I’ve been seeing the links to this one all over the fediverse/Mastodon over the weekend, so I read it.
You should read it too.
It’s “I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. the success rate after fascists were elected was 0%.“, by a fellow named Chris Armitage.
I have no idea who he is, or what his qualifications may be, but frankly those don’t matter much for this. It doesn’t take a professional historian to look into the various fascist takeovers of States since “fascism” took on its common meaning in the early 20th century.
Amateur-historian-accessible analysis on this stuff is all readily available and easy to access online.
And he’s not wrong.
As examples of fascist takeovers, he briefly discusses:
- Germany
- Hungary
- Italy
- Portugal
- Spain
and of his claimed “roughly fifty attempts” he mentions Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, Greece, and Romania without discussion.
His only counter-example is Finland, where the fascists were ascendant but were stopped before they could acieve significant electoral success.
(Finland actually has quite the history of bloody-minded and bloody-for-reals resistance to fascism.)
So yay, Finland.
And now the fascists have actually achieved legitimately, through-normal-processes, control of all three branches of the U.S. government and subsequently launched their coup to extend that control and the powers of that government into traditional fascist level not actually allowed under U.S. law.
Chris gives four potential ways to address that problem, none of which make for particularly fun times but they each at least offer a way to pull the U.S. back from the cliff that it’s currently hanging from by its fingernails.
So, go read it.
And then go get yourself ready for wherever these maniacs take us next.
