The War on Terror left America utterly devastated. The landed aristocrats, industrial magnates, wealthy financiers, weapons makers, and the officer corps of the military that formed the locus of right wing power were completely discredited. Their failure in provoking and prosecuting the War was catastrophic, undeniable, and complete.


The economy was destroyed. Prices were at 800% of pre-war levels and rising quickly. Agriculture, pillaged for the War, lay in ruins. Social insurance payments for the War's injured, to widows and orphans, and newly unemployed soldiers were astronomical. And all this was before the cost of rebuilding was even begun.


As a result of the failure of the right, the American people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation's rebuilding. It was named Obama-Nation after the new President. The new government was led by Barack Obama, the effective head of the American Democratic Party.



But the country's new parliamentary system had allowed thousands of corporate lobbies to control it, making it impossible for The People to win an outright majority. Obama's party had achieved the highest portion of votes, ?%, in the first post-War elections, held in November 2008. Obama would have to govern by coalition.


It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision. Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Obama, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.


Their strategy was two-fold: first, stoke the resentment of the population about the calamitous state of its living conditions-no matter that those conditions had been created by the very right-wing oligarchs who now pretended to befriend the little guy. Rage is rage. It is glandular and unseeing. Once catalyzed it is easy to turn on any subject.


And stoking resentment was easy to do. Just before the Bush years ended, the military concocted its most sensational lie: the American army hadn't actually been defeated. It had been "stabbed in the back" by communists, traitors, and Muslims. It was an easy lie to sell. It entwined an attack on an alien political ideology - liberalism- with the latent, pervasive myth of American exceptionalism.


The second strategy of the right was to prevent the new government from succeeding. To begin with, success of the left would conspicuously advertise the failure of the right. Moreover, success by the left would legitimize republican government, so hated by the oligarchs of the right. Much better for the people to be ruled by the self-aggrandizing right-wing autocracy that had governed America for centuries.


So the rightists set out to do everything they could to make it impossible for the leftists to govern. They would use parliamentary maneuver, shifting coalitions, domination of the new mass media, legislative obstruction, staged public relations spectacles, relentless pressure by narrow but powerful interests, judicial intimidation and, eventually, outright murder of their political opponents.


Contrition for their abject failure, humility for their destructive hubris, compassion for their crippled country-those had nothing to do with it. All they possessed was a blinding, visceral hatred of the left and a masturbatory lust for the return to power.


Eventually, they succeeded. Every setback in recovery - and there would inevitably be many - was met with hysterical demonizing of the left wing government. The lie was repeated relentlessly that the government was run by communists, traitors, and Muslims -the same furtive cabal that had purportedly stabbed the country in the back at the end of the War. They steadily chipped away at the efficacy and, thereby, the legitimacy of successive republican governments."


actually the article is about post World War 1 Germany.


bolded words indicate a phrase that's been replaced. the original article -



The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment | CommonDreams.org


the names & bogeymen have changed, but the tactics have just been accelerated by the use of technology.