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Why Trump’s Fascist Evil Conquered America
The postwar dynamics of America’s military-industrial complex and the twin governmental fig leaves
One of the great mysteries of the early twenty-first century is how fascist evil could have prevailed in the United States. How does the leader of the free world turn into a grotesque cult of Trumpian authoritarianism?
Donald Trump hasn’t just overtaken the Republican Party. He’s made a mockery of the humanist institutions that support modern civilization, including science, capitalism, democracy, freedom of thought, and the rule of law.
How has this happened? The answer amounts to the political upshot of American history from WWII onwards, and this history should come with a warning label because it’s appalling and not fit for children’s ears. The history of postwar American politics is a horror story, which is why it led to Trumpism.
There are three elements of this history: America’s status as an industrial superpower and the two major parties’ ways of coping with that status.
The US surpassed Britain as a superpower in the Gilded Age, but in the ensuing decades, America’s industrial elites squandered their capital in the stock market, which ruined the nation in the Great Depression. Americans extricated…
