'An unbreakable plurality of the GOP explicitly wants fascism': defense analyst

Defense analyst Brynn Tannehill has taken a look at recent polling of Republican primary voters and has come to the sobering conclusion that many of them want former President Donald Trump to be a dictator.

Writing in the New Republic, Tannehill notes that a recent poll of GOP voters showed that Trump's Nazi-esque rhetoric about migrants "poisoning the blood" of the nation made 42 percent of respondents more likely to support him, while only 28 percent said it made them less likely to support him.

"About half of Republicans hear Trump’s rhetoric and think, 'Yes, this exactly what I want,'" he writes. "Which is to say, an unbreakable plurality of the GOP explicitly wants fascism."

While the fascist bloc of the GOP may not constitute a majority of voters in the country, Tannehill points to historical precedent showing they don't need to be in order to impose a potential dictatorship on the country.

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"When Milton Mayer visited Germany in the early 1950s to interview former low-level members of the Nazi party, he concluded that perhaps only a million out of 70 million Germans were 'Fanatiker' (fanatics or true believers)—the rest were just along for the perks or to simply avoid unwanted scrutiny for lack of ideological purity," Tannehill explains. "In my own experience as an analyst in U.S. Central Command who studied insurgency, I estimated that you only needed 10 to 15 percent of the population to be supportive of the insurgents to get a situation like what I saw in Iraq in 2005–2006."

In other words, says Tannehill, "you don’t need all that many people dedicated to dictatorship, theocracy, or any other awful possibility to absolutely collapse a country into barbarism."

Read the full analysis here.