Deplorables

As we learn more about the plot to overthrow the 2020 election, Chauncey DeVega notes that Hillary Clinton's warning from 2016 was understated.

Today's Republican Party is in fact a right-wing extremist organization, and fascist in all but name. Its followers and voters embrace and act upon those values and beliefs. To claim that there is some other Republican Party, somehow separate and distinct from right-wing extremism — as too many commentators and political observers do — is to assert a difference that does not substantively exist. Ultimately, Hillary Clinton's [recent] Guardian interview makes clear that she too fails to consistently and accurately describe the party that she warned us about five years ago.

DeVega is not optimistic that the press and political class will respond adequately.

American political insiders are deeply invested in the familiar, nostalgia-colored mores of American politics. To acknowledge the existential threat of the Jim Crow Republicans and the [fascist] movement is too traumatic and terrifying for the political class to properly contemplate. Indifference, fantasy and soothing lies about how everything will inevitably be OK in America appear to offer a much easier path than doing the difficult and dangerous work required to save American democracy.

Matters are now so dire that it is now not a question of whether American democracy will succumb to a nightmare reign of full-on fascism but rather when that will happen. If America's neofascist movement continues to gain momentum, Joe Biden will be relegated to the role of a speed bump or an asterisk in American history.