I’ll get right to the important bit here.
Chauncey DeVega at Salon “..spoke with Christopher R. Browning. He is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. He is the author of several books, including the most recent "Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp." Browning is also the author of the recent and widely-read essay "The Suffocation of Democracy," which appeared both online and in the Oct. 25 edition of The New York Review of Books.”
Browning has some important perspective on the threat of Trump and Trumpism. While he doesn’t want to use the “F word” (fascism) to describe Trump, he makes it very clear he regards Trump as an authoritarian. He is extremely concerned about where we now are.
...As a rational thinker, someone who believes in the Enlightenment project and liberal democratic norms, I assumed that the truth and basic facts were a type of sunshine. If you put enough of this light out there for the public, they would make good decisions. But now, with Trump and his enablers, systemic serial lying is rewarded. The very notion that there are facts and discernible truths are being rejected by a good percentage of the American people. We are stuck in a situation where President Trump's spokespeople say things like, “Well, we have alternate facts," or "The truth evolves," or "The truth is not true." Basically, the truth has become utterly instrumental to close to half the population.
...The next two elections are absolutely crucial. 2020 is critical. I don't think we are past the point of return for trying to correct things and fix America's democracy, but we certainly are getting perilously close to the point of no return.
Read The Whole Thing.