Lobbing gross insults across the line is a pathetic way to run a campaign. We hear people shouting ‘fascist’, ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ and so forth while many have only a vague idea of what is contained in these exchanges.  The current acceptance of criminal behavior, playground name calling, and a willingness of so many highly placed people to collaborate on ignoring the Constitution points something deeper than just another American Presidential Campaign.

The historian Robert Paxton, author of  Vichy France: Old Guard New Order. 1940-1944. was quoted in the New York Times article by Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer.    She quotes Paxton regarding January 6: “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it . . . “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”    Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”  

One party in this election started a stampede and is running to stay ahead of a movement heading for the Buffalo Jump all the while calling it ‘leadership’. The other party recognizes the purpose of the Buffalo Jump, which is mass casualty for a harvest of necessities, and urges a new altered course.  But the momentum of this new American stampede toward fascism seems to paralyze the rational mind and the most coherent arguments for democracy seem to go to ground like the autumn leaves from the tree.

A nation is held together by a common sense of good serving as a guardrail.  The common sense of good gives shape and orientation to the political sense of good.  The political sense of good is structured in a Constitution that serves as a stable reference in turbulent times. If after this election we get another chance for four years of democracy we need to deal with our own society and its divisions.  The Nazis used Vichy France to their advantage in WWII, by applying a reign of terror to a French population that had little imagination for what was about to happen to them and no “new language” to guide them from the onset of the occupation. Before this new collaboration has a chance to bring down the American Constitution let us create together a new good language before we find ourselves suffering the age old pain of occupation in our own homeland.