A Book I'd Rather Not Write
The second fascist and exterminist Trump administration has been so relentlessly horrific that it can almost make one forget the horrors of the first one, including Charlottesville (“good people on both sides”), the mad pandemicist Trump response to Covid-19 (“inject Clorox,” etc.), the mass-murderous cuts to public health and environmental protection, the thankfully blocked desire to crush the George Floyd Rebellion with the US military (“shoot them in the legs”), the attempted subversion and physical overthrow (a literal putsch attempt on January 6) of the 2020 presidential election, and so much more.
Those horrors and how and why to understand them and the first Trump White House as fascist were the subjects of an entire book written by yours truly four years ago — This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (NY: Routledge, 2021).
Will I in the future write a book about Trump47, titled perhaps It Happened Here: The Rise and Consolidation of an Amerikaner Fascist Regime, 2016-2026?
(Let’s hope not. That could well signify the end of humanity.)
Not likely. Even if the consolidation takes place, taking us from “this happened here” to “it happened here,” I’ll probably be too busy resisting and/or too repressed by the fascists to undertake such a task.
Plus, it would feel creepy to make the consolidation of fascism the subject of a monograph requiring months of solitary research, writing, and editing while monstrous oppressors cancelled all prospects for a decent future.
But who knows? Maybe shit will be so locked down I won’t have anything else to do.
Speaking of Trump45, so brilliantly (that’s a joke) dissected and analyzed in This Happened Here, I think the first Trump administration’s terrible record is part of why we haven’t seen more and better resistance to the much worse Trump47 regime.
Trump 45 was so awful (see my book for details) and fascist — or “authoritarian” (the milder term preferred by the tender intelligentsia) — that many decent people were thrown back into stunned shock, depression, disbelief, horror, disgust, “internal exile” (Masha Gessen’s term for intellectuals silenced under Putin), self-protection, and basic surrender by the orange-brushed RepubliNazi ogre’s mind-boggling Supreme Court- and Democratic Party-enabled return to power, this time with full criminal immunity for God’s/f#*k’s sake!
At one level, I get it. But as we near Mein Trumpf47’s terrible one-year anniversary, it’s long past time for anyone and everyone who cares about humanity to shake off this demobilizing shock and horror. And here it important to shed one of the deeply flawed cognitions that helps fuel surrender — the false notion that We the People have ever come remotely close to undertaking the kind of mass resistance that alone can lead to the removal of a fascist regime from atop an imperial superpower like the US. We have not. This has not happened here yet. It needs to and quite soon or it will be accurate to say it happened here. And once “it happens,” it’s a bitch to undo it.
I am open to good ideas from readers on how to bring about the real and effective resistance required to meet the historical moment.
I am not talking about more big single day protest rallies once every four months under the direction of former Democratic Party Congressional staffers.
Help me not disappear into an attic to write It Happened Here: The Rise and Consolidation of an Amerikaner Fascist Regime, 2016-2026.
While it need not be said, I will say it. I have been around a long time. I am, let-s say for argument, highly educated and read and a political scientist formally and a historian, Latin American specialist, and have lived for many years in Latin America, although a born in he US person. I have lived in a country with a failed economy, two in fact, and now am back to the US witnessing its grand decline, though armed to the teeth and still capable of inflicting great harm to other nations and itself, while many, perhaps most, of its citizens are impaled on its own self-imposed ,to a large extent, lack of coherent response. This is my point, again if it need be said, Paul is not exaggerating. Find a way to act or suffer the fearful consequences that are already happening to so many.
I once was called to a hospital late at night on a professional basis and when I arrived, a nurse described a patient as alive in only one sense, "a slight response to pain." He did not survive. I never have forgoten her poignant description of the last moments of existence.
Without proper scientific method applied, it's coNvid all the way.