Is America Really Up Against An Internal Fascist Threat?

That should be apparent to anyone who's been watching the metastization of the worst features of right-wing populism within the American conservative movement and within the Republican Party. If the non-progressive bulk of the Democratic Party establishment is moving more in the direction of an Eisenhower Republican posture, it's been pushed there by a drastic lurch to the right-- exacerbated by, but by no means begun by, Trump... more a headlong plunge than a mere lurch, by the GOP. And this isn't going to get any better, primarily because conservatives don't see a way forward for the Republican Party within the confines of democracy. The radical right-- and not just a morons like Trump-- is done playing by a set of rules that they feel are stacked against them. And that means anything goes.

Conservatives freaked out when people without property were allowed to vote, when ex-slaves and their descendants were allowed to vote, when women were allowed to vote, when young people were allowed to vote. They flip out when their schemes to prevent voting by groups unlikely to embrace conservatism are prohibited and when their endeavors to water down the vote of those people are declared unconstitutional. Ever since the Patriots beat the British and their conservative American allies in the late 1770s, conservatives have felt they've never gotten a break.

Trump's buffoon-like reflexive fascism was easier for conservatives to embrace than it would have been if they thought they could get anywhere without the populists, nationalists and, yes, fascists, who worship him. Over the weekend Jeremy Rosner from the quintessential Democratic establishment polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, wrote an OpEd for The Hill, The Democratic and Anti-democratic parties, explaining a realignment of America’s two major parties that will not be mostly defined by demographics but by ideas about democracy and the rule of law. "To put it simply, we are headed for an era in which America may well have a Democratic Party and an Anti-democratic Party." Headed for? How many Republicans do you see standing up to Trump? Yes, a few... a very few.

"This realignment, in large part," he wrote cautiously, "was driven by a crucial strategic choice the Republican Party made over the past decade, as described in a recent piece for The Atlantic by Vann Newkirk II. Soon after the GOP’s 2012 presidential defeat, Reince Priebus... led a post-mortem analysis that was unusually blunt and prescient. It said the GOP must make big reforms in its outlook and agenda or risk electoral marginalization. In particular, it called for the GOP to support comprehensive immigration reform, liberalize its views on gay rights, demand reforms on corporate governance, and stop talking like a bunch of 'stuffy old men' who leave younger voters 'rolling their eyes at what the party represents.'" That was seen by the populist-right as a recipe for RINO-ism, so none of the recommendations were taken seriously, let alone adopted. "Instead," wrote Rosner, "it relied on tactics aimed at preserving power for a party that represented a steadily shrinking share of the population, mostly defined by non-urban, lower-educated whites. These tactics included gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of the census process and efforts to stack the federal judiciary with like-minded jurists." Trump only made this tendency-- part of the nature of conservatism to begin with-- much, much worse-- and devoid of societal norms or even guard-rails.

If Republicans after 2012 decided to go outside democratic norms to preserve their power, rather than to reform and align with the values of a majority of the rising American electorate, Donald Trump in 2016 put that strategy on steroids. His presidential candidacy-- built on racially-charged language, offensive comments about women, nationalism and appeals to less-educated whites-- snugly fit the imperatives of a party that was drifting away from a majority of the public. So, too, the recent power-grabs by Republican legislatures in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan, which have moved to strip incoming Democratic governors or attorneys general of traditional powers, simply to preserve Republican power, even in the face of a popular vote for change.

Trump didn't order, nor coordinate, those moves. They came pretty naturally to a Republican Party obsessed with power and financial greed over and above any "American ideals," which most conservative never truly embraced anyway. Rosner is looking for a happy ending and suggests that "the Trump-era moves to preserve Republicans’ power may have crossed an important line-- a legal line. Disclosures by special counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York suggest that some on the GOP team lied, during and/or after the 2016 election, about their interactions with the Russians, and Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pleaded guilty to his part in a hush-money scheme during the campaign involving two women who say they had extramarital affairs with Trump. The march to apparent illegality was not confined to the 2016 presidential race. In the 2018 race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, it now appears that the campaign of GOP candidate Mark Harris, the uncertified winner, may have run an illegal scheme to skew absentee ballots in his favor. The new legislative power-grab schemes in Wisconsin and Michigan almost certainly will face court challenges. Many Republicans who themselves are not breaking electoral laws or subverting democratic institutions are still condoning their party’s anti-democratic bent by refusing to condemn such actions. The slide toward extra-constitutional, illegal and anti-democratic tactics to preserve GOP power is becoming its new brand."

The Trump base is too thick to understand and conservatives who do understand seem to be increasingly opting for the Republican Party tribalism they're comfortable with.

Some analysts suggest issues of race, gender and education will be dominant drivers in upcoming elections, since those demographic fault lines were so visible in recent voting. But another dynamic may define 2020 even more strongly. Should the various Trump investigations produce more evidence of law-breaking, a defining dividing line between the parties could become the question of democracy-- which party is for it, and which is trying to subvert it.

Already, the incoming Democratic majority in the House has vowed that its first major bill will focus on democracy-- making it easier to vote, limiting big money in politics and ensuring presidential candidates are more transparent about their finances.

Will half-assed Democratic band-aid policies work while hypocrisy dominates the party establishment, essentially nothing more than another wing of deadly conservatism?

All this mirrors what happened after Watergate. A year before Nixon’s resignation, the dominant issues were the economy and the oil embargo. By the 1974 midterm, a focus on campaign finance reform helped to sweep in the 49-seat Democratic gain that became known as the “Watergate babies.” And two years later, the focus on ethics and reform was enough to sweep in a moral reformer and Washington outsider from Georgia.

It could be that Republicans in coming months will begin to change path on issues tied to democracy and the rule of law, as new revelations emerge about Trump and as they ponder the extent of their losses in the recent House elections. They might finally begin to act on Reince Priebus’s post-2012 urgings to adjust their policies and outlook. But if they continue to double down on preserving their power by any means, even as their voter base shrinks, their anti-democratic brand could become even more pronounced.

More likely, someone snuck into Rosner's room and shot him up with some pure diacetylmorphine. I'd count on Bernie winning before I'd count on the Republican or the conservative establishment changing stripes.