How to Stop Fascism in America

“The dark night of fascism is always descending on the United States yet only lands in Europe.” —Tom Wolfe

Sound the air-raid sirens! It’s the Return of the Axis Powers—now in IMAX 3D and with a complimentary tulip glass of Barolo. Saluti!

Italy didn’t learn its lesson from its Allied thrashing in Sicily. A whole century removed from the March on Rome, those poor, immigrant-hating, tourist-dependent winos just elected a fascist to the prime ministership. Giorgia Meloni will be Italy’s first female Premier—which would be cause for celebration in our identarian times, except that she’s a no-good, retrograde fascist. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is forming a fascisty coalition with two equally inimical parties, Forza Italia and the League. Together, these three heirs of Ill Duce are ushering in a new authoritarian storm over Europe.

Oh, and did I mention the new Italic regime is fascist with a punctuated capital “F”? (Has diminishing marginal lexical returns kicked in yet?)

The Meloni government plans on jumpstarting the new fascist age by… sending arms to Ukraine to bolster an already successful counter-coup de main against Vladimir Putin?

…Exactly! “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire,” Mussolini suck-up and poet extraordinaire Ezra Pound once warned. So now the new Italian government will carry on the fascist flame by arming the Jewish president of Ukraine to repel revanchist aggression by a soi-disant defender of traditional Christian civilization.

Don’t get it? Well you aren’t reading The Atlantic enough, you unlettered imbecile!

Italy may have fallen (due volte!), but we can still stay the same fate in the good, old U.S. of A. We have a president who, with the help of a few shamefaced Republicans, successfully wrestled power from a Musso manqué. So what if Joe Biden can’t complete a sentence and is a sock puppet of his advisors. At the spry age of 78, he drove the Ultra MAGA forces from the White House, saving us from the tyranny of mean tweets. But we cannot rest on our liberal laurels. Domestic fascists are regrouping. The President himself appended the “f” appellation to Trumpy Republicans—now let him enforce its connotations.

First things first: funnel oodles of campaign copper to the MAGAeist of Trump-gloios licking candidates. Step two: by pumping up otherwise unelectable red-rage runners, Democrats nudge out the kind of soft, milquetoast moderates Mitch McConnell’s made a career of grooming. Then, for step three of the triple-bank shot, after shepherding feral America-Firsters over the primary finish line, clean their clocks on election day with reasonable sounding blue alternatives.

The plan is 100% grade-A backfire-proof. There’s no way anything could possiblii go wrong. The DNC is staffed by professionals, after all, with a spotless track record. Except that one time Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin. And that other time in 2014 when the election arm effectively threw in the towel, leading to Republicans taking the Senate and blocking Obama’s last Supreme Court nomination. Or that whole dolorous jag when the entire party, under Obama’s aloof aegis, shed over 1,000 elected seats.

But this time—🎶maybe this time🎶—will be different. The American people show absolutely no electoral appetite for insurrectionists. A near-majority even wishes to see Trump get a mark on his rap sheet for inspiring the riot-cum-near-coup at the Capitol. Public opinion is clearly on the side of liberal democracy and decency—the Democratic Party’s unofficial slogan. An isolated NBC poll confirms it! That’s proof enough.

Allow me to shush the naysayers now by preempting their objections. Yes, historical factors are against the incumbent party. And yes, inflation continues to put penny-pinching families in a vice grip. And of course the Federal Reserve’s latest 75-basis-point bump has basically doubled housing payments.

But this is the future of liberal democracy we’re talking about. You have to fend off fascism by first supporting its adherents, then crushing them with the full force of b-roll-cluttered, Chicken-Little-chiliastic TV spots.

Come November, America will wash all its despot-desiring impulses out to sea on a blue wave!

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Whew! Talk about dedication to a bit. Scrolling liberal Twitter for hours to absorb the self-deluding narrative was more strenuous than Tom Hardy conditioning his body to play Bane.

Anyway, the title of this piece is “How to Stop Fascism in America” and while the Democrats have their own high-risk, middling reward method to stem the rise of the Trump Reich, I have a simpler tactic. No 5-D chess, no game-theory modeling, no begging the votes of stupid people with exaggeration, pathos, and duplicity.

Just a straightforward approach: do not, under any circumstances, lend support, direct, tacit, or otherwise, to the enemy.

If you fancy yourself a fascist fighter, don’t bolster your foe in hopes of a more resounding win. Elections aren’t the final rapturous war at the Hill of Megiddo. Raising the stakes won’t bring ineluctable victory. Politics is a fight for fickle public opinion. Credibility can’t be counted on as a selling point if you fund those you label enemies of the republic.

The Democrats’ meddling in Republican primaries to boost Trump train bearers isn’t just playing with, in their estimation, Reichstagian fire—it undercuts the entire line of reasoning that the GOP is composed of cryptic brownshirts. “We helped nominate these goose-stepping radicals, now you have to vote for their opponent or risk national destruction” is the kind of perverse logic that would make Dick Tuck blanche.

The biggest political trick of all will be, come November 8th, Democrats blowing their reserves to elevate a new bench of fash Trumpkins to Congress. Burned and misled donors may not be so charitable with the green treats next cycle.