Before the Inauguration, one was guarded about using the term “fascist” to describe America, as if slanderous and an exaggeration. No longer. It is not entirely Trump’s doing; Obama and his predecessors were creeping up to that point with each intervention, confrontation, weakening of civil liberties, drone attack, regime change—a whole catalogue of death, defiance, destruction. But it is Trump who pulls America over the top, with the willing agreement of millions of Americans, a self-conscious, articulate mobocracy contemptuous of all who disagree with, yes, a fascist agenda.
That agenda is simple: capitalism and militarism merged, indivisible, monolithic, holding America in a death grip. Squeezing, choking, bullying: experience gained abroad, slowly taking effect at home. Root out the dissident. Empty the social safety net, so that ordinary people begin to think complicity, for fear of suffering hardship, a fusion of surveillance and foreclosure or even penury and want of basics. The Tale of Two Cities? No, two countries, with police-state attributes riding roughshod over the people.