If you care about the current Republican slide (race?) toward fascism, and you haven't already listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast Ultra, now's the time, since all eight episodes are available.
It's a look at Nazi infiltration of the U.S. in the 1930s and ’40s, including the U.S. Congress, and how the legal system was stymied in stopping it. It's full of names I (and possibly you) never heard of, but who were prominent at the time. As I wrote earlier, it began by confounding my sense of traditional "Right" and "Left," and that continued with some of the characters in the later episodes.
The final episode reaches its conclusion with the voice of historian Steven Ross, who says:
Whenever somebody says, 'It's time to move on, let's heal and move on' — that's always a mistake. The idea was that these right-wingers ultimately aren't really a danger to America. After the mistrial, in 1945–1946, it would have done this country, I think, real good by saying, you know what, we have known about a left-wing danger in America, but we have never really openly, as a country, discussed right-wing danger.
We need to hold people responsible. People who call on fellow Americans to pick up arms need to be held accountable. And we have never done that in our history, really, for the right wing.
And then Maddow wraps up, telling us that "Fascism happens recurrently" because it has a certain appeal to a certain percentage of the population. "Previous generations of Americans have confronted this same type of threat before us," She says. "And learning what they did gives us some lessons learned about what works and what might not work."
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