He was only a teenager, but if he got home late from a date, dance or party the local neighborhood busybody would corner him the next day to find out where he was, who was there with him, how long he was there and what he did. They asked for names, and they followed up, so you had better tell the truth, too. People quit going out, and stopped socializing, and felt compelled to attend pro-government functions and rallies and to make sure they were seen there.

If you were not involved in Actividades Contra-Revolucionarias you would probably be OK, but eventually the whole system devolved into a network of informers and snitches who used it to settle old scores, carry out feuds, and advance their careers at the expense of their colleagues, even in the government itself. The individuals who received and processed these reports were strongly motivated to act on them, even if they suspected they were bogus, because of the fear of being called soft on “imperialism”, or getting caught in a deliberate snare set by their own colleagues. It was much like McCarthyism, except the tentacles extended down into the deepest levels of society and being a victim of una denuncia, was not limited to rebels and spies, it could even happen to supporters of the regime. People forget, the traditional Cuban Communist Party (a Moscow-controlled outfit) was persecuted and replaced by a more Fidel-friendly organization.

Cuba was familiar with sabotage, bombings, torture, police raids, assassinations, and secret arrests and disappearances during the struggle against Batista. But they simply were not ready for the bureaucratization of oppression introduced by Fidel and Che Guevara. And this was before computers…everything was hand-filed, typed up and mimeographed.

Americans have deluded themselves that it can’t happen here because the population is so heavily armed. But it is precisely that contingent that will provide the ideological foot soldiers for this Browshirt army, and the NRA and groups like it will provide the organization and leadership. Its not the Liberals who are armed to the teeth, at least, not for the most part.

No, I don’t think we’ve gotten anywhere near that yet, and I don’t really think it will come to that. But I suspect it could happen here, and if it does, it will happen very quickly, almost without warning. The November midterm elections will be the watershed moment. If it is going to happen, it will happen next year, and the process fully in place by the next Presidential election. If 2018 is a landslide for the Trumpists, I may just pull a fade…

The ‘Rotte’ in our midst will work to spoil any fruit this discussion might bear…

Eight years of a Progressive black Presidency didn’t overcome and demoralize the Right. On the contrary, it mobilized and energized them. They will never let that happen again, no matter what it takes. Its precisely because the Right sees their upcoming demographic extinction on the horizon that they’ve lit a fire under their ass to seize the reins of power so that their minority will be irrelevant. They see themselves, after all, as the Moral Majority. The fact neither is true won’t even slow them down.

They have always seen America as a vast WASP empire with a few pesky ethnics clustered along the coasts and in the bigger cities. The next Census is not going to change that attitude, they are already looking for ways to rig it. They still see themselves as a majority, and the rest of us as a tiny handful of troublemakers on the fringe. True numbers are irrelevant, like the slave population of the 18th century, we only count as partially human.

As for the Millennials, I fear your optimism about their political virtue may be a bit exaggerated. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see the youngsters as totally worthless slackers, the way many of my old fart cohort do; but I am already a member of a generation with great promise that sold out shamefully. The young’uns will be tempted, and I fear many of them will happily trade away their principles, probably just for a break in their Payroll Witholding and student loan payments. Its only a matter of time before those receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits and those paying for them are set against each other. Divide and conquer. As soon as their numbers approach ours we will be placed into conflict with one another. The Boomers will be despised and envied for the fact they have pensions, savings, health insurance, own homes and are debt-free. And too many of their children see themselves as entitled by Ayn Rand to be entrepreneurs. As Lord Elrond once remarked, “Our list of allies grows thin.”

Maybe the Habitable Zone can be restructured as a bastion of Liberal Science, a place where these ideas can be introduced and refined. It is clear, after all, that science is a Progressive activity, not a commercial one, and that the Conservative obsession with commodifying space resources and subdividing the expanse into corporate baronies will no longer be tolerated. The New World was colonized commercially, but the waste of resources and the resulting genocide, slavery and extinction was too high a price to pay. We need not abandon or forget our scientific and space roots, just make sure the solar system isn’t carved up into fiefdoms for some grim corporate vision of the future.

Or we could just forget about space for a while, until we solve the problem at hand and we can roll up the mattresses.

(Barely relevant aside: Wonkette, I think it was, coined the term “KKK hood” as a synonym for “MAGA hat”. Written in HTML as “KKK hoodMAGA hat”.)

But we should discuss the threat level. You and RL have been writing in the key of apocalypse pretty much all the time lately. It’s hard to say when hyper-polarization became genuinely Manichean. Should I create a “Primal Scream” board to triangulate between CurrentVents and Flame?

Of course the populist extreme right rabble pose an existential threat to our world. In Europe as well as America; in Russia the oligarchic/kleptocratic variety has already won. Russia’s the model for what the extreme right wants for America. Who else would cheer the upcoming private meeting between the Cheeto Mussolini and Putin?

I think an all purpose reply to many of your (collectively) posts would be “and then?”. Because each step on the road to perdition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. America is by no means the cliche lobster being slowly cooked by an unperceived rising heat.

George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Variations of that epigram are burnt into everyone’s brain.

So what happens when we remember the past? I’d add inevitable sequel: Knowledge of the past changes the future.

Perhaps it’s one of those quantums.

I’ve written before that nobody in 1930s Germany could say “never again”, because it had not yet been. But you hear “never again” and a thesaurus of related sentiments a lot these days. And there are signs of spine in the growing sentiment to “fuck civility” toward the despicably uncivil.

Conservatives, I’ve found, are particularly bad at seeing the future. No doubt because they’re fixated on the past. Trump and his lickspittle enablers in Congress have pissed off vast swaths of Americans. Of the electorate. They’ve attacked everything we value and hold dear, and they act like we won’t notice? Jesus fucking Christ, Americans like their national parks!

I think there’s genuine reason to believe that the November election will be a real kick in the balls for the populist right. Which today is synonymous with “GOP”.

On the longer time scale, this generation of people calling themselves “Republicans” are the last generation of Republicans. It’s demographics, but not primarily the scary “white minority” one; it’s age. The young’uns, especially the youngest Millenials just getting ready to vote for the first time, are the least racist, least misogynist, least anti-Semitic, least homophobic, and most diverse bunch of people ever to walk the face of the Earth. They strongly tell pollsters that they recognize the extreme right as their enemy, as implacably hostile to everything they hold near and dear. That’s some Manichean polling!

Today’s Trumpublicans will be extinct in a generation, for all practical political purposes. And if don’t stop them in November, we can endure, and we can rebuild. Europe was able rebuild after what the fascists did to them in WWII, and we can rebuild after we’ve vanquished our latter-day fascists.

That’s not to say I think we should wait and see how the election turns out. That’s no fun. But it’s got to be more than stacking mattresses against the door and preparing for Armageddon. Can we employ our knowledge of the past to do more than fear the future?

I await your notions.