ABSOLUTELY! We have been far too patient with the forces of white Supremacy from the beginning in this country. From the founding documents where we had to remove the positions against slavery to keep the slave states on board to the creation of the electoral college, allowing monuments to and bases named for confederates who fought against the U.S.A. to the southern myth that the Civil War was the war of northern aggression. We need to stop tip-toeing around this. America cannot achieve full greatness while refusing to acknowledge being birthed from our origional sin of racism. It's not ok.
Not-so-strange coincidence: I've been working on a piece titled "So Let's Talk About Fascism (Everybody Else Is, Right?)." In it I refer to Jim Crow as "fascism's first cousin." Academic refugees from Nazi Germany who wound up teaching in the South, often at HBCUs, saw and were startled by the connection. A member of my writers' group suggested that by definition fascism needs a single strongman at the top, so the Jim Crow South didn't qualify as fascist. The MAGA movement and the current GOP do qualify, with Trump as the strongman. I agree that Trump is a fascist, to the extent that he has any ideology at all, but I have a hard time seeing him as a strongman in the mold of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. He's more a means to an end for the men behind him, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Project 2025 crowd, and the rest of them: they don't have the charisma to rally great crowds or the votes to get into office legally, so they need a Trump. Whether they could control him if he got elected, I don't know and I don't think we're going to find out. But the odds look better than they were for the German conservatives in the early 1930s, if only because Hitler was 44 in 1933 while Trump is now 78.
People think they know Trump. The people that are concerned about 'Fascism' are not enough to defeat him. Harris needed to convince people she was better on bread-and-butter issues, and, perhaps because she is an attorney and prosecutor, she has not focused on that. Most voters aren't concerned with civics, and they are used to Trump's ranting. I am as depressed about this as anyone, but I won't overestimate the depth of American perceptiveness. Food prices, housing availability, car and gas prices, wage rates, these things people illogically expect politicians to "do something about". When Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest", he was talking about "The People". I hope Harris gets elected, but you and I know, it shouldn't be close, but it will be.
ABSOLUTELY! We have been far too patient with the forces of white Supremacy from the beginning in this country. From the founding documents where we had to remove the positions against slavery to keep the slave states on board to the creation of the electoral college, allowing monuments to and bases named for confederates who fought against the U.S.A. to the southern myth that the Civil War was the war of northern aggression. We need to stop tip-toeing around this. America cannot achieve full greatness while refusing to acknowledge being birthed from our origional sin of racism. It's not ok.
Not-so-strange coincidence: I've been working on a piece titled "So Let's Talk About Fascism (Everybody Else Is, Right?)." In it I refer to Jim Crow as "fascism's first cousin." Academic refugees from Nazi Germany who wound up teaching in the South, often at HBCUs, saw and were startled by the connection. A member of my writers' group suggested that by definition fascism needs a single strongman at the top, so the Jim Crow South didn't qualify as fascist. The MAGA movement and the current GOP do qualify, with Trump as the strongman. I agree that Trump is a fascist, to the extent that he has any ideology at all, but I have a hard time seeing him as a strongman in the mold of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. He's more a means to an end for the men behind him, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Project 2025 crowd, and the rest of them: they don't have the charisma to rally great crowds or the votes to get into office legally, so they need a Trump. Whether they could control him if he got elected, I don't know and I don't think we're going to find out. But the odds look better than they were for the German conservatives in the early 1930s, if only because Hitler was 44 in 1933 while Trump is now 78.
Trump is most definitely a Fascist! His rally in NY City sounds like an old KKK rally!
People think they know Trump. The people that are concerned about 'Fascism' are not enough to defeat him. Harris needed to convince people she was better on bread-and-butter issues, and, perhaps because she is an attorney and prosecutor, she has not focused on that. Most voters aren't concerned with civics, and they are used to Trump's ranting. I am as depressed about this as anyone, but I won't overestimate the depth of American perceptiveness. Food prices, housing availability, car and gas prices, wage rates, these things people illogically expect politicians to "do something about". When Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest", he was talking about "The People". I hope Harris gets elected, but you and I know, it shouldn't be close, but it will be.