Fascism, 1: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

2. a political movement that employs the principles and methods of fascism, especially the one established by Mussolini in Italy, 1922-43. 

Meet the newly reconstructed Republican Party.

And read why fascism is not coming to America and why there are way too many Blacks, Asians, Hispanics,  Democrats, uppity women, progressives, liberals, Mexicans, and (gasp) socialists in America to kill or imprison. Besides, without them, what would they have to whine about on cable news?

_____

Yesterday, Media Matters reporters found a Facebook Post from Marjorie Taylor Greene that claimed the California wildfires were set by space solar company satellite lasers owned by the Rothchild’s, the Jewish  European Banking Family often referred to in anti-semitic conspiracy theories. I thought the Nazis had worn them out.

The post has been deleted.

This is the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia that Trump said he”loved” and who was just appointed to the House Education Committee.

I confessed that I laughed when I probably should have cried.

OK, I’m paying attention again; it was a nice respite.

I heard a Ukrainian refugee on the news the other day he was greatly alarmed by the Republican Party’s moral collapse in the face of Donald Trump’s threatened vengeance against free people. He said fascism could happen anywhere.

As a Jew, I understand the fear. Good people can be manipulated into doing awful things. It does happen. And it can happen.

But it won’t happen here. America is not like Ukraine,  Germany in the 1930s, Hungary or the Philippines, or Egypt.

The United States is unique because of its size and history. For one thing, more than two-thirds of the country are descended from people who came here from other countries.

Their families came here to be free and they know what it is like not to be free.

The country is crawling with independent women, blacks, immigrants, refugees, moderates, radical leftists, Democrats, and progressives.

It’s too late to kill all of us or send us away.

We have a deep and rich history in this country, not of kings and Lords and despots, but of ordinary people who get to decide who their leaders should be.

We have established roots as a free people (whites were, in any case) and have remained that way uninterrupted for more than 200 years.

Many conservative judges and Republican bureaucrats could not stomach what Trump and his groupies tried to do to the general election.

Last year was rough, but the other side fought back every step of the way.  The center held.

The entity that seeks to return America to a country led by and for Christian White People will need to bring an Army powerful enough and immoral enough to slaughter or contain tens of millions of people. Even China can’t and won’t do that.

Donald  Trump is not capable of that. He won’t leave the mirror on the wall long enough.

Donald Trump is a serial loser. He is great at disruption and bullying; He is an absolute disaster planner or conquerer. He lies too often to be good at it. He fights with emotion, never strategy or foresight.

He and the Republicans have taken the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower and transformed it – this began before Trump – into an extremist, deeply regressive, clearly bigoted, and conservative political party, composed almost entirely of aggrieved white Christians or disconnected working-class whites.

This conservative chapter of the party is over; the party is evolving into an unrepentant and quite openly White Nationalist Party fighting on behalf of what they perceive as white rights and entitlement. Trump is their sensei.

Their members threaten to hang, imprison or execute political opponents; they are enthusiastically suppressing Black voters again – reconstruction 2.0 –  lying about voting fraud and warring against people of color, refugees, and people from elsewhere, especially those “shithole” countries.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel winning columnist, says the G.O. P. “is stuck, probably irreversible, in a “doom loop of bizarro.” If the Trump-incited Capitol insurrection didn’t snap the party back to sanity – and it didn’t – nothing will.”

It isn’t clear yet, he added, who will face doom—the G.O.P as a significant and valuable political force, or America as we know it.

For me, it is way too soon to panic or start talking about the End of Days 0r  President Trump 2.0.  I can’t see how they can take all of us down with them. I don’t believe it is possible.

The party’s surrender to Trump sent shock waves of fear and anger through much of the country, but being perverse, I had a different idea.

If I wanted to conquer something, there is no shirttails on the planet I would avoid attaching myself to more than Donald Trump’s.

He is a fast ride to nowhere, certainly not the future.

We thought we were done with Trump for a while, and yet once again, he roared back against great odds. The gift that never stops giving.

Trump is serious, he has unleashed something awful in white, rural – not urban – America, and that is a fire that will have to burn itself out. He will not burn us all with it.

Perspective is important. He’s got the poor and disconnected chunk or our land. You cannot control America without also controlling its cities.

Trump is almost universally hated in every important urban center in America.

The Democratic Party represents more than 40 million more people than the Republican Party. The extreme – now extremist – ultra-conservative movement controls much of the courts and many legislatures. It has shown no scruples or ethics or reserve about suppressing voting rights, denying the validity of elections they don’t like,  and upsetting traditional political norms.

But that is not nearly enough to dismantle or destroy a civic structure as big and entrenched as ours.

The Grand Old Party is no longer grand; it has become a predominantly rural party now, shrinking its opportunities to expand and grow, even losing the suburbs that were their mainstay for decades.

Sadly, and somewhat related, rural America is bleeding, hemorrhaging jobs, farms, wealth,  hospitals and health care,  and opportunity.

Trump and the remnants of the Republican Party have abandoned the cities – too liberal, too diverse, and in so doing, chopped at least one of their legs off and a big piece of their future.

They are thriving in Majorie Taylor Green land, but there are not many people there.

That is not a democratic movement they are building; it is a rural and populist strain of American fascism.  They hate everyone’s rights but their own.

It won’t fly, not among individual citizens, not among the young, not among all those women and people of color, not among the all-powerful CEO’s who need open markets and stable governments to prosper.

Panic is pointless; perspective is precious. Please step back and think about it.

1.Donald Trump is powerful, resilient, and destructive. He is also erratic, self-destructive, and irrational. No one in our political history has risen faster or screwed up more dramatically.

He faces a half dozen civil and criminal charges and lawsuits.

He is in poor physical and mental health. You will not have him around to hate for long, and by them, the Republican Party will look like the CDC does now – broken, shell-shocked, traumatized.

By all odds, Trump could easily have been re-elected.

He blew it at every turn. Why, once he is out of office would he suddenly become rational, successful, and smart?

He is his own worst enemy and will stay that way. Being a loser has unraveled him, and living in Mar-a-Largo and golfing with Lindsey will not ravel him.

Like Dracula, Trump will need a silver bullet to do him in finally, but he is no saner and wiser now than he was when he had all that power. Turning the party over to him is a bad bet and a colossal mistake by the G.O.P.

This is short-term thinking of the worst kind. Trump will destroy them, as he has destroyed every person around him except for Ivanka and Jared.

If this election proved anything, America is a centrist, not an extremist nation. He lost, and if necessary, he will lose again. He’s good at it. He’s been doing it all of his life.

2.One of the great legacies of Donald Trump has been the creation and nourishment of powerful new liberal and democratic social movements in America.

Me Too, Black Lives Matter, the coming of age of suburban women, awakened real Republicans, moderates, liberals, and independents.

Think of what Stacey Abrams did before you cry in your soup. If it was possible to flip Georgia, anything is possible.

We are all given the gift of restoring our democracy to its true promise and finally making American authentically great, rather than just pretending to be.

3.The Democrat Party is enormously powerful, if sometimes muddled and anemic. There are a lot of clogged arteries in that party.

But there is a lot left.

It is the chosen political party in almost every great urban center in America,  from Austin to San Francisco to New York to Houston, Boston, and Seattle.

Those cities possess enormous cultural influence, powerful media,  great wealth, and every powerful stock and trade market in America. Conquering those cities, bending them to an extremist white nationalist agenda would be literally impossible, as well as profoundly stupid.

For four years, Trump’s personal police force, the ICE, tried to round up the millions of undocumented immigrants, most of them working in cities.

The effort was a failure, rejected by local governments, stymied by sanctuary cities, assaulted by mayors, local police chiefs, and governments.

No judge can manage a vast police bureaucracy from a desk in Texas, as we will learn.

Does Mitch McConnell or traumatized progressives think Black Lives Matter and Me Too, and the gay rights and anti-gun violence and climate relief movement are all going to melt away to take their lives and the country back to 1950?

Why would any rational and observant person think that is possible?

Tens of millions of Americans have a powerful sense of the importance of democracy and morality. As we just saw, they’re not about to give it up to Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, and they’ve already rejected Donald Trump.

4. Politics can’t be seen just as today’s bad news. As Trump demonstrates, politics rockets up and down and is never predictable. New leaders on both sides will soon emerge, almost surely with one or two new political parties.

They are the future of politics in America, people who will break the logjam and force both parties to talk and listen. Marjory Taylor Greene is the future of nothing but her own swollen ego.

We might evolve into a multi-party, parliamentary system of government. Kamala Harris might start fighting back. Someone else might emerge as a hero to people who yearn for a kinder, gentler nation and call out the travesty that was once a great political party.

Joe Biden might turn mean.

When I look at the epidemic cowardice in the Republican Party – just a few weeks after the President publicly incited a lethal riot in the capitol – I think of California, a state much like other Democratic states in many ways.

The Republican Party has paid for its out of touch extremism by becoming prevalent and barely alive. That’s what happens in New America.

Marjory Taylor Greene is becoming the face of the Republican Party and her supporter and mentor, Donald Trump. Those pedophile rings in the Capitol are in trouble. The rioters couldn’t find them.

The disintegration of the G.O.P. has happened steadily but gradually. The party’s fusion with extremist evangelicals and white nationals has only recently become clear enough for people like me – and many others –  to see and accept.

It doesn’t take a genius to foresee years of struggle and tension. As of now, our system is broken and barely functioning at all.

While Republicans embrace conspiracy theorists, Joe Biden is actually trying to run the government. The contrast could not be more powerful.

If I worry, it’s whether or not the progressive and Democratic movement can and will find a leader and spokesperson strong enough and savvy enough and eloquent enough to take on the true radicals and extremists in America.

And use the powerful new media tools they use to fight back.

Biden was the perfect choice to beat Trump and take on the virus, but he might not be the perfect person to get his hands a little dirty for a shitstorm like this.

It might be time to unleash Kamala Harris or another articulate figure with some real force and clarity to start making some loud noises.

The Republican Party is now an official and admitted cult of worship, making it a giant target for much of America, especially their political opponents.

Look how well the G.O.P. has done by painting progressives and Democrats as radical leftists or socialists. Joe Biden is about as radical as a cabbage.

The Republican Party really is a radical party of extremists; they are the Doom Loop Of Bizarro, the party of lies, fascistic aspirations, and a genuine threat to democracy. Perhaps people in authority might think about pointing that out to Americans more often and more effectively.

A party that can’t run on opposing that platform doesn’t deserve to win.

Progressives and liberals – like Jews –  rarely have a positive outlook on the world because they’ve been through too much. The Christic idea of helping the poor and the vulnerable went out of fashion some years ago; do-gooders are battered and programmed to lose.

Politics is about pendulums and momentum, and Donald Trump is the greatest momentum provider American political history has ever known.

After years of foggery and confusion, things are clear.

There is no evidence that I have seen that America wants to be a white nationalist country.

What Donald Trump and his new loyal slaves in the Republican Party are promising can’t come to be,  and not just because it is immoral. It’s because it is no longer possible and will never again be possible.

They missed that boat; it isn’t coming back.

The next time you see a fire breaking out, don’t bother to call 911 or the fire department. Lookup; there might be Jews hiding in the clouds.