe that, I just couldn’t resist the zinger.

Marx wasn’t very good at coming up with any cures, but he was spot on when it came to diagnosing the disease and its causes. I am an economic reductionist, and like being a materialist, a mechanist, it may have its inherent biases; but at least it is consistent and reproducible in the laboratory.

Speaking of filters, here’s a neat trick. Get yourself two pairs of cheap or used Polaroid sunglasses you can afford to sacrifice for science. Remove all four lenses from the frames. Pick any two lenses and place them in line, and rotate one relative to the other until the light transmission through both lenses drops down to virtually nothing. You can use clothespins to hold the lenses in place and in line with one another.

You know the conventional explanation: the vertical and horizontal polarization planes cancel each other out and remove all the light coming through both lenses. Hardly any gets through, and if any light is visible at all, it is due to minor manufacturing inconsistencies in the lenses.

Now comes the fun part. Take a third lens and stick it in between the first two. You can now see clearly through all three lenses! How can this be?

So what does that prove? That there are no explanations, only analogies and metaphors.

After the election, there was an immediate, premature, consensus that what motivated Trump’s knuckle-draggers was “economic anxiety”, the belief that they were all people who’d seen their jobs go away and their incomes drop.

But more thoughtful study of the issue, as reported recently in multiple studies (including Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote in PNAS), concludes that it isn’t money that motivates them, it’s fear of losing status as a white person. That is, the foundational narrative is the one about whites being somehow a threatened minority in an increasingly brown world.

You’re also not wrong about ethnonationalism being “a factor that is deliberately seeded and aggravated”. But I don’t think it’s something that was implanted whole and complete, rather, demagogues like Trump skillfully tease out the existing resentments and exacerbate them, and helpfully identify the villain who must be exterminated.

Trumpers are the eternal useful idiots, whose natural character flaws make them the perfect tool for rightwing authoritarians.

It works both ways, though. Old Italian buildings are often full of surprises. Years ago, when workmen were remodeling the old L’Unione Italiana (a 19th century Italian workers’ mutual aid society) building in Tampa, they knocked down a wall and found hidden behind it one of the largest surviving collections of Anarchist literature in the world.

You know what an Anarchist is, don’t you? A Libertarian Socialist, that is, a Libertarian who believes big business is just as evil as big government.

About two months ago, one of the workers renovating the old Italian Embassy building at 16th and Fuller streets NW was surprised when part of the exterior wall started to crumble as he cleaned it. He was even more startled by what he found behind it: an engraving in Latin and a battered pair of bas-relief sculptures of . . . well, what exactly?

The Latin was the easy part: “AEDES AD MCMXXV AERE PVBL EXSTRVCTAE” translates as “a building constructed with public funds in 1925.”

The sculptures were a little tougher. Whatever they were, they looked as if someone had taken a pickax to them in an attempt to obscure their original form. But if you know a little about Roman history, Italian history or world history, you can tell what they are — or were: bundles of wooden rods bound around an ax blade.

They are fasces. From them, we get the word fascism.

Substitute Blacks, Mexicans and Muslims for Jews, and Liberals for Communists and suddenly history (even if it doesn’t exactly repeat itself) starts rhyming.

Trump and his followers may not openly sell themselves as Nazis, but American Nazis see them and welcome them as Nazis. And Trump has gone on record as implying there is an equivalency to fascist and antifascist extremists and he and his followers have done nothing to distance themselves from the former.

I’m glad we have “media and progressives shining spotlights on them”, because Conservatives in general and the GOP in particular seem determined not to. You’re right, RL. This is no longer an armchair game for history buffs, There are political movements out there determined to see something very much like the Third Reich installed in this country. That’s not quite the same as saying its probable, but it is certainly not impossible. All the prerequisites and precursors are in place, and they appear to be gaining ground.