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**SEPTEMBER 27, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Fight Fascism First

Robert Kagan's must-read essay in

**The Washington Post**, "Our Constitutional Crisis Is Already Here
,"
gets the big picture right, but gets some tactical details seriously
wrong.

Kagan is all too accurate when he points out that Trump has captured the
Republican Party and that Trumpers are now fully prepared to destroy
democracy in order to win the 2022 and 2024 elections. "Trump's grip
on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the
party," he points out. "One by one, the 'adults' resigned or were
run off."

He is correct that Democrats, going about the normal business of
negotiating their differences on the budget resolution, are not
sufficiently mindful of the deeper threat of full-on fascism.

Kagan is also right that the Republicans are playing a double game,
behaving as a normal opposition party in trying to block or weaken the
governing party's program, while being enablers of dictatorship, quite
like the German conservatives who threw in with Hitler in 1932.

"It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an
aberration that will not be repeated," Kagan writes. "Because Trump
supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there
is every reason to expect more such episodes."

What to do? Here is where the wishful second part of Kagan's powerful
essay contradicts the unflinching first part. He writes that Republicans
like Mitt Romney and the six other Republican senators who voted to
convict Trump for inciting an insurrection should

fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present
emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate
for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with
Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the
Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary
governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending,
defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic,
effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital
and immediate need to preserve the United States.

Sure, that would be swell. But it's not going to happen. And it
won't happen even if the Democrats reduce Biden's Build Back Better
program to 50 cents to "strive for a temporary governing consensus."

Rather than looking for anti-Trump Republicans, who Kagan accurately
reminds us are as dead as dinosaurs, Democrats should be redoubling
their efforts to get voting rights legislation, and to use the federal
government's police and prosecutorial powers to give no quarter to
fascists seeking to overthrow what remains of our democracy.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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CALLACI

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