There’s a school of thought which posits that we really dodged a bullet with the last election : yeah, Trump is still out there making noise, but he left office whether he wanted to or not, and now we can go about the business of steering this flagging ship we call America back toward a course of normalcy. Never mind the fact that “normalcy” isn’t a great state of affairs for many people, and their utter contempt for the political establishment was one of the biggest factors in President Goldenshower’s rise to power, this view is entirely too optimistic even leaving aside Biden’s own pro-corporate, militaristic leanings — the threat, you see, isn’t over, largely because it didn’t start with Trump and it never really went away.

I should be clear that by “the threat,” I refer to the potential for the US to descend into an overtly fascist, authoritarian…