Some Democrats and Progressives are criticizing other Democrats and Progressives for focusing too much on the Russian hack of the DNC computer system as a way of attacking Donald Trump.  Their principal claim is that Trump voters don’t care for about what the Russians may have done to help Trump win compared to their illusion that Trump will help improve their economic and social circumstances.  Instead, these Dems believe the Democratic Party should focus on organizing voters and better messaging to compete against Republican policies that are already suspect with many voters. 
 
Also, some liberal Democrats are concerned about reviving a cold war with Russia.  They do not believe that the intelligence community has provided proof that the DNC hack was done by the Russian government, as opposed to Russian non-government hackers.  And, liberal Democrats are uneasy about depending on the intelligence community as allies given their checkered history in the over throw of elected governments like that Salvador Allende of Chile.  Moreover, even if the Russian government was involved in the hack, they doubt that Russian efforts had any meaningful impact on the election outcome.

Sessions lied in the hearing to confirm him as Attorney General as he volunteered that he had not met with Russians during the election season.  Sessions served as a surrogate for Donald Trump as a primary in the Trump presidential campaign, during which time, Sessions met with Russian Ambassador Kislyak in July and September.   If this were a “normal” Presidency, we would expect that the president would encourage Sessions to recuse himself in any examination of the campaign.    Any President who cared to have his administration trusted would be eager to display that his chosen Attorney General projected integrity in all his dealings.  Instead, Trump is seething.  Trump is irate that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions recused himself from issues related to the investigation of the influence of Russians on the 2016 Presidential elections. We have to ask why.

As the Devil’s advocate (Trump’s advocate), Trump needs Attorney General Sessions to obstruct any comprehensive investigation into Russia’s hack into the DNC computer system and email leaks to WikiLeaks.  His election has already been illegitimated and additional information is becoming available about Russia’s blackmail, social media trolling, fake news, and illegal contributions to undermine democratic elections.  Trump’s public pretense that Democratic cries of foul about a “Russian invasion” is a sign that Democrats are blinded by disbelief that they didn’t win in November.   If that were the case, he would want to refute this falsehood and not suffer additional damage from a weakened Attorney General.     

Alternatively (or in addition to), It may be Trump, Ivanka, Jared, and the Steves (Bannon and Miller)  have kept their many ties to Russian oligarchs and   government officials hidden because of their participation in corrupt and illegal business practices.  It seems that Trump has laundered money from Russian criminals, Iranian guards, and Vladimir Putin himself.  They are rightly convinced that a full investigation of their activities would dispel the illusion that they are negotiating with the Russians for world peace and lead to their criminal prosecutions.    

However, neither of these explanations holds water.   If the Democrats are sore losers, or if the Trumpetts are engaged in the quest for world peace, the administration would welcome scrutiny and would be eager now to reveal all – to shame the Democrats and to delight their base.  Instead, Trump is seething, and the press is drip-drip-dripping details each day.  Why are they lying about their connections with Russians at a time when there is widespread acceptance of the idea that Russia invaded our country by contaminating our election process?

Last Thursday, for example, Sessions acknowledged “inadvertently” misleading the Senate Judiciary Committee. However, on Monday, after spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, Sessions amended his testimony by asserting in a written statement that he had told the truth when he said he hadn’t met with Russians.  He justified this last lie to cover his first lie by saying that he did not meet with Russians as part of the campaign but as a member of the Senate (although the meeting was at the Republican Convention and his travel was not paid for by the government).  After being caught in such a clear lie, many have called for Sessions to resign.  But, Sessions has no intention of resigning because Trump (and Bannon) need him.  (Sessions is not just a loyal Trump employee; he and Steve Bannon have long strategized how to restrict immigration, curtail voting access, and to clamp down on inner cities for the glory of white supremacy and the old South.) 
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Trump and his posse have engaged in wrong doing and are now being run down by the media and intelligence community.  They hope that the lies they tell, will at least buy them some time so that they public will forget.  They may be right unless the new stories based on leaks are buttressed by facts uncovered by public investigations. 

Even the most ardent Trump supporters admit that Donald Trump’s behavior is, at best, unusual, or, at worst, bizarre and unhinged.  While many of his supporters believe his behavior is somehow connected to the bluntness and political incorrectness called for to be a successful businessman, many of his opponents attribute his behavior to the more sinister and well-designed plan to transform our democracy into a fascist state.  Other opponents see Trump’s behavior as the manifestation of some form of mental illness.  It is surprising that so many people find it credible to believe that Trump is mentally deranged rather than a budding fascist given the abundance of evidence that Trump is a fascist who is aligned with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
 
Fascism is often used as a pejorative and equated with Nazism, although not all fascists have been Nazis. To lessen the derogatory sting of “fascism,” some observers have substituted “authoritarianism,”  “totalitarianism,” or “illiberal democracy” as less incendiary substitutes.  Nazism is only one of the many different types of fascism.  Compared to Nazism, for example, Italian fascism was syncretic and did not have a coherent ideology.
 
 Characteristics of Fascism
 
While many analysts of fascism have identified various characteristics of fascism, there is a remarkable consistency in what they found.  Two analysts, Henry Wallace and Umberto Eco, are of particular interest because their analyses were conducted during or shortly after World War II and were based on their personal experiences with fascism.  Their explanations of the dynamics of fascism show the truth that Donald Trump and many of his Republican supporters are without question fascist.​

Henry Wallace

​Henry Wallace, Vice President of the U.S. (1941-1945) identified several characteristics that he believed described American fascists.  Some of the characteristics he identified in 1944 include the following:

• The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants … to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power;
•  A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religious, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends;
•  The symptoms of fascist thinking … can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power;
•  American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact…their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate ever fissure of disunity; and
•  [American fascists] claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution…they demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

This Black History Month inevitably reminded us of the oppressive times that forged the heroes we celebrate.  With the installation of Donald Trump and the obvious desire of his white supremacist administration to return us to those times.  We wonder if there is anything we can learn from those heroes besides the need to persevere. 

The three basic paths blacks took to resist white was to (1) agitate for economic and social rights in the manner of W.E.B. DuBois; (2) try to negotiate with the white establishment for limited economic rights like Booker T. Washington; or retreat into the self-imposed separation of black nationalism as Marcus Garvey did.  DuBois, one of the founders of the Niagara Movement that became the NAACP, fought for social and economic integration. He argued that any attempt to limit rights would eventually lead to the subordination of all rights.  Washington, on the other hand, while publicly arguing for limited rights in the economic area espoused separation in the social sphere.  Interestingly, during the period Washington was espousing social separation as a way of advancing economic welfare, blacks who made had attained some measure of economic success were brutalized by whites who use white supremacy to claw back those economic gains.   Garvey, a Jamaican who had traveled throughout the world and thus put U.S. racism into a global perspective, developed a Black Nationalist perspective.  He aimed his appeal to non-elite blacks and promised uplift for the entire black community. 

Although very different perspectives, both the Washington and Garvey approaches entail some degree of isolation from the rest of the U.S.  Regardless of whether these approaches were viable early in the twentieth century, they cannot work now.  Bantustans or nationalism (black or white) will not work in a globalized system of commerce.  Conducting business, however, means necessarily erasing boundaries rather than erecting them. It should not come as a surprise that citizens from none of the seven countries on Trump’s Muslim ban list did business with Trump.

DuBois was right.  The approach that is left now, as in previous times, is the struggle for equal social and economic rights that will give us all a shot at making the most of the opportunities we have.  What is also true is that must continue to persevere in light of Trump and his administration’s efforts to limit rights.

Donald Trump is not the problem. Trump voters and the Republican Party are the problems that threaten American values and is on the verge of dismantling U.S. democracy.
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GOP leaders are so intent on the promise of enacting their legislative agenda, they are willing to support a President who is neither fit in terms of temperament nor ability.  Despite his ignorance of government, his narcistic needs for adoration, and his devotion to conspiracy theories, the Republican Party and its voters selected Trump as their candidate to run against Hillary Clinton.  If, as the GOP claimed, Hillary was too corrupt to be President of the United States, it makes little sense that they would nominate Trump whose own record was certainly as dodgy as hers – especially when they had other prospects who more closely represented the values that they told us were theirs.