The left has been saying this for decades. The fascist streak in US politics has taken over the Republican Party. Republicans have become fascists, fascists rape, torture, and kill people just to assert their authority. Orwell knew. Orwell's monstrous interrogator O'Brien said: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston? […] By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
Anyone who has walked the picket line outside a deadly workplace (and those have come back, even before COVID-19), fought the goons – they know.
Orwell, again, “You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature. […] The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”
So even though death and disease surround them, Republicans will deny death and disease and die themselves.
This is the malignant narcissism that Dr. Lee and her co-authors wrote about in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Trump is the mirror of it, but he is not the source.
What do we do about it?
If Trump and the GOP manage to cheat their way to hold the presidency and the senate, America is sort of boxed. As has been mentioned many times the Constitution makes assumptions about people putting the country first when it created checks and balances. Short of a military coup led by officers loyal to the Constitution and not to Trump, what other choices are there? Street protests will be put down harshly and there has been lots of practice at that.
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