Political scientists of the future will no doubt burn a lot of digital ink trying to identify where things went off the rails in 21st century America.

Like the first shot of the Civil War, the near-collapse of our democracy in 2020 and 2021 stand out as pinnacle moments in what is, at least for now, a “cold” Civil War.

With the rule of law under severe strain from the full-frontal assault against it by President Trump and his Republican Party peers, the GOP is increasingly using control of government at the state level to codify their anti-democratic efforts.

As my friends Cornell Belcher, Kurt Bardella, and I tried to make as clear, a country in which one of its two ruling parties is changing laws to consolidate power and to undermine democracy’s most sacred tenet, free and fair elections, we have moved way beyond a Susan Collin’s “very concerned” and into

So, to say that author Brynn Tannehill’s in her new book American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy is timely is an understatement. Tannehill adopts a “watch what they do, not [just] what they say” approach to her meticulously researched book to answer THE core question of our time: is the modern Republican Party developing into an Americanized version of german or Italian fascism?

The fascism label may sound like nothing more than the same type of rhetorical red meat thrown about by the Right accusing Democrats of “socialism.” But two things make contemporaneous concerns about the Right adopting fascism distinct and very different than the Right’s accusations of socialism on the Left.

The first is the GOP, unlike the obscure and powerless socialists of the far left, is now controlled by its radical factions. Extremists now hold critical party leadership positions at both the state and federal level. The second distinction is the GOP is already using unilateral control in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, to redefine government- allowing governors to usurp local authority implementing legislation to undermine free and fair elections.

Al Gore called impending climate change from man-made activities an “inconvenient truth” in his seminal lecture of the same name, presented as a documentary in the early 2000s. The collapse of America’s conservative party into fascism is our second “inconvenient truth.” Gore’s clarion call about climate change failed to provoke action.

Will we make that mistake twice?

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