Someday a real rain will come
By 
Rick Perlstein and John Ganz explore a historical parallel:
[Ganz] “I think that’s what, basically, we have in the United States: a very weak political establishment, but a civil society underneath it that’s looking for a kind of expression. And the expression that it’s taking is pathological … It’s demanding a dictator. Because the party system is unable to answer the demands they have.”
[Perlstein] In describing how that longing has historically been expressed, Ganz introduced to me an idea that blew my mind a little. It was articulated during a political crisis in France in the late Third Republic that culminated in a failed march on the Chambre des Députés on the night of February 6, 1934, leaving 16 dead. In correspondence between Ganz and the great historian of fascism Robert Paxton the day after the riots at the U.S. Capitol, both agreed that day bore “a spookily close parallel” to January 6th.
What the right-wing populist marchers were demanding in 1934 Paris was “republic by plebiscite.” Meaning: a true sounding of the French people’s desires, to get around a corrupt parliamentary system “dominated by Jews, and special interests, and the Masons.” That’s the part that blew my mind—because I immediately recognized something like it as a constant during the 70 years or so of right-wing politics in the U.S. that I’ve studied, since the days of Joe McCarthy: conservatives’ faith that a truesounding of the will of the American people would put paid to the foreign intrusion of liberalism for good.
Like the kind of letters George Gallup received in the early 1950s: “If you took a true poll of the American people … you would find them over 95 percent for Senator McCarthy.”
Or Phyllis Schlafly’s tract A Choice Not an Echo, which argued that if the Republicans would only nominate a true conservative he would win in a landslide, but the only reason that didn’t happen was that a few “New York kingmakers” (Mr. Gallup pre-eminent among them, as it happened) manipulated things behind the scenes to make that impossible.
Or the 84 percent of Tea Party adherents who said their views “generally reflect the views of most Americans.”
Or when Mike Lindell, in his campaign for RNC chairman in 2023, said, “This country is 70 percent red. If you remove all the garbage and all the corruption and everything. It’s 70 percent red, and it’s getting redder all the way.”
And, of course, on January 6th.
Various aspects of fascism have been always presenton the American right. (In 1981, the virulently and explicitly racist and antisemitic magazine The Spotlight had many times the circulation of any other publication on the right.) They remained contained or undeveloped. With Trump, they burst forth in full flower. The fantasy of the Republican plebiscite—the notion that the true nation is already with them were it not for the deep state’s depredations—was at the essence of the demand at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “If the government is no longer for the people, it is your duty to overthrow that government and reinstate a new government, for the people,” as a 1/6 terrorist named Christopher Alberts, convicted of bringing a handgun to the Capitol, roused the mob that day.
It is a point I’ll keep repeating: The most important thing for journalists to cover in this presidential election is not how many votes Donald Trump gets, either in the popular total or the Electoral College. To those subsumed inside his cult of personality, the conclusion is already foregone: If you took a true poll of the American people, swept aside the garbage and the corruption of the kingmakers in the media and the deep state (not to mention all those Democratic officials desperate to do anything to cover up their pedophilic cult)—obviously Donald Trump represents the views of most Americans, and is the only legitimate representative of “the people.” The question is how many will be willing to take up arms for this belief, should the people whose job it is to count the votes come up with the “wrong” answer.
The idea here is that the increasingly sclerotic and dysfunctional nature of the American presidential system in an era of ideologically coherent and disciplined parties [see Juan Linz’s critique of presidential systems in general] is giving birth to all sorts of authoritarian fantasies of a caudillo-like strongman, who will sweep away the un-American forces of the deep state — the American in name only pseudo-citizens that are traducing the Will of the People. The Will of the People is manifested by the desires of the real Americans, and these eminently just and reasonable desires are being frustrated by foreign and/or inferior degenerate political elements. As to who those elements are . . . well let’s just say that’s train’s never late.