By the spring of 1945, the former socialist-turned-corporate-fascist god Benito Mussolini was hanging upside down with his mistress (right-wing family values!) in Milan, and the right-wing's One True God Adolf Hitler had shot himself dead in his bunker in Berlin. Europe had been an abattoir of right-wing mass murder for several years, saved finally in large part by America's 'Greatest Generation', led by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, which had helped rid much of Europe of the murderous scourge of right-wing insanity (Franco, for some reason, remained untouched by the Allies in Spain).
Incredibly, almost 70 years later, corporate fascism reigns triumphant in America, notable for its inversion of Mussolini's model of government in control of corporate power, with the American strain of the disease handing the position of control to corporate titans. How is it we threw away the sacrifice of a revered generation, only to see the very evil they helped defeat come to rule what was once considered 'The World's Greatest Democracy'?
The autopsy of American democracy has been chronicled by the likes of Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and many others. The Fifth Column of right-wing traitors who have worked from within for decades to obliterate American democracy range from the notorious, like Paul Weyrich, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing hate radio, to Ayn Rand's monstrous hordes of economic pirates such as Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer and the execrable Grover Norquist. Numerous right-wing nests of treason like the Heritage Foundation and many other propaganda sumps are of course funded by openly fascist thugs like the Koch Bros. and their Birch-loving doppelgangers, along with right-wing fishwraps like the National Review and the Weekly Standard. These stalwarts of anti-democratic misinformation have given birth to risible, sophomoric yellow journalism tabloids like NewsMax, Drudge, the Daily Caller and WorldNutDaily, which feed the bottomless appetite for paranoia, hatred and racism among the Stupid Party's neo-Confederate hordes.
How did this happen? One might say it is the Achilles heel of democracies that they are vulnerable to fascist groups like the Birchers, the national Chamber of Commerce, the most profitable corporations, sociopathic billionaires, et al; that the seeds of its own destruction are contained in the very features that make democracy so attractive, e.g., free speech, which is used by right-wingers to spread the most laughable lies (and to snuff out any real opposition)...if that is true, how is it democracies elsewhere on the planet are able to use the very features of democracy to keep the most deadly elements of any society, right-wing lunatics, at bay?
Democracy must be disciplined; it is under no compunction to allow the worst among us to use the very features that make democracy so salutary to the majority of its citizens to destroy it. That is why Canada prohibits Fox News from poisoning its populace with the steady diet of lies and bigotry that has helped America become a corporate fascist dystopia, and why most democracies in the world prohibit corporations from bribing politicians and controlling elections.
America must grow up and accept its obligation to protect democracy before protecting the "rights" of those who seek its destruction. FDR understood that. The Greatest Generation didn't make its sacrifice on the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific so the enemy they fought would, little more than a half century later, bring America down from within.