It is troubling that in each article we must consider that many people do not understand what is happening in the U.S. They don’t understand Fascism and they don’t understand why it is serious and they don’t understand that 70 million Americans just voted for it.
That’s right. Here’s one way to look at it. In 1933, the Nazi Party won a plurality in the Deutsche Reich. They did not win a majority, but in a parliamentary system, they had more votes than the other parties. And so, to form a government, the parties agreed that the Nazi Party would lead, and the Nazis elected Hitler. They then sent their thugs (the equivalent of today’s White Supremacist, gun-toting, pro-violence, thugs) to sit in the assembly and threaten the other legislators. Soon, much of the Nazi agenda was voted in, and not long after, Hitler was not only voted leader, but leader for life. Anyone who did not follow Nazi laws was considered treasonous, not only against the state, but personally against Hitler–punishable by death.
Hitler wasn’t about to let someone take over after his party had obstructed so much democratic legislation over the years, beaten up leaders and broken up rallies by other parties, destroyed publishers’ offices and burned their newspapers–and all the while, every night, on the radio, accused other parties of what they were actually doing.
During the last Democratic administration, Mitch McConnell obstructed over 150 pieces of legislation that Obama wanted to initiate to create even more jobs than he did (he took us from 11% unemployment down to 4.3%.) McConnell led the filibuster of 400 individual pieces of legislation. He led a Republican Party that attempted to repeal Obamacare over 60 times, and after Trump came in, came within one vote (the heroic John McCain) of doing so. Despite what they always say at election time, they never had an alternative plan that did anything other than relieve physicians and medical equipment manufacturers of liability. That was the central point of their plan which you could have put on the back of a number 10 envelope.
Now they are attempting to interfere with the orderly transition of government. They are not about democracy. They, just like the old Nazi Party, have the financial support of a group of unbelievably wealthy Right Wing financiers. This is a group so powerful that, in Illinois, when a Democratic billionaire governor, said–let’s tax me and others like me to help balance the budget in Illinois, from the failure of other previous administrations, the people actually were persuaded to vote to raise their taxes, cut their services, so that they could allow people like former governor Rauner, who cut cut his own taxes by $475,000 in the first year alone, to have nine homes in the most expensive places in the world, or just many homes, plus a $52,000,000 four-story apartnent in downtown Chicago.
How did the state get into this mess? I jus t told you. Billionaires over the last thirty years, the Koch Brothers, or the Uihleins or the Griffins or dozens of others spent tens of millions (this year–$50 million) to persuade stupid Illinois citizens to vote against themselves, and raise taxes on the Middle Class and poorer groups in society, rather then someone with nine estates or a $52,000,000 aprartment in addition to his other homes (plus the $40 million he spent to kill the tax bill.) Yes, people in Illinois are stupid, but it is also about vices and imperfections–greed, even among the middle class. Racism. Hate of one’s fellow man. Many Fascists actually hate other Americans, want them dead. You’ve seen it now.
They tried to kidnap and murder the Democratic Governor of the almost completely Neo-Fascist state of Michigan. Michigan is almost as Fascist in its state government as is Wisconsin, and they are even dumber than the people of Illinois. They have a state legislature that gerrymandered anything but Republicans districts practically out of existence in Michigan. The same thing in Wisconsin. There is almost no way that the Wisconsin state legislature can have a Democratic majority. To get one, under the current system, they would need to get something like 60-65% if the vote to get 50% of the House and Senate seats in the Wisconsin state legislature. Yet, when voting state wide, Wisconsin elected a Democratic Governor, Lt. Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General and several other major statewide offices. The fact that they can’t beat the ALEC corporate gerrymandering of the state, tells us more than anything, about the faults in our elective system.
Trump wants to deny the electoral process. He said, before the election, that he would refuse to leave, that he would not accept the vote of the people. And he is true to his word. He has initiated more lawsuits, despite having lost in Pennsylvania and two or three other states with margins that cannot be challenged–twenty or thirty thousand vote majorities. Needless to say, those Republicans who voted against the American people on healthcare, on tariffs that impoverished many farmers (though others who barely survived, (including the same farmers in Illinois who voted to increase their taxes) those Republican lawmakers want Trump to win in any way possible. Because they are not for Democracy. They are for Fascism.
Republican moderates and Independents who voted for Trump should get off their fat fannies and write to their legislators and to the media and on social media to express their disgust–hopefully some people still are disgusted at attempts to strong hand our Democracy by thugs. We have evidence. We know that studies of voter fraud have produced only a handful. In fact voter fraud is less likely than being hit by lightning…a second time–only .000007. Democrats should all be hysterically angry and shouting at this blatant, near-criminal attempt to overwhelm our legal election processes. The number of votes that could have been inadvertently cast in error has never exceeded more than a few hundred in any state–ever. This attempt by Trump is not only a waste of time, it is a simple attempt to slow his departure and make life more complicated for others, like, for example, the American People, who need government to function.
The campaign for President is over. But the campaign to rid this country of the blight and the evil of Fascism is not over. Are we anti-Fascist–absolutely. We are also completely and totally in favor of a democracy, a form of democratic republic, and benevolent, rational Capitalism. All those things have worked in the past. Fascism has not. In fact, tens of millions of people have died because of hate-filled, bigoted Fascists who see hate rather than love, division rather than unity as the way to conduct free societies.
We are for populism, because American forms of populism whether under Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican or Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, protect the people and offer a society in which all men of all races, colors and creeds may prosper. We need to get to work with our Democratic political figures now to find ways in which we can defeat Trump and the Right Wing Fascists.