It is fashionable for those left of center to define Trump as a fascist. Trump is not yet a fascist, though it's unclear whether that's his desired end state. The reality is that there is a wide variety of authoritarian regimes in the world, and outright fascism is very rare. There is an argument that North Korea is actually a fascist state, but otherwise, there are no fascist states currently in existence.
Currently the US enjoys the following.
-For the most part we have free and fair elections. True, states like Georgia and Florida engage in soft vote suppression, but voters are not beaten from the polls by police and elections do happen. Check out 2018. That totally happened.
-We have a free press. While there is incessant moaning of bothsides journalism, the fact is that Trump's press coverage has been abysmal for years. Trump's efforts to stifle the press have failed. Instead, he has elevated non-factual news outlets like OANN and Breitbart. Creepy and damaging, but not the suppression of a free press.
-We can protest. While there were moments like Trump's clearing of Lafayette Square and his efforts to import his good squads into Portland, for the most part, people have been able to protest. They have not be able to riot, but they're not supposed to.
What Trump is endeavoring to do, however, is still scary without being Hitler. Trump is following in the footsteps of other illiberal authoritarians like Putin, Orban, Duda, Duterte and Erdogan. Their affinity for each other is clear. Now, that crowd of rogues all took power in countries with weakly institutionalized democracies. All of them were autocracies as recently as the 1980s.
But as Chait notes in the linked piece, a second Trump term could sufficiently erode the two centuries of democratic norms that have sustained this country. The Supreme Court pick is obviously getting the most attention right now, and rightly so. The ability of a minority of the country to elect a president, control the Senate and then control the Courts of a generation is deeply troubling to the idea of democratic legitimacy, so much so that the Republican Party is moving away from abiding by democratic norms.
If Biden wins a comfortable win, carrying not only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia or Texas AND Democrats win a net of 4 seats, then maybe we will likely see a return to the normal partisan dysfunction in Washington DC. Maybe the Democrats have a great night and win Senate seats in ME, NC, GA, IA, CO, TX, AZ and MT. They axe the filibuster, pass real legislation and return functionality to our government.
If Trump wins - especially an election reeking of fraud - I don't think the United States survives as we know it. I'm not an alarmist. I've studied the long arc of history. But if he wins, it's time to break the country up. Maybe the Northeast joins Canada and the Pacific Coast becomes its own country. I don't know. But Trump's re-election is a legitimate threat to the viability of the American experiment.
Putin must be laughing his ass off.
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