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The language should seem familiar: "I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." That, of course, is -- and in our moment in America, could only be -- not just any old autocrat-in-the-making, but The Donald himself. You know, the guy who, as he's indicted for one set of possible crimes after another, eternally scarfs up all the headlines, while his fervent supporters, a significant chunk of what was once known as the Republican (but is now the Trumpublican) Party, seem unwilling to give an inch in backing him.
While we're still far from election 2024, 16 months in which anything could happen (including all those Wendy's burgers doing him in), it does seem all too likely that he'll win the presidential nomination from, yes, his party hands down, or do I mean up? And though right now, it also seems as if he could fail in his bid for a second presidential term in office, don't count on that either. All you have to do is imagine the economy taking a nosedive or our aging president doing something similar during the election campaign.
Oh, and were he to lose another presidential bid, don't assume that January 6th was an anomaly or that, the next time around, Trump himself might not personally head for Capitol Hill. We are all, in fact, entering a new and ever grimmer era in American history, on a distinctly new and ever more ominous planet. In that context, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon bring up a genuinely dreaded word in the American lexicon: fascism. Tom
Yes, We Have Home-Grown Fascists
And Now They're Beginning to Say the Quiet Part Out Loud
One day when I was about six, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger.
"What is it, Papa?"
"It's a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed."
This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being the daughter of a Jewish father and gentile mother, I was myself a demi-semite, I was worried. I knew that these people wanted to kill my father, but with a typical child-centered focus, I really wanted to know whether the gentile half of my heredity would protect me in the event of a new Holocaust.
"Would they kill me, too?" I asked.
Yes, he told me, they would if they could. But he then reassured me that such people would never actually have the power to do what they wanted to. It couldn't happen here.
I must admit that I'm grateful my father died before Donald Trump became president, before tiki-torch-bearing Nazi wannabes seeking to "Unite the Right" marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting "Jews will not replace us!" before one of them drove his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, and before President Trump responded to the whole event by declaring that "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."
Are Queer People the New Jews?
Maybe the grubby little group behind the tracts my father and I saw that day in New York would have let me live. Maybe not. In those days home-grown fascists were rare and so didn't have that kind of power.
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