As Dick Gregory once put it, when discussing a similar comparison, “In the South they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too big. In the North, its just the opposite.”

Wilkommen to Weimar Amerika.

Divine Decadence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8P80A8vy9I

It helps to see events at multiple levels of resolution like that. For obvious reasons over the last year, I’ve been motivated to read history, at one scale the story of Hitler’s personal rise to power; on the other, the societal scale of Weimar Germany, and how it formed the amniotic fluid that combined with the DNA of Hitler to give birth to National Socialism.

I’m currently reading “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939″, currently at around 1932, just as the decade of work (that Trump is trying to skip) is starting to pay off. The disturbing thing about the multilayered picture of history that emerges from my reading is, not so surprisingly, the similarity of the raw material that Hitler and Trump are working with. Hitler didn’t force Germany into anti-Semitism, he further enflamed an already virulent strain of it and exploited it; just as Trump is mining the deep vein of American racism and racial resentment.

We’ve all read seeming terabytes trying to explain Trump’s followers. The common trope has been that they’re economically distressed white people, their lifestyles slipping away and their futures bleak. Except that actual analysis of Trump’s actual followers shows nothing of the sort. Most are doing fine economically, and they don’t care that Trump’s economic “policies” are an incoherent word salad. All these decades, it turns out, they only heard the dogwhistle, and ignored the pretty theories. Look into their shriveled little hearts, and you find that what really motivates Trump’s followers is naked bigotry and racism.

For the ones old enough to remember, it’s George Wallace all over again. A rematch, and maybe this time for sure, they can wipe out a century of social progress by putting one of their own in the White House.

The bookmakers are just hedging their bets these days when they give Clinton 80%+ odds of winning the Presidency, against some wildcard that upsets everything at the last minute. Trump will go down in flames. But I share the thinking person’s concern about what happens next. The Deplorables aren’t going to just evaporate. And now they’ve tasted blood.

Police say they’ve arrested a 20-year-old man for spray-painting anti-Muslim messages and the words “Donald Trump” on a Muslim community center in Bayonne, New Jersey, early Friday morning.

Jonathon Huffey faces charges of criminal mischief, bias intimidation and criminal trespass, according to Lt. James Donovan of the Bayonne Police Department.

Huffey, a Bayonne resident, is accused of spray-painting a slew of hateful messages ― including “Fuck Muslims,” “Fuck ISIS,” “Fuck Allah” and “Fuck Arabs,” as well as “Donald Trump,” the name of the Republican presidential nominee ― on the exterior wall of the Muslim Community Miraj Center, located in the basement of a Catholic elementary school.

Donovan told The Huffington Post that police tracked Huffey down thanks to an eyewitness and surveillance footage from a nearby bank. It’s not clear whether Huffey has an attorney.

The Bayonne Department of Public Works arrived on the scene Friday to clean the graffiti, Donovan said.

“Personally I really was saddened that somebody would do something so ignorant,” Waheed Akbar, an administrator and board member at the Muslim center, said Friday. “Especially this being a Catholic school building. There’s kids in this building. A day care center.”

Not only is the election just a heartbeat away, the constituency he serves is rapidly becoming a minority. He is faced with his own diminishing windows. And he has much of the infrastructure you allude to that he needs already in place, lovingly constructed and reinforced by others.

I never did believe in Godwin’s Law. Fascism has always lurked just below the surface in America, ready to emerge in response to any national stress or emergency. After all, we have always had a very big middle class, in both absolute and relative terms. And that class is now threatened and shrinking rapidly. Maybe the booboisie doesn’t have a clue exactly what is going on, but they certainly are aware something is happening. They want quick and easy explanations and solutions, and Fascism has them ready to deliver.

You tend to interpret human behavior in psychological/biological terms (Right Wing Authoritarianism and hominid group dynamics). I tend to see things more from a cultural and social perspective (historical and economic forces). I’m not saying one of us must be right or wrong, this is not a binary choice or an either/or decision. We just perceive the same phenomenon through different filters. I suggest, however, that even from different directions, we are arriving at very similar conclusions.

But Trump seems to think he can waltz in to his first election, with no more than shrieking rage and flying spittle, and just assume that a political support infrastructure will materialize to support him…in much the way that he always finds a chair underneath his ass when makes a move to squat. The stuff you need just happens when you’re a billionairemillionaire.

As for the comparison with the old Habitable Zone, ER, I’m afraid Godfwin’s Law long ago was thrown out the Overton Window. We’re strangers in a strange land now.

Of course, before we did that, we’d first have to all agree on exactly what we meant by “Fascism”, and to all agree on a precise definition of the term.

Fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class, and as the middle class finds its hegemony and legitimacy endangered and its economic and racial superiority threatened, this is precisely how it is manipulated by demagogues and how it manifests itself. This is early 20th century Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Argentina (and a host of other places)all over again.

Of course, there are differences due to the times, and historical peculiarities, and national character, but it is still instantly recognizable. Trump and his allies and followers are following the playbook so closely that if this had been written up in a novel or screenplay just a decade ago it would have been dismissed as a cliched oversimplification and exaggeration.

It isn’t just their hatred of the Jews that gives them away. Its the hatred, period; nativism, nationalism, militarism, exceptionalism, and of course, racism. There’s nothing “Neo-” about Trumpism. But its not all about Trump either. This latest outbreak of this social disease does not arise from one distinct personality; Trump is not merely a Franco or a Mussolini or a Hitler in a new guise. He simply took advantage of an existing environment, just like they did. If it hadn’t of been Trump, it would have been someone else just like him.

Look through the list of personalities you refer to and quote in your post. The American Right is infested with these people.