“A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Post-election America: check, check, check, check, and check. About the only thing that doesn't check is the "external expansion," unless you count increased trade with other kleptocratic states, Russia and Hungary, or if talk resumes about trying to buy Greenland.
The worst of this, of course, is all the violence and suffering this fascist fever will impose on the Republican's scapegoats, poor migrants, Trans people, liberals, anybody that opposes them, basically. Project 2025 checks a lot of those same fascist boxes and reportedly doesn't have much to say about external expansion either. It is, actually, not just a fascist moral abomination but geo-politically a belly-flop losing strategy in the global energy transition that will define civilization in the 21st century.
Climate change denialism in US government policy, hostile to industrial policy, obstructing government action for decades, is why Chinese innovation and production in solar and electric cars has blown away the US in the last 15-20 years. Doubling down on this loser's strategy-- Grump promises to reverse all the green new deal industrial policy in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act-- will increasingly isolate the US as a belligerent obstacle to sustainable global economic development.
And, crucially, global realpolitiks that the republicans seem to have lost entirely, this plutocratic opposition to climate change reforms can slow and obstruct a green transition but they cannot stop the economic challenges climate change presents to the 7 billion people living on earth. Ceding global leadership to China and other great power centers facing these challenges will only further endanger the planet, increasingly marginalize the US and other states that assume this burn-baby-burn posture, and hasten the decline of US influence and power in building for a better future.
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