Subject: Don't get distracted by the differences
https://martinlongman.substack...

The Comparisons Between Nazis and MAGA Are Strikingly Alike
Don't get bogged down in the differences or semantics. Focus on the similarities.

/snip to the conclusion

I anticipated Trump’s rise in several articles, including one in 2013 called The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction. In that piece, I looked at how the Republicans were responding to the reelection of Obama.
[quote from the referenced piece]
The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

At that point, I was considering this as a purely electoral strategy. Conservatives were pursuing it as a way to avoid changing their positions to account for the changing demographics of the country. Rather than address their crippling lack of support with minority populations, they would seek to maximize their share of the white vote.

This was the breach Trump and MAGA stepped into to take over the entire Republican Party and eventually the country. It has been far worse and severe than what I feared in 2013.

Rather than a mere assault on pluralism for cynical political advantage, the MAGA movement has brought forth a full-on attack on the Constitution, human and civil rights, representative democracy itself, and even our alliances.

We can try to explain why this happened just as we can try to explain why Germans embraced Hitler. But just or more important is understanding what it actually is, and where it is trying to go.

Rather than get bogged down in defining what fascism is or is not, we can and should focus on how the worst that fascists produced resembles what is happening to us today.

Today we have a government bent on conquest, racial purity, and total power. Tens of millions of people voted for this. Many didn’t understand what they were empowering but that doesn’t provide much comfort. They were supposed to know this was monstrous and morally reprehensible.