A Republican Congressional candidate called Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need today.” In a 2021 radio interview, Carl Paladino, the former Republican candidate for New York State Governor explained, “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.”
The Texas Republican Party platform recently declared Joseph Biden’s election in 2020 “illegitimate,” opposed any legislative restrictions on the “wearing of arms,” rebuked one of the state’s Republican Senators for supporting very moderate gun regulation, branded homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” called for a repeal of the federal income tax, and demanded that students “learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child” and requires them to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
Crazy can be very dangerous.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a leading expert on the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy between World War I and II. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Snyder argued that Russia today, under Vladimir Putin, qualifies as a fascist state.
Snyder specifically identifies Russia’s friends, Putin’s international allies, as leaning towards fascism, including Marine Le Pen of France, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News, because they are enemies of democracy.
Others have defined the fascist threat more broadly.
The United States now has a significant bitter ethno-nationalist white Christian movement that considers itself aggrieved by Jews, Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants who they claim want to replace them as the dominant group. It has a political party and cult-like figures who manipulate this group to hold onto power and block any attempts to address major social and economic issues. It has corporate interests that support the cult figures and their efforts to stir up mass support because it is in the interests of these wealthy capitalists to cut taxes and eliminate government regulations. So far the United States ethno-nationalism has not turned to militarism, but it includes armed groups that threaten military action in the name of 2nd Amendment rights.
Isn’t Donald Trump and MAGA’s claim that they will make America great again a reference to a mystical past golden age, an age dominated by white Christian men, that they hope to restore? Aren’t these similar to the claims made by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the 1930s and Vladimir Putin today? Yes fascism is afoot in Putin’s Russia. But it is also a threat in Trump’s America. As we saw on January 6, 2021, crazy can be very dangerous.