How the fuck did we get here? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thought this as masked fascist goons terrorize my city, tear gassing Halloween parades and schoolyards, crashing their cars into civilians then dragging them out of their cars to take them God knows where, and literally “disappearing” people from their families and lawyers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as an unaccountable executive arrogates more and more power from supposedly coequal branches of government, bombs or intimidates more or less every other country in the Americas, sinks our economy with misguided notions of autarky, and corruptly pockets bribes, all while a steady 37% of the country continues to accept that he will “Make America Great Again.”
In hopes of understanding how exactly in the fuck we got here, I turned to Robert Paxton’s “The Anatomy of Fascism.” Before publishing this book in 2004, Paxton wrote a well-regarded history of Vichy France that bucked the conventional wisdom that it was a reluctant hostage and instead portrayed it as an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi Germany.
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