How Should America Resist a Fascist?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/how_should_america_resist_a_fascist.html
After Donald Trump claimed the Republican presidential nomination, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan wrote an essay for the Washington Post that made a simple but provocative claim: Trump, now a stone’s throw from the White House, was a vector for fascism. That, in running a campaign of threat and intimidation—against political adversaries, against foreign countries, against nonwhites and religious minorities—Trump had opened the door to the worst passions and darkest urges of American society.
“This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes,” wrote Kagan, “but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party—out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear—falling into line behind him.”
Kagan didn’t address it but his piece raised an important question, perhaps the important question of this election: If Trump is a vector for fascism—if he is a fascist, full stop—then what do we do about it? The history of the 20th century is, among many other things, a testament to the danger of popular authoritarianism and how it can overwhelm the better angels of a nation’s character to pursue its resentments with murderous efficiency. That history is why, in the face of Trump, the targets of his rage have organized against him.
So far, this movement against Trump is a democratic one that utilizes U.S. laws and institutions to mount a defense against a man who threatens them, from his attacks on the idea of an impartial judiciary to his tolerance for violence and support for a herrenvolk vision of American life. On the grass-roots level, Muslim and Latino activists are working to naturalize immigrants and register them for the ballot, while civil rights groups are fighting voter restrictions that may keep them from the polls. Students and other young people are protesting Trump events to demonstrate their stance against his rhetoric and aims. On an institutional level, the Democratic Party is planning a massive campaign against his candidacy, and the press is beginning to scrutinize his life and beliefs in serious ways.
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