I like to fantasize that every time [Sleezebag] is alone with Putin, they talk about his exit strategy, and that one day when he leaves the country, he'll never come back.
We'll probably survive, but we'll have to live with the shame of knowing that future historians will refer to our time as The [Sleezebag] Era.
The same browser that takes you to foxnews.com will take you anywhere else.
This may be true of very elderly people. It is not true of the average Fox News consumer in my experience (bear in mind that I live in [Sleezebag] country). Plenty of them are younger than that, and even a moderately old person (about seventy, say) has learned something about the internet over the past twenty-five years.
BUncle, you're making my point: all previous authoritarian and totalitarian takeovers have occurred against a backdrop of terminal social collapse. America is still the wealthiest and most powerful country on Earth. Things would have to get much, much worse before we'd be in position for a fascist coup.See, the problem with all this you say is, I know a lot of Republicans and I remember back to Nixon. You're missing that I'm not talking as much about what's wrong now as about the scummy downward progression, lo, these last 40 years.
As for the checklist: this country in general has been far more racist and jingoistic than Republicans are today. I'm pretty sure the average white American in 1970 was significantly more racist than the average Republican is today; do you dispute that? Where racism does occur, it's different in character. It used to be that nonwhites were biologically inferior, borderline subhuman. Now you see assumptions of purely cultural inferiority, so that you see things like Newt Gingrich proposing to address the NAACP on the superiority of paychecks to foodstamps. Even [Sleezebag]'s infamous "they're not sending their best people" is dependent on the assumption that there are, in fact, good Mexicans. Prejudice against Jews is now fringe-right, and prejudice against Asians is barely a thing AFAICT (Kuciwalker from Poly is indisputably conservative; he's of partially Jewish heritage, married to a Chinese-American woman, and nobody seems to care about either). This is why [Sleezebag] had to defeat challengers named Rubio and Cruz to win the nomination--their Latin ancestry was irrelevant because they were culturally white. The whole country has moved in the direction of being substantially more racially tolerant, and come to see racism as a much more serious matter, which throws conservatives' failure to shift as far as the mainstream into sharp relief.
Nationalism, and subservient media mouthpieces? Used to be far more the case. Prior to the Vietnam era the news outlets were far more deferential to authority, as was the culture in general. We meekly accepted censorship during both world wars. That changed in part because of the same phenomenon that spawned Fox News: the diversification of information streams by new technology. When there were only three big TV networks and a bunch of major newspapers, all dependent on advertisers to subsidize hefty production costs, moderation was the rule, because moving too far to extremes could turn off viewers. Then came cable, and then the internet. Anyone can throw an opinion out there, and information is very hard to contain. The flipside is that people can choose their own set of info sources and ignore all others.
In that respect, Fox News is the exact opposite of Pravda. Nobody's forced to watch it, or get the truth via furtive photocopied samizdat. The same cable packages that sell Fox News sell CNN and MSNBC. The same browser that takes you to foxnews.com will take you anywhere else. They all know what the traitors are saying; they just don't listen. The internet as a whole is still more egalitarian; any idiot with basic equipment and a minimal budget can make YouTube videos, podcasts, blogs, whatever. Which is why I don't need to be told what Fox News is saying--I have FB friends who share the same rubbish. In fact, Fox News is rather tame. I know a guy who's a neoreactionary, a thing that didn't exist twenty years ago. The dude sincerely believes monarchy is superior to democracy, and gets in big online slapfights with opposing radicals. But socialism is also now a thing people take seriously, again because of the internet. "Fake news" is shorthand for "people are free to say things which are false, and other people are free to believe them, and we can't discredit or silence them in favor of an imposed consensus."
This isn't incipient fascism, it's a whole new world of competing voices. It's getting messy because consensus can't be arranged top-down anymore. That doesn't mean it'll end with jackboots uber alles.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next decade. I'm not really concerned about creeping authoritarianism anymore; the US isn't nearly as dysfunctional as previous societies that have gone that route. But everything's topsy-turvy. Where's everything going to land?