The Far Right Takeover of America is Almost Complete

What Happens When Fanatical Extremists Capture All of a Country’s Institutions?

I read recently that America was added to the list of countries most dangerous in the world for journalists. That comes hot on the heels of America being among the ten worst places to be a woman, the worst place in the rich world to be a mother or a child or a retiree, and many, many more places on dismal lists of worsts. Why is that?

When I look at America, here’s what I see. A country where the extreme, fanatical right wing takeover of its institutions — all of them — is almost complete. From laws to courts, representation to presidency, norms to rules, from press to public sphere — America is now controlled almost entirely and exclusively by the most fanatical kind of right wingers the rich world hasn’t seen for decades, probably since Nazi Germany. Yes, I mean that. Let me make my case — and you can judge for yourself whether my words carry any weight.

(And let me say at the outset — I emphatically don’t say any of that to mean the reductive left versus right frame of American cable news and pop culture. “All conservatives are bad, man!!” Not at all. I have many conservative leanings, from my belief in virtue to the value of history to the need for meaning, found primarily in morality. I don’t think conservatism’s bad — I think it’s gone completely haywire, and it’s conserving all the wrong things, instead of any of the right ones. Hence, I don’t think every conservative is a fanatic or extremist — and so what I do think is that decent and sane people on both left and right should be deeply worried about what’s happening in America today.)

Let’s start with an obvious example. Until and unless the Mueller Report is released — and I mean in a substantive way, not the heavily redacted version — Americans should consider their judiciary not just badly compromised, but broken. But the judiciary often the last cornerstone of a democracy — because while you can lose many things, as long as there are even somewhat impartial courts to try crimes in, democracy has a chance. And so the capture of the American judiciary by extreme right wing fanatics is something that you should be very worried about, indeed. It suggests that democracy…