So this is how it happens.
In the ashes of Europe after World War II, the free world soon began to wonder: How could a nation of proud people turn complete control of its society over to a tyrant, a despot, a man whose reckless ambition would spread carnage and suffering across the globe?
How?
We are, of course, familiar with the story.
Adolf Hitler rose to prominence behind a relatively small band of political extremists called the National Socialist Party, better known as the Nazis. At the time of his entrance into the national political scene, he was dismissed as something of a joke, “the little corporal,” and not considered much of a threat, even after he emerged to win election as Chancellor in 1933, taking advantage of a fragmented political system in Germany struggling to overcome the crippling effects of World War I.
He might have been merely a footnote to German history, a Rutherford B. Hayes in American terms, without his singular talent for capitalizing of fear, anger and a deep-seated nationalism that fired the imagination of everyday Germans who never imagined that were entrusting their fate to a mad man.
Hitler grew his base by scapegoating other Germans, first the communists/socialists and later the Jews, inciting the masses with a vow to Make Germany Great Again.
Political opponents were thrown in jail. Undesirables — gays, intellectuals, people of non-German descent, were banished, imprisoned or murdered. Newspapers that protested these outrages were discredited and then shut down, and a state media emerged to take its place.
Within a year, the nation’s constitution had been changed, installing a one-party dictatorship.
We know now that most of the German people at the time of Hitler’s ascension were not Nazis and would have been horrified at the inhumanity that their misguided support of this despot would set in motion.
Yet history would not hold them blameless. Hitler could not have happened without the support of well-intentioned, though tragically misguided “good citizens.” It remains Germany’s historic shame.
For seven decades now, Nazi Germany remained as a cautionary tale to guard a free people against self-imposed tyranny disguised as patriotism.
The free world — especially America, as the leader of the free world — had always heeded that warning.
Until Tuesday.
Donald Trump is the modern incarnation of Hitler and America awakes today at the dawning of American Fascism.
In a single misguided moment, America has abdicated its role a leader of the free world, and who is there to take its place?
Those who might dismiss this as hysterics, should consider the disturbing parallels.
Like Hitler, Trump burst onto the national political scene as a comic figure, a punch-line and was, therefore, dangerously underestimated.
But still waters run deep and behind the buffoonery, Trump had tapped into a ugly undercurrent of white nationalism so disturbing that America was shocked by his stunning ascension to the presidency.
Like Hitler, he solidified his base by making enemies of neighbors — Muslim Americans, Latinos, LGBT, the media, the educated. Lies were either ignored or accepted as fact. Deep flaws in character and a spectacular ignorance of policy, be it foreign or domestic, were ignored under the pitifully vague promise to “Make America Great Again.”
This morning, ignorance is a virtue, intolerance a mark of purity.
A divided country, as Hitler well understood, is easily conquered and the institutions that Americans have always relied on to be a safeguard against such madness are today, in shambles.
The Democratic Party has been rendered irrelevant. The media that might stir the conscience of America is scorned and derided even as Trump threatens to change the libel laws that have always guaranteed a free press, one of the pillars of our form of government.
The Republican Party seems poised to make a dramatic shift to the radical right and the voices who might temper extremism in the party risk alienation. The “new” Republican Party will survive not as a restraint on excess, but as an enabler of it.
This morning, that radicalized Republican Party holds control of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and, soon, the Supreme Court. On the state level, the Republican Party has control of a majority of the governors’ offices and state-houses through the nation.
We are a one-party autocracy. There is nothing now to stand in its way.
Dark, shameful days lie on our national horizon and the people who history will again judge to be most culpable are all around us — our friends, neighbors, family members. Even ourselves — good though terribly misguided and manipulated Americans.
So this is how it happens.
The era of American Fascism has begun.
God help us.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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