Why Are MAGA Republicans The Most Dangerous Fascists In U.S. History?

By People’s World Photos: People’s World Back in the 1930s and ’40s, and even before that, there were fascist operatives in the U.S. with significant followings. Their aim was to destroy the U.S. government and remake America in their own image. William Dudley Pelley, leader of the fascist Silver Legion and the Christian Party during the Great Depression, espoused many of the same things put forward by Christian nationalists of today. He relied on right-wing followers to provide the soldiers for his movement and dressed them in silver shirts, modeled on Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts. His anti-Semitic party promoted a program full of the kind of positions backed by the modern-day religious and fascist right. The torch-light paraders in Charlottesville who Trump said were “very fine people” would have felt at home in Pelley’s movement. Some know about the 1933 Wall Street “Business Plot” to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with a military dictator, but most have forgotten these days about another planned fascist revolt that involved figures at the highest levels of power in Washington. In the 1944 “Sedition Trial,” dozens of people were charged for plotting to undermine democracy with help directly from Hitler’s...