GOP nearing final phase of imposing fascism on US: Yale professor

The Republicans Party is close to winning a decades-long fight to write fascism into United States law, according to a philosophy professor who has studied authoritarian regimes.

The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchs who wish to undo constraints on their business and right-wing social and religious coalition with roots in the Confederacy, and those forces have organized themselves around Donald Trump and his election lies to take direct aim at democracy, according to Yale professor Jason Stanley in a new column for The Guardian.

"Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests," wrote Stanley, author of the book How Fascism Works. "Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy."

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Fascist propaganda takes root in the nation's racial conflict and resulting militarized police, and enemies both internal and external are blamed for a humiliating series of imperial wars, and the twice-impeached one-term president has shaped all those forces around him into a cult.

"There has been a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades," Stanley wrote. "Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it."

"Donald Trump has shown others what is possible," he added. "But the fascist movement he now leads preceded him, and will outlive him."