I have found this week to be very depressing and by this week, of course, I mean last week (Sunday 6 through Saturday 12 May). And, it hasn’t really let up so far this week, either. While there have been terrible terrible things happening like the Ol’ Pussy Grabber violating the Iran deal and pulling pulled further into the North Korean sucker punch. We had the Schneiderman (doesn’t that seem like so long ago) accusations and resignation. The Gina Haspel nomination to lead the CIA. The NRA convention and appointment of super-traitor Ollie North as its president. And the weird mishegas around John McCain’s slow impending death by brain cancer. How fucked up are we when we cannot even get the death of an esteemed public figure and war hero like John McCain right. I mean, there was no end to the absolute shitty news coming out last week and into this.

So of course, before I could hit the publish button, we have to have a massacre in Gaza during the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. A portent of things to come.

And in my morose review of the week’s news, I said to myself, This is fascism. I don’t mean Nazism, I mean fascism, which is slightly different, but, as it turns out, it is difficult to completely tease the two apart and indeed to define fascism very accurately because garsh darn it, for all his other crimes against humanity, Mussolini didn’t do a very good job of defining it when he invented it.

Defining Fascism

As noted by Jessie Szalzy over at LiveScience, fascism is hard and confusing because it doesn’t seem to mean the same thing to everyone. Okay, she said it was complex because people relate it to different things. If you Venn diagrammed the definitions, the overlapping space would be occupied with authoritarianism and aggressive nationalism.

Okay, so maybe Madeleine Albright was right, we aren’t there yet, but ya gotta admit it ain’t for not trying. This is a government — the GOP is up to their anus in complacency or rather have filled themselves with an enema of complacency, just don’t be around when they try to empty that sucker out and convince us all that they weren’t because that shit is gonna be ugly — that is hellbent on destroying the institutions of our democracy. Both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are busy studying the buffing of their nails while Kevin Nunes, Trey Gowdy, Chuck Grassley, and Ron Johnson are all trying to tear down the FBI, the IC, and the judiciary as quickly as they can. This is a government that is quickly trying to turn ICE into storm troopers and suppress minorities and women as much as possible.

If we haven’t yet, we are working on getting for ourselves an authoritarian government. The GOP has the presidency and the Congress and is appointing and approving judges as quickly as they were obstructing Obama. They will have a judiciary that has a very good chance of upholding their fascist laws, policies, regulations, and decisions.

Okay, so back to what is fascism. Robert Paxton has defined fascism as a form of political practice distinctive to the 20th century that arouses popular enthusiasm by sophisticated propaganda techniques for an anti-liberal, anti-socialist, violently exclusionary, expansionist nationalist agenda, and he should know, he’s been studying fascism since before Mussolini birthed it over there to the Columbia University Department of History. According to Paxton, fascism’s only defining principle is to make the nation stronger, bigger, and more successful — Make America Grate, Again, anyone? — so anything that achieves that end, is justified. Hold this thought, because we’ll circle back here and apply the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s narcissism and the GOP’s lust for a permanent majority to the strengthening of the nation.

“Mobilizing Passions” Through Feelings

Apparently, once you start stripping Hitler Nazism from fascism, you’re left with more emotional sludge, empty grand gestures, and propagandistic lying rhetoric. Paxton outlines the seven feelings that fascists use to “mobilize passions” — shout at your computer screen wherever you are if you think any one of these sounds like the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and the current state of the United Fucking States of Fucking Stupid, okay? Just start shouting. I promise it will (a) be okay and (b) you won’t be sorry you did:

The primacy of the group. Supporting the group feels more important than maintaining either individual or universal rights.

Haven’t I been on about groupthink recently? This is nothing more than groupthink writ large. And, if groupthink will land any group so stupid as to not guard against it in some deep shit, think about what it will do to the most powerful country in the history of the world once the government starts down this road in earnest. You thought W’s Iraq War was bad, brother, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We could easily be fighting a two front war in Iran and North Korea this time next year. This is nothing to fuck around with.

Are you screaming with me? Can you hear it? The sound of my one or maybe even two readers screaming in the distance? Is someone coming up all concerned and asking after you and they start screaming, too? Did you make a friend? I told you it would be worth it.

I can’t get over how much the whole seven feelings to “mobilize passions” sounds like conservative Christian voters shooting themselves and anyone nearby in the genitals because of their values. They see it as their place to suffer for the greater good of corporate America, that corporations would not be the cause of Cancer Alley because that would be bad for business, that liberals are promoting the interests of the brown other unfairly over theirs, and that they live godly lives and voting in a godly way is more important than living in Cancer Alley and letting some dirty stinking brown get something that they didn’t rightly deserve or earn.

Another thing that Paxton notes is that fascist regimes routinely violated any pre-ascendancy promises once ensconced in their governmental positions in favor of  suppressed individual liberties, imprisoned opponents, forbade strikes, authorized unlimited police power in the name of national unity and revival, and committed military aggression. And looky who is suppressing individual liberties and especially the vote long before the Ol’ Pussy Grabber ever ascended to office, threatening to lock up political opponents, busting unions long before the 2016 election, has ICE running roughshod over people and local governments, and threatening military aggression against Iran and North Korea.

Ya still think that this administration isn’t teetering on the brink of fascism? Well, let’s consider the eerie similarities between fascist economics and the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s economic goals.

Fascist Economics

The LiveScience article cites The Library of Economics and Liberty as describing fascist economics as socialism with a capitalist veneer since they promise to eliminate to the private sector without ever really eliminating it… remember how Mercedes Benz was nationalized by Nazi Germany? Of course not since they weren’t. As it turns out most fascist regimes exist to promote large private corporations and steer national wealth towards them through government contracts and eliminating smaller competitors. Big German companies like BMW, Bayer, Krupps, and others all supported Hitler. Big business directed the German economic policy.

Who sits in the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s cabinet? Wall Street lobbyists, bankers, and other tycoons. Who really is directing US economic and foreign policy? The Ol’ Pussy Grabber has started an easily won trade war to benefit big oil, steel, and coal in the name of self-sufficiency or autarky. And, while mutually self-serving there is the occasional use of teeth in the felating that goes on between big business, conservatives, and fascist governments.

In essence, a fascist government is one that exists to support big national corporations. With the rise of globalism, now it is transnational corporations as long as the emoluments keep flowing, the government will keep selling the populace like a cheap natural resource to industry. Look at Scott Pruitt’s EPA.

Fascist Conditions

Don’t jump on the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s GOP government is fascist just yet because there is yet another similarity to review. Fascist governments seem to rise when there is a combination of fragile national identity — the US has been taken advantage of by our allies for too long, we’ve been losing for too long, we’ve been disrespected because our government has been giving it away — coupled with cynicism about the government’s effectiveness in addressing the needs of the common patriot. What has been the Repube’s stock-in-trade line since Reagan?

It is almost enough to get you believin’ in conspiracy theories. It’s like the Repbubes have been setting the stage for a fascist authoritarian government for the past forty years. or more. The Repubes no longer talk of wanting a permanent majority, but they keep trying to engineer it through gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, and stacking the judiciary. They have engaged in very anti-democratic means to achieve and maintain their majorities in state governments and at the federal level.

The Ol’ Pussy Grabber is an extreme narcissist who cannot distinguish between his needs and the country’s. Whatever makes him great will make the country grate. Whatever hurts him will hurt the country. If he makes $500 million off of Chinese investments in his Indonesian development, then the country just made $500 million. He is incapable of distinguishing between the country and himself.

If the goal of fascism is to strengthen and expand the country, the extreme narcissist as leader will see that strengthening and expansion as praise for him or herself. People who are driven by this type of radical nationalism will be attracted to the narcissistic easily manipulated leader as a way of advancing their own agenda.

For the Ol’ Pussy Grabber fascism is the logical ideological place to be. It is what he will be most comfortable with since it suits all of his interests: self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, self-advancement.

The delusion of the self and country being one in the same is destructive in and of itself and can only end badly for everyone, but the Repubes desire for complete authoritarian rule just magnifies those destructive tendencies and makes them worse. We cannot conceive of a world without the US. We cannot conceive of a world without the US leading it. We cannot conceive of a world without the US being a democracy. But we are rapidly approaching a time when the US may cease to exist.

Make no mistake, the Repubes are evolving into a fascist party. They do not respect democracy and they do not respect the electorate. The only solution is to vote them out of existence.