It’s January 28, 2021, and yesterday 45 of 50 Republican senators voted against the very idea of impeaching Donald Trump. Three weeks ago, those very senators’ lives were threatened by a murderous mob inspired by Donald Trump and his lie that the election was stolen. Many Republican senators, most notably Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, added fuel to the fire by supporting the lie with their own rhetoric.
Personally, I thought being in the crosshairs of the mob they inspired would be a clarifying event for them. In a normal world, they would realize that it is in their own best interest and the country’s interest to disavow Donald Trump and the big lie. But we don’t live in a normal world. We live in a world where the vast majority of Republican law makers essentially say to the insurrectionists, “you were right to try to kill us.”
It’s hard to imagine what role these men think they will have in the after-scape of a Trump-inspired insurrection, but there is no question that they think there will be a place for them. There is only one word for their methods: fascism. Fascists value power above all else. There are no moral, ethical, or legal boundaries that stand in the way of a motivated fascist. They would send us all to the gallows for the mere chance to be in the presence of power.
Fascists use a variety of methods to gain and hold power. They use the rules when it suits them, bend the rules when that works, break the rules when they can get away with it. Propaganda, lies, coercion, and violence are all on the table.
Lies used to sow division are the most effective. The fascist doesn’t try to convince their followers that they have the answers to their problems. Their goal is to convince them that there are dangerous enemies all around, and the only way to vanquish their enemies is through empowering the fascists. Immigrants, Black Lives Matter activists, Antifa, and Democrats are all portrayed as dangerous anti-American radicals coming to kill, rob, rape, and displace the “true” Americans. The fascist uses a strong-man leader as a method of destroying their enemies. The strong-man will see to it that they are all humiliated, locked up, walled off, and in extreme cases, killed.
Angry mobs are a hallmark of fascist methods. Hitler had the brown-shirts, a small army of German men willing to do violence for the Fuehrer. Trump has the Proud Boys, The Three Percenters, and Q-Annon adherents. Even after he is gone, they remain working alone and in groups to bring their leader back to power.
Congress has an opportunity to make sure Trump can not run again in 2024 by convicting him in the impeachment trial, but the Republicans have indicated, through their vote to call the trial itself unconstitutional, that they have no intention of doing that. They are keeping the path to power open for Trump. This keeps the mob inspired, the propaganda machines on cable news and the internet churning, and their own dreams of unopposed power alive.
It may be tempting to believe that the danger has passed now that Donald Trump has been vanquished to Mara Lago, but that is only a momentary reprieve. It gives us an opportunity to address the danger, but it did not end it. He may be back himself, or there may be another strong-man leader to take the Fascist helm of the Republican party. Maybe it will be Don Jr. or Ivanka. Ted Cruz thinks it could be him. Maybe it will be someone out of the blue. We can’t know today, but it is a certainty that the danger is not behind us.
We have two years to drive the fascists out of the body politic. That’s when there will be another election. If the Democrats and the few brave and honest republicans, like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, don’t manage to change the path of the Republican party by then, we might see the balance of power tip back toward fascism, and America continues its downward trajectory.
Defeating them is the only option. Negotiating with them is a fool’s errand. Their word means nothing. There must be consequences for those who enabled the insurrection. Start with Donald Trump and work down from there. A lack of consequences is consent to continue unabated.
But we have rules to abide by, and Democrats don’t have the power within the constitutional structure to ensure political consequences for the Fascists. It will take a significant portion of the Republican party to find their conscience and some courage to join the Democrats to end this American Fascism. But at the moment of this writing, hope for such conscience and courage is dim at best.