Hartmann: How far down the fascist road have we gone?

He lists numerous things that indicate we've gone pretty far down that road. And can we pull back from that disaster and restore democracy? The list is long (below) and partial at that, and the Repugnacons are responsible for most all of it with help from the Democorps. If we don't act now with political ferocity then surely this will descend all the way into complete fascism and democracy will be lost. If from your privilege you cannot see that and think this is alarmist then you are indeed complicit in that descent.

• The Supreme Court explicitly legalized political bribery in decisions in 1976 and 1978, doubling down with Citizens United in 2010

• President Bush authorized extrajudicial murder, kidnapping and torture of non-citizens

• President Obama authorized and carried out the first “legal” assassination of an American citizen on foreign soil

• Both political parties followed Chile and the UK in a massive, 40-year experiment in Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism, throwing open our markets to foreign competition that closed over 60,000 American factories and destroyed millions of good-paying union jobs

• Repeated radical tax cuts shifted tens of trillions of dollars (in today’s money) from the working class to the top 1 percent, a shift so thorough that the top 1 percent today own more wealth than the entire American middle class

• The Electoral College loophole in our Constitution allowed two Republicans to become president even though they lost the elections of 2000 and 2016; they used that opportunity to stack our courts, particularly the Supreme Court, with hard-right cranks

• President Reagan ordered the DOJ and FTC to stop enforcing our anti-trust laws and Clinton signed a law allowing virtually unlimited consolidation of our media so today hard-right poison spills out of three cable television networks, over 200 TV stations, 1500 radio stations in English and an estimated 200 in Spanish (the fastest-growing part of the rightwing ecosystem that’s almost entirely unnoticed by the Democratic Party)

• Reversing Congress’ assertion in the 1930s that unions had legal protections, the Supreme Court and Ronald Reagan declared war on working-class people so effectively that today only about 6 percent of American workers in the non-government economy have such protections

• A movement of armed militias denying the authority of the US government has declared war on liberal democracy so completely that they led an assault on the US Capitol and were within minutes of assassinating the Vice President and Speaker of the House

• Our intelligence agencies launched a massive surveillance program that has caught us all up in its web, completing the toolkit that a genuine autocratic fascist would need to control the population should an intelligent one ever rise to the White House

• The Republican Party has, almost without exception, embraced the idea that elections can and should be rigged to their advantage, passing over 30 laws in 19 states to do just that

• Multiple Republican-controlled states have decriminalized killing people on our public streets by driving cars into crowds of protestors

• Voting rights legislation is being blocked not only by every single Republican in the Senate but two bought-off Democrats as well

• An entire generation of students are saddled with crippling debt never before seen in American history

• Over 40 percent of Medicare has been privatized through the “Medicare Advantage” scam while an estimated one million American families will go bankrupt this year just because somebody in their family got sick

• Fewer than a quarter of all high school graduates have taken even a single civics class, leaving two generations since Reagan unaware of how a democratic republic is supposed to function

• Donald Trump nakedly and brazenly lied to the American people literally every day off his presidency and continues to do so with impunity

• Multiple members of Congress participate in an open act of sedition and, so far, their only consequence has been re-election and media stardom

• In an eerie echo of how Hitler used the widow of a man killed by police when they tried to overthrow the government of Bavaria in 1923, Trump is now turning a woman killed by police during the 1/6 coup attempt into a martyr

• The Republican Party has embraced dictatorial foreign governments manipulating our electorate, presidents making millions of their office, and oligarchy in the USA

• A 37-year-old billionaire singlehandedly controls the world’s largest single source of news and information while, a whistleblower asserts, subordinating human rights, democracy and common decency to profit

• The planet has warmed over a full degree Celsius, provoking massive climate emergencies worldwide while the fossil fuel industry continues to buy off politicians and spill science denial into social and mainstream media

• The US Supreme Court initiated a historic constitutional crisis by allowing the Texas vigilante abortion law to stand in defiance of its own Roe v Wade decision