Concerning the Migration of America’s Fascist and Nazi Movement Over Time Across the American Political Landscape
2,627 words. Approximate silent reading time: 11 minutes to 19 minutes.
The United States has a deeply troubled history of racism and hate. That, of course, is a vast understatement. The source of all that racism, bigotry, and hate is a ground-into-the-carpet, active, and vital American fascist and Nazi movement. The historically interesting part - and the point of this writing - is to document the migration of that fascist and Nazi ideology over time across America’s political landscape.
Antebellum Southerners and Confederates were the Nazis before there were Nazis. A century and more before the rise of the Nazi party in 20th century Germany, southern Whites originated, defined, and shaped Nazi ideology. From racism and bigotry right down to slave labor camps, Southerners developed the ideologies and practices the German Nazis later adopted, applied, and expanded.
Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, America’s fascist and Nazi movement was the southern wing of the Democratic Party. The democrats were a party divided. A northern wing largely supported slavery’s existence. A southern wing was relentlessly committed to the continuation and expansion of slavery.
When post-Civil War Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern fascists went right back to work. Evil doesn’t stop being evil just because the good guys go home. They stripped voting and civil rights from Black Americans, formed terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce White supremacy, and even reestablished a form of slavery that wasn’t finally stamped out until six years after World War Two.
Most of those Confederate memorials we’ve heard about so much in recent years were not established in the post-Reconstruction 19th century but in the 1920s and 1930s.That was a time when the Ku Klux Klan was reconstituting (the Second Klan) and expanding its membership and list of hate targets. Other fascist groups such as Black Legion, Silver Shirts, Christian Front, and German American Bund were coming into existence. The fascist poison was also spreading across the globe, finding new places to take root in East Asia and in Europe in post-World War One’s busted-up empires.
The source of that poison was the United States of America.
As German Nazis formed the legal underpinnings for the persecution of Jews – the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 – they modeled those laws on racial exclusion statutes in the United States. Germany’s Nazis drew great inspiration and guidance from America’s Jim Crow laws. The German propaganda press reported approvingly about lynchings in the American South: how the South’s good “Aryan” citizens were merely protecting their race and civilization from “negroid” or “mongrelized” people.
In the American South, elaborate definitions of a person’s racial makeup determined to which legal rights they were entitled (or not entitled) and to which legal and social restrictions they were subjected. A “quadroon” was a person of one-quarter African ancestry and three-quarters European ancestry. An “octoroon” was a person of one-eighth African ancestry and seven-eighths European ancestry. Similarly, Germany’s Nuremburg Laws defined with a fine-toothed comb how individual Germans were to be classified. If they had no Jewish ancestry they were classed as “German or of kindred blood". Or Germans were to be classified “Jew” if they had at least three Jewish grandparents. Germans might also be classed as Mischling (mixed breed): a person with two or fewer Jewish grandparents. To calibrate the sieve even finer, Mischlinge of the “second degree” had one Jewish grandparent, and those with two Jewish grandparents were of the "first degree". Elaborate birth, marriage, and worship history tests might also be applied.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed great admiration for how “Aryan” America had cleared the North American continent of the “natives” to make room for “racially pure” settlers. It inspired his plans to expand Germany into eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to make Lebensraum (“living space”) for Germans. Hitler and his Nazi buddies came to refer to the areas into which they sought national expansion as the “wild East". However, the original genocide to create “living space” was perpetrated in the American “wild West” on Indigenous Peoples by the U.S. Army and people driving covered wagons – a genocide that was later fictionalized in thousands of Hollywood movies. Hitler's plan for expansion and settlement to the east in the 20th century was simply the Nazi version of America's 19th century Manifest Destiny. Each was a three-step process: invade, kill the people already there, expropriate the land.
Another idea German Nazis imported from the United States was the forced sterilization of mentally or physically disabled people. From the late 19th century until decades after World War Two more than 30 states legalized the practice - rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics - and most engaged in it robustly and enthusiastically. Hitler and his buddies were actually late to the party in 1933. In the United States, more than 60-thousand disabled Americans were forcibly sterilized.
As German Nazis were in the process of destroying the democratic Weimar Republic, America’s financial and industrial elites were busy with what came to be known as The Business Plot. This was a plan early in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency to organize a half million strong army to march on Washington DC, depose FDR, and establish a German/Italian style fascist dictatorship. The dictator was supposed to be a retired Marine Corp major general, Smedley Butler. He perhaps was not the wisest choice for the role of despot: a highly decorated survivor of many conflicts, including World War One, he wore on his chest two awards of the Medal of Honor. He took his information to Congress.
Subsequent hearings in the House of Representatives established that the plot was real: wealthy businessmen had indeed planned such a fascist coup, although what point the plot had reached before exposure was uncertain. But the plot to impose by force a fascist dictatorship on America was genuine. Could those conspirators have put together a force of half a million to attempt the destruction of American democracy? The fact that in 1925 KKK terrorists numbering about fifty thousand (out of a total membership at the time of about three million) descended on Washington DC is evidence that such a force was perhaps within the realm of possibility.
Donald Trump’s attempt to destroy American democracy in January 2021 was a bush league version of The Business Plot. Trump clearly came up short on putting together a half million terrorists on the fly to attack Congress. Of course, America being America, none of those wealthy Business Plot conspirators were ever held to criminal account for their sedition. Neither was Donald Trump.
But The Business Plot represented an evolution, and a northward migration, for fascism in America.
In the Antebellum South, those who owned and profited from the slave labor camps (the euphemism is “plantations”) learned quickly just how wealthy one could become when dozens or hundreds of enslaved humans produced wealth all day long without having to be paid for their labors. Profits like that could make a person without a moral compass - and in the Antebellum South Christianity was nearly universal, but moral compasses seem to have been in short supply - a big believer in the idea that some humans weren’t really humans after all and were rather just beasts of the field. This concept advanced by Southerners preceded and foreshadowed the Nazi concept of the Untermensch or “sub-human”: people who were not really human, but supposedly animals in human form.
By contrast, The Business Plot saw mostly northern economic elites panicking at the thought that FDR and a Congress full of democrats could result in working Americans keeping slightly more of the wealth they produced – enough even to find some small measure of economic prosperity - at the cost of America’s wealthy becoming ever so slightly less wealthy. But in both cases, this fascist totalitarianism was sourced from America’s moneyed elites: either southern agrarian slavers or northern industrial capitalists.
As war again approached in the late 1930s, America’s fascists and Nazis worked hard to keep the U.S. out of the war and even to keep American military aid from those fighting Hitler. They wanted the destruction of freedom and liberal democracy in western Europe and the victory of Nazi totalitarianism. Their organization, which was called America First (sound familiar?) held fascist and Nazi rallies across the country. Donald Trump’s fixation on a Madison Square Garden rally before the 2024 election was not merely some random whim. He was recreating the Madison Square Garden pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler rally of 20 February 1939, with himself in the role of Führer. The marquee outside Madison Square Garden in 1939 announced an "All American Rally".
In the end, it was only Japan’s self-defeating attack on Pearl Harbor that allowed a democratic, liberal, and anti-fascist (antifa) American government to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies, guaranteeing eventual victory for freedom and liberal democracy.
The migration of America’s fascist and Nazi movement continued after World War Two. Imagine coming home from overseas: having either fought Hitler directly in Europe or his Japanese allies in the Pacific. You’ve just had the worst imaginable experience - your life and relationships disrupted, your very existence in constant jeopardy, witnessing your buddies maimed and killed – but you won through, survived, and took the big boat home. But although Hitler had put a bullet into his own head in a Berlin bunker, on your return you find Nazi ideology and practice alive and well and living in the American South!
Some historians believe it was that shock on the part of so many returning American veterans that helped put wind under the wings of the Civil Rights movement. The northern wing of the Democratic Party slowly (shamefully slowly) got behind the struggle Black Americans had already long been fighting for their civil, legal, and voting rights.
After World War Two, the Democratic Party was increasingly an unwelcoming place, so American fascists and Nazis realized they needed a new political home.
A truly remarkable transformation occurred in American electoral politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Within just a few electoral cycles the American South changed from being almost monolithically Democratic for more than a century to being almost monolithically Republican. The fascist and Nazi movement had found its new home, and the South changed from blue to red almost as if a switch was thrown. The GOP simply told White southern bigots – these were the same people who had screamed and spat at black children on their way to integrate formerly all-White schools, who had set up segregation academies after the Brown v decision, who had bombed Black churches, and murdered civil rights workers – We’re now the new GOP, and if the democrats won’t help you hate Black people anymore then just put us in charge. We’ll get the job done. And that’s what they did and have been doing ever since.
The GOP didn’t really invite in the fascists and Nazis. It was more a matter of the fascists and Nazis decamping from the democrats and gradually taking control of the GOP. Dwight Eisenhower was a two-term republican U.S. president in the 1950s. Previously he had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War Two. It is difficult to imagine General Eisenhower extending a cordial invitation to fascists and Nazis, even if they were America fascists and Nazis. The granular details of how this gradual relocation took place are impossible to recount with any brevity. But one can look at some milestones.
Certainly, Ronald Reagan’s election and reelection as president were major victories for fascists and Nazis seeking to insinuate themselves into the GOP. Ronald Reagan, contrary to GOP mythmaking, had deeply racist and bigoted bona fides. In August 1980, as GOP candidate for president, Reagan traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, near the site where KKK terrorists had taken hostage and murdered three civil rights workers in 1964. But Reagan didn’t use the occasion to praise the heroism and sacrifice of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Rather, Reagan pandered to southern bigots with "state's rights" racism.
Post-Reagan, the GOP partnered with Rupert Murdoch to do what Rupert Murdoch has spent his life doing: establishing fascist propaganda outlets. Fox began broadcasting in October 1996, and republicans have been able to use that outlet, and many others, to disseminate fascist propaganda in the guise of “news” for more than a generation now.
After Hitler took over as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the Nazis’ first organized anti-Jewish initiative was a one-day nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. Many ordinary Germans paid no attention or even made a point of supporting and patronizing their Jewish neighbors' businesses. The bridge between a mostly ignored antisemitic boycott in 1933 to 1938’s Kristallnacht – the nationwide campaign to violently terrorize Jewish people - was paved with five years of vicious and pervasive antisemitic propaganda. American fascists and Nazis in the 1990s GOP applied that lesson about the critical importance of relentless propaganda.
You might wonder what Trump’s and the GOP’s obsession with the elimination of birthright citizenship is about. The concept was established in one of a triad of post-Civil War Constitutional amendments – the Fourteenth, with the three (13th, 14th, 15th) advanced by a Congress in the control of liberal republicans – created primarily to bring Black freed slaves into full citizenship. That fact alone makes understandable the visceral hatred racists and fascists have for the concept. And as the German Nazis demonstrated with their Nuremberg Laws: if you can take away a person’s citizenship then you can do anything to them. Lock them in concentration camps. Even murder them.
Habeas Corpus – the rule of law guarantee that individuals are not powerless and at the mercy of the government – is another liberal legal concept America’s republican fascists and Nazis are absolutely salivating to gut, just like the Nazis did in 1930s Germany.
By killing the federal Department of Education and putting control of education at the state level, America’s fascists and Nazis – just like their German counterparts in the 1930s – can use the schools to engage in the ideological, partisan, and religious indoctrination of children across vast swaths of the country. Hitler expressed great enthusiasm for the efficacy of indoctrination from youth.
So, America’s fascist and Nazi movement has completed its journey to a new home. The difference is that in the past it had been just a wing of one political party, its power blunted by intra-party machinations. Today, it wholly owns one of only two major political parties in the United States.
I feel such regret considering how far America could have progressed from that deeply troubled origin of racism and exploitation and hate had America’s fascists and Nazis not spent the last two centuries - all day every day right up to today - keeping all that racism and bigotry renewed and alive. They are always identifying and defining new groups to make into objects of hate, into “Them” groups. Transgendered people are just their freshest targets.
Eighty years ago, more than 400-thousand Americans lost their lives to help deliver the world from fascist and Nazi totalitarianism. In each of the last three presidential elections tens of millions of Americans voted for republicans and Trump. You may be one of them. If you are, then how terribly you’ve desecrated the memory of our honored World War Two dead and their heroic labors and sacrifices. On 20 January 2025, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito finally won World War Two.
Edward R. Murrow was an American journalist of the World War Two and post-War era. He aired many radio reports from a London that almost nightly for eight months in 1940 and 1941 suffered under a rain of fascist bombs dropped by the Nazi’s Luftwaffe. I’ll conclude as Mr. Murrow had always signed off his broadcasts: “Good night, and good luck.”
The 80-Year Rule
3,523 words. Approximate silent reading time: 17 minutes to 23 minutes.
Dr. Ronald L. Feinman - a professor of American History, Government, and Politics of long tenure - in 2020 wrote of how George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt faced – and successfully shepherded the United States through - existential crises, each in their turn, every 80 years or so. Those were times when America was at a fork in the road with one tine pointing toward liberal democracy and personal freedom and the other tine pointing toward conservative totalitarianism and tyranny.
A period of 80 to 90 years has been referred to as a “natural century”: a period roughly approximating a long human life, involving the near complete replacement of the human race.
Roman historians conceptualized long periods of time by the saeculum – the period of time from when something happened (such as, say, the founding of a city or the start of a war) to the moment when every human alive at that origin had died: the complete replacement of all those alive at the starting point. The true and entire renewal of humanity from any given point in time.
As this essay is being revised and published in May 2026, the oldest documented living human is Ethel Caterham of the United Kingdom. According to Roman deeming regarding saecula, with Ms. Caterham’s eventual passing the saeculum will close that opened with her birth as Ethel May Collins on 21 August 1909 in Shipton Bellinger, Hampshire, England.
In reference to the United States, Dr. Feinmann reckoned in periods of 80 years, using 1780, 1860, and 1940 as demarcation points. But my perception is that those points of crisis and decision are best viewed as episodes: as periods of time in themselves, lasting about two decades, during which a lengthy series of events shaped the path the country will follow.
In the past, there have been three of these episodes, with a fourth currently in progress. The first was the 1770s and 1780s, when the American War for Independence was fought and won, and the United States became an independent nation under its current Constitution. The next occurred 80 years later in the 1850s and 1860s, when a great Civil War and its antecedent events decided if the United States would remain united or if the sections of America would become separate nations. Then passed another 80 years to the 1930s and 1940s, when America eventually overcame the influence of an active and vital domestic fascist and Nazi movement and chose to fight beside international allies to defeat fascist and Nazi totalitarianism in a global conflagration.
Those three past periods are defined by a recurring theme: each ended in the victory of Liberal democracy and personal freedoms and the defeat of Conservative totalitarianism and the subjugation of the individual.
1770s and 1780s
In the 1770s and 1780s American colonists fought a great war – and the liberals won! In throwing off monarchical tyranny, the liberal enlightenment thinkers who established the United States as a nation brought to life not just liberal principles of governing and governmental organization, but wildly, radically liberal social concepts. These included the idea that people were more than just the subjects of a monarch, as they had always been prior to that moment in history, but rather individuals who were the possessors of human rights and freedoms including the fundamental human rights to say whatever they wanted to say, print whatever they wanted to print, to worship or not as they chose, and assemble in any way that pleased them. And to do all those things without having to go first to a monarch or an aristocrat to seek and receive permission.
There were certainly Conservatives at that time – called “Tories” in both the American colonies and in Britain – who viewed with horror such concepts of human freedom, fought those concepts tooth and nail, and wanted nothing to do with any United States of America, individual rights and freedoms, representative government, or liberal democracy. But the unlikely – even wildly improbable – occurred, and liberal Americans threw off the yoke of what was then the most advanced and powerful government and military in the world. The victory of American liberals was not just a result of valor and military tactics, but of diplomatic sophistication. They wisely made the American War for Independence mostly a proxy war between the British and the French. The war was won by France, and Americans - with their new democracy and freedoms - were the beneficiaries.
But prior to that event human freedom did not exist. No human possessed individual rights and freedoms that accrued to them personally. Every human on the face of the Earth was nothing more than the subject of some monarchal dictator.
In the 1770s and 1780s the Liberals and Enlightenment Thinkers won and the Conservates lost, bringing into existence a nation based on the concepts of people as individuals with rights and freedoms and of those who ruled only ruling with the consent of the ruled.
1850s and 1860s
Eighty years later – in the 1850s and 1860s – a series of events led to the secession of Southern states that were seeking to preserve and expand human chattel slavery. Those secessions, combined with attacks on federal military targets, resulted in the commencement of armed hostilities between the American government and the rebellious states.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was long since past when another conciliation – the Compromise of 1850 – had the effect of heightening tensions again.
The 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought northern audiences the knowledge of the monstrous nature of, and the human suffering and brutal exploitation caused by, slavery.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed settlers to determine the slave or free status of their new state. This led to extreme violence, especially by proponents of slavery.
The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v Sanford ruling of 1857 – which declared that those of African ancestry could never be citizens of the United States – further inflamed tensions.
John Brown’s futile 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry in what is now West Virginia sought to incite a slave rebellion.
Those events, and others, drove a wedge between North and South. On the conservative side of the wedge were those who believed that a tiny elite of privileged Southerners should enjoy the extreme wealth created by the labor of enslaved humans, and who believed those enslaved people were not humans. On the liberal side of the wedge were those who believed an end to the institution of slavery would bring the United States into the family of civilized nations, and that abolishing human slavery was simply the right thing to do.
But there were also those who sought to pursue a middle course: trying to finesse the issue by keeping the nation together while allowing the institution to remain.
At the very end of the 36th Congress in late 1860 and early 1861, an amendment to the Constitution was formulated by a committee led by Ohio republican representative Thomas Corwin. This was during the period between the election of a liberal republican, Abraham Lincoln, as president on 6 November 1860 and his taking office on 4 March 1861.
Known to historians as the Corwin Amendment, it received its final approval by Congress on its last day in session and the day of Lincoln’s first inauguration. The amendment was sent to the states for ratification. That process was never completed.
The historical irony is that had the Corwin Amendment been ratified by the states it would have become the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. The Corwin thirteenth amendment would have constitutionally guaranteed the legality and existence in perpetuity of slavery in those places where it already existed and would have prohibited any future amendment to the Constitution or act of Congress that would end slavery in those places. The idea was to mollify the South sufficiently so that those states would not break asunder the union. But during the three months the amendment was being written and making its way through Congress, Southern states were already actively seceding in reaction to Lincoln’s election. By the time the amendment passed Congress, seven of the 11 states that would secede had already done so. The attack on Fort Sumter followed barely more than a month later.
Instead, the Thirteenth Amendment which was eventually approved by a Congress controlled by liberal Republicans, ratified by the states, and enacted after the Civil War in 1865 was the one that abolished chattel slavery for good.
Coincidentally, that Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery was proclaimed as in effect on 18 December 1865, the day of Thomas Corwin’s death in Washington, D.C. at the age of 71.
After all those events, a great and terrible war ensued for four years. That war resulted in at least 1.5 million total casualties and more than 620-thousand deaths on both sides by combat, disease, or other causes.
But the federal government was ultimately victorious in its purpose to keep the United States whole as a country without the stain of human slavery. In the 1850s and 1860s the Liberals won again and the Conservates lost again, preserving the unity of a free nation and the existence of personal freedom, and ending a great evil.
1930s and 1940s
Eighty years later – in the 1930s and 1940s – fascist and Nazi racism and totalitarianism expanded and tightened its control of Europe. In Japan the 1920s saw the end of the Taisho Democracy. It was replaced by the Showa Era, the first decades of which were characterized by fascism, militarism, warmaking, and ultra-nationalism. The Second World War killed an estimated 70 million to 80 million, about 3% of the human population. Some 70-percent of the dead were civilians.
Franklin Roosevelt took office as president of the United States on 4 March 1933, 33 days after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by German President Paul von Hindenburg.
Much of what Nazism in Germany became was inspired by practices and beliefs in the United States (see the essay Concerning the Migration of America’s Fascist and Nazi Movement Over Time Across the American Political Landscape).
In the 1930s there was no shortage of conservative groups in the United States advancing the beliefs and the cause of Nazi ideology: the Ku Klux Klan, Silver Shirts, Black Legion, Christian Front, the German American Bund and others. They were mostly smaller and regional groups. The umbrella organization which tied them together was known as the America First Committee, led by vocal pro-Nazi antisemites like Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlan.
One can legitimately wonder what might have happened had Roosevelt not sought and won an unprecedented third term as president. The election on 5 November 1940 took place more than a year after Germany’s invasion of Poland and during The Blitz, when fascist bombs dropped by the Nazi’s Luftwaffe rained down on English cities almost every night from September 1940 to May 1941. The Spring and Summer of 1940 saw Germany’s invasion into western Europe, the fall of France, and the dramatic evacuation of Allied forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. In the Pacific, 1940 and 1941 saw the Japanese announce the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – a vehicle to establish Japanese economic and military hegemony over most of northeast Asia. And those years saw Japan’s invasion of French Indochina.
Franklin Roosevelt, like Winston Churchill, recognized from the beginning the existential threat to liberal democracy and personal freedom posed by conservative fascism and Nazi ideology. Historical research confirms that the invasion and subjugation of the United States was a long-term goal of Hitler’s, following the conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union.
The liberal Roosevelt was never seriously challenged for the Democratic Party’s 1940 presidential nomination. He won effortlessly on the first ballot.
The republican candidate in 1940 was an industrialist, Wendell Willkie. He was committed to supporting England in its fight against Hitler by any means short of declaring war. He had several rivals for the nomination, all committed isolationists to a greater (Robert A. Taft) or lesser (Thomas E. Dewey) degree. Willkie was nominated on the sixth ballot. Roosevelt won the general election handily.
American Southerners were the Nazis before there were Nazis. For centuries before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in 20th century Germany, Americans in the South practiced and perfected the racism, bigotry, and slave labor practices later adopted by Germany’s Nazis.
The Nazis learned from American Southerners how to racially characterize humans – classifying people by their ethnic and religious characteristics just as their predecessors in the American South had classified humans by their racial and genetic identities.
German Nazis invaded eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to create Lebensraum (living space). It was simply the application of American Manifest Destiny from the 19th century, during which white Americans created living space for themselves by invading, killing, and expropriating the land of Indigenous Peoples.
The Nazis learned from the United States the forcible sterilization of the mentally or physically disabled, using the pseudo-science of eugenics as justification.
The Nazis used American Black Laws to model their Nuremburg Laws to take away the citizenship, freedom, and lives of Jews and others belonging to “Them” groups.
American Southerners regarded enslaved people as beasts in human form long before the Nazis developed the concept of the Untermench (sub-human) and applied it to people they deemed undesirable.
After Franklin Roosevelt’s first inauguration in 1933, America’s wealthy fascists and Nazis conspired to depose and replace him and model the American government as a German/Italian style fascist dictatorship. The plan came to be known as The Business Plot. Its existence and intentions were confirmed by congressional investigation.
The events in Europe and the Pacific in 1939 and 1940 undercut the arguments of America First fascists and Nazis in the minds of too many Americans. Japan’s self-defeating attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. Hitler’s equally self-defeating declaration of war on the United States four days later allowed Roosevelt to extend the American involvement into the European theater. And, as Winston Churchill had foreseen, the entry into the war of the United States - with its essentially untouchable and unbombable industrial might - was decisive. The news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor reached London during the early evening of 7 December 1941. Churchill later noted that that night he “went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved.”
Churchill later expanded those thoughts. “Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So, we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.”
Churchill was right that the war would be long: three and a half years from Pearl Harbor to the defeat of the Axis Powers in Europe and closer to four years for the final victory over fascist Japan. The way was long and tragically bloody, but Roosevelt led America through the war, as he had through the Great Depression, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage less than a month before the victory in Europe.
But, again, the Liberals had won another great victory over Conservates, this time both domestically and internationally, preserving liberal democracy and personal freedom.
2010s and 2020s
We now find ourselves nearing the end of another two-decade period after an 80-year jump: the 2010s and 2020s.
Conservative fascism and Nazi ideology are again ascendent in the United States. The American fascists and Nazis that for much of American history were confined as just a branch of the democratic party - constrained by geography and intraparty machinations - have now asserted complete control of the republican party.
The 80-year period between World War Two and the present saw:
- The almost monolithically democratic South for more than a century become almost monolithically republican over a period of just a couple decades. As Americans returned from World War Two, only to find Nazi ideology and practices alive and well in the American South, the liberals of the northern wing of the democratic party finally allied with Black Americans to pursue civil and voting rights for all Americans. American fascists and Nazis were, to say the least, not fans.
- The fascist and Nazi movement’s takeover of the republican party as its new power base. They were eventually able to place one of their own, Ronald Reagan, in the White House.
- The republican party partner with Rupert Murdoch - a latter-day Joseph Goebbels – to establish a dedicated, full-time propaganda network in the United States. The GOP fascist and Nazi propaganda effort does not enjoy the media hegemony Goebbels’s machine enjoyed in 1930s and 1940s Germany, but it is far more sophisticated.
In 2016 along came Donald Trump. His racist and fascist bona fides were long established. Following Reagan’s departure from office in 1989 the ensuing republican presidential candidates came in the personae of a succession of relative moderates: George H. W. Bush (who had fought in the Pacific theater during the Second World War), Robert Dole (who had been grievously wounded fighting against Hitler in Europe), George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney.
Finally, Trump came to the rescue in 2016. He didn’t veil his racism with code words and dog whistles. Trump was willing to offer naked and direct bigotry and hate. America’s republican fascist and Nazi movement swooned and coalesced adoringly around Trump. Hilary Clinton won a plurality of the votes of Americans in 2016 by a margin of almost three million, but Trump was still able to get into office.
Trump’s unexpected win in 2016 left the GOP’s fascists and Nazis with no time for a detailed plan to exploit the gift that had fallen into their laps. But after Trump lost in 2020 – and was unsuccessful in his effort to hold onto the office through sedition on 6 January 2021 - they had four years to plan for his anticipated return to office after 2024.
The Heritage Foundation in 2023 published its Project 2025. The document details comprehensive plans for radical changes to American government and society including:
- expanding the authority and scope of the presidency to make the office one with the powers and immunities of a monarchy,
- reclassifying tens of thousands of currently professional merit federal government positions as political appointments, and requiring applicants to take and pass a written exam to prove their fealty to fascist and Nazi ideology,
- misusing previously independent and professional federal law enforcement organizations like the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for partisan purposes,
- establishing Christian theocratic rule, an apostate misappropriation of Christian doctrine by those the Bible describes as Anti-Christs,
- controlling the independent Federal Reserve to base monetary and economic policy on conservative ideology and the financial benefit of cronies rather than fact-based assessments of economic data and conditions from the real world.
The list of potential harms is far too extensive to comprehensively detail here. But the idea is to undo the liberal principles that have made the United States a thriving if flawed democracy and model of individual rights and freedoms for 250 years. The conservative fascist and Nazi plan would end liberal concepts like the separation of church and state, the rule of law, the separation of powers, checks and balances, an independent judiciary, civil liberties, and individual rights and freedoms.
All of this would be buttressed by the comprehensive gerrymandering of election districts that the GOP fascists and Nazis have already engaged in for decades. This fixing of elections would give Trump, or an ideologically similar executive, the sort of rubber stamp legislature and judiciary required to support a totalitarian monarchy or dictatorship. The sort of system Vladimir Putin has set up in the Russian Federation. We are seeing a clear preview of this concept in the present Congress and Supreme Court.
Dr. Feinman wrote on this subject in 2020, as Joseph Biden was seeking to take the presidency away from Donald Trump and steer the United States back onto a path of democratic government and the preservation of individual rights and freedoms.
Trump’s renewed presence in the Oval Office, combined with the fascist and Nazi movement’s detailed plans to destroy American democracy and freedom, mean that for the first time the Conservatives could win and the Liberals could lose, as America struggles through this fourth episode of existential crisis.
The tines are again pointing toward liberal democracy and freedom in one direction and toward conservative totalitarianism and tyranny in the other. This time there is a strong chance that the Conservatives could win and – to paraphrase Churchill – the American experiment with liberal democracy, the rule of law, and personal rights and freedoms may finally be wiped out and our history come to an end.
Contact at: non.partisan.17@gmail.com