(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How Fascists Subvert Democracy [1] ['Alan Singer', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Ice Blue'] Date: 2026-08-05 This chronology of events in Germany is drawn from 1933 Berlin The Path to Dictatorship (2013). In a diary entry dated August 6, 1932, Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the German Nazi Party, wrote “Haben wir die Macht, dann werden wir sie nie wieder aufgeben, es sei denn, man trägt uns als Leichen aus unseren ämtern hinaus.” An English translation is “Once we have power, we will never give it up, unless they carry us out of our offices as corpses.” In July 1932 elections, the Nazi Party headed by Adolf Hitler emerged as the largest bloc in the German Reichstag or parliament, after receiving over 35% of the vote. On January 30, 1933, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reich chancellor and head of the German government. On February 27, 1933 the Reichstag building, mysteriously burned. During the next month, Hitler issued the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act. Combined, they enabled Hitler to bypass parliament, eliminate political opposition, and establish one party autocratic rule by the Nazi Party. In April 1933, the Nazi Party began its campaign to isolate and victimize German Jews with a national boycott of Jewish owned businesses. It began to force Jews from government civil service positions and launched a campaign to drive undesirable influences out of the universities. In May, Hitler banned independent labor organizations and had union leaders and activists arrested and sent to concentration camps. On May 10, large book-burnings were held in over twenty German cities to destroy works by Jews, leftists, and other authors who did not conform to Nazi ideology. In June officials of other political parties were arrested and sentenced to prison with hard labor. A year later, in August 1934, with the death von Hindenburg, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor establishing himself as all-powerful Führer or Leader. Members of the German Reichswehr or armed forces were required to take a personal oath of loyalty to him. As these events were taking place, André François-Poncet, the French ambassador to Germany reported “all of these dams that were supposed to hold back the Hitler movement had been washed away by the first wave.” By the summer of 1933, François-Poncet believed in just five months Hitler and the Nazi Party had firmly established a fascist regime. Emergency decrees were the key for quickly solidifying the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and undermining democracy. As Goebbels wrote, once they had power, they never were going to give it up. Several prominent scholars fear the United States is treading down the same path. Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University describes what Trump is doing in the United States as “competitive authoritarianism,” but not quite fascism, because opposition political parties continue to operate. In his book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder who left the United States to teach in Canada because of fear that academic freedom in this country was threatened, argues that accepting Trump’s form of “untruth” is a step towards abandoning freedom. Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works, argues that Trump’s politics rely on classic fascist methods including targeting groups as threats or unworthy; attacking democratic institutions including elections and the media as frauds, and claiming that to combat crises and make the country great again require a powerful leader, Donald Trump. It appears that Trump, the Republican Party, and the MAGA movement are doing everything they can to never leave power including mimicking, either consciously or unconsciously overt Nazi strategies. They are undermining the public’s confidence in fair elections, gerrymandering districts to rig who gets elected, preparing to use their para-military ICE forces to intimidate voters, attempting to rewrite American history, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars donated by wealthy corporations and individuals to spread propaganda and influence what people think. As part of the process of intimidation, Trump threatens to investigate, prosecute, and imprison perceived enemies. Since winning the 2024 election, he has had to Justice Department investigate and/or indict former FBI Director James Comey, E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine writer who won two civil judgments against Mr. Trump, New York attorney general Letitia James, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Fani Willis, and the Georgia district attorney who charged Trump with interference in the state during the 2020 presidential election, and U.S. Senator Adam Schiff. The Trump, Republican, and MAGA neo-fascist strategy includes declaring national emergencies and expanding executive power. Since returning to the Presidency on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump has issued over 270 Executive Orders. Many of them claim to address national emergencies in order to permit him to assume unprecedented Presidential power. One Executive Order declared Antifa, which does not exist as an organization, “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.” This directive enables federal law enforcement agencies to act against any individuals they deem as Antifa as terrorist threats to the United States. On September 25, 2025, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” In the memorandum Trump outlined a campaign to investigate and disrupt progressive financial networks, non-profit entities, and ideologies associated with anti-fascist movements that he accused of promoting political violence and domestic terrorism in the United States. It authorizes the “FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Forces to lead national investigative efforts focusing on networks behind acts of political violence and civil disorder. Tasks the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service with tracking and disrupting funding networks of targeted groups. Authorizes the Attorney General to recommend groups for designation as “domestic terrorist organizations” and prioritize domestic terrorism as a national priority area.” With this directive, nonprofit organizations and civil liberties activists joined academics, lawyers and law firms, journalists and news outlets, and public health professionals and scientists on President Trump’s list of enemies, political opponents and critics who he wants silenced. The American Civil Liberties Union charges “NSPM-7 is a deliberate attempt to sow fear and intimidate and silence opposition to the president’s abuses.” NSPM-7 is being used by the Trump administration to arrest and imprison as domestic terrorists people who have no connection with terrorism and sometimes with each other. In Texas, eight anti-ICE protesters received decades long criminal sentences as members of an “antifa cell” after one member of the group shot and wounded a guard who he claimed was about to kill one of the protesters. A ninth person, the husband of one of the protesters who was not present at the demonstration was sentenced to thirty years in prison as a supposed co-conspirator. In Chicago, six people were arrested for protesting at the Broadview ICE facility and charged with a terrorist conspiracy against the government. When the original grand jury refused to indict them, federal prosecutors presented their case to a new grand jury. The case eventually collapsed because there was no evidence that a conspiracy existed. In Minneapolis, fifteen anti-ICE protesters were charged with felony conspiracy to impede federal officers. Evidence used to charge them with conspiracy include attending a meeting at a DSA office, posting a flyer online, wearing an “I’m Antifa” sweatshirt, and receiving an automated text message. There is no evidence that the fifteen people had any direct contact with each other or planned anything together. To justify and help it implement NSPM-7 the Trump administration organized a 2026 Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, a high-level international conference hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The summit brought together representatives from more than 60 countries to discuss ways to combat what it identified as a “global rise in violent far-left extremism and secular political terrorism.” The Trump administration announced it would play a leading role in combatting far-left political groups that were conducting “deliberate, ideologically motivated strategy to destabilize free societies by violently targeting our political and economic systems, including attacks against private citizens, government officials, police and law enforcement, businesses, and critical infrastructure around the globe. For too long, however, this threat has remained a blind spot in the international community’s counterterrorism focus, underestimated and under-resourced, despite the danger it poses.” Speaking at the conference, Rubio complained that in the United States during Black Lives Matter protests city governments refused to prosecute people who were perpetrating violence and committing vandalism. “As criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror.” Trump advisor Stephen Miller claimed you can identify leftist threats by their “deformed” appearance. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who were assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. They’re all deformed in some way.” He warned to assembled “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.” My concerns about NSPM-7 as a threat to democracy in the United States are shared by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism. In a special report, the office argued NSPM-7 and other Trump administration “measures could result in violations of international human rights law, including the United States’ obligations as a State party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), particularly with regard to the rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, privacy, and participation in public affairs, as well as the rights of human rights defenders.” They also challenged “the labelling of protesters against immigration enforcement activity as ‘domestic terrorism’ and the killing of two U.S. citizens.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/5/800080233/community/how-fascists-subvert-democracy/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/