By any historical measure this country should not be where it is right now, politically speaking. The worst pandemic to strike this nation in over a century has begun its slow but inexorable transformation into an event now comprehensible in hindsight rather than experienced in the immediate moment. The economic crisis has started to recede, with millions of Americans’ thoughts increasingly occupied by their summer vacations and reuniting with friends and relatives instead of focusing on whether they can safely return to work. People are once again going out to eat, to shop, and to entertain themselves, spending money and traveling.

In short, you could fairly expect this to be a time of resurgence and shared national enthusiasm as the country emerges from an unprecedented, unbelievably stressful, involuntary hibernation, and as Americans begin to reclaim their former lives. And you could fairly expect the political differences among the nation’s citizens to reflect the same general sense of relief.

Instead, the prevailing public sentiment right now is one of politically polarized anger, distrust, suspicion and hatred on a scale that most of us have not witnessed in our lifetimes. These sentiments have consumed the nation’s politics solely because one of our two major political parties has willfully adopted the delusional notion that the 2020 election—possibly the most secure election in our country’s history—was somehow tainted by widespread fraud, even though absolutely no evidence of such fraud exists. This farcical narrative has become so embedded and fundamental to the Republican Party’s thinking that its adherents now feel emboldened and justified in attempting to disenfranchise those Americans whose votes they arbitrarily deem unworthy or illegitimate, a judgment based primarily on their skin color. But worse than that, and even more ominously, that party has now become much more overt in countenancing outright violence against other Americans in furtherance of its goals.

As a result, the nation now faces a crisis even worse than the one foisted upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic, this time not from any unexpected health calamity or foreign invasion, but one that is entirely homegrown, spun out of thin air by people with no respect or regard for the country’s democratic principles, or even democracy itself. Conservative David Frum, writing for The Atlantic, recognizes what we are witnessing in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s brief tenure has a name, and it’s past time to start calling it out for what it is: fascism.

Frum acknowledges he’s arriving late to this acknowledgement, having cautioned against labeling the autocratic tendencies of Donald Trump as akin to those infamous European fascists who deservedly turned that word into a monstrous epithet, encapsulating every horror of the 20th century as wielded by the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. But the analogy now is inescapable; as Frum observes, there is simply no other word that applies when a movement couples both contempt for the law and legal process together with an explicit endorsement of violence against one’s political opponents.

That is what the GOP has become in the shadow of Trump’s Big Lie, and its recent trajectory suggests it will become much, much worse. Frum notes the change in Trump himself, comparing his shockingly equanimical but still somewhat tempered treatment of far-right white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville—while he still had to consider his reelection prospects—to the vitriol-spewing, unapologetic racist monster he has visibly morphed into since his electoral defeat in 2020:

The failed insurrection of Jan. 6, which Trump himself orchestrated along with his most virulent and fanatical accomplices, provided a springboard for him to convince those followers that violence was not simply the only course to follow, but the correct and proper course, one fully justified by the sinister presence of allegedly hidden forces aligned against them. To emphasize the point, Frum quotes another well-known fascist, speaking to his crimes in the face of an establishment that had considered him defeated. When Hitler was imprisoned after failing to overthrow the German government in 1923, he defended his actions as not only justified, but necessary:

Frum compares this infamous Nazi sophistry to the revisionist tripe now being peddled by Trump’s media enablers concerning the events of Jan. 6, in which a mob of violent thugs attacked the U.S. capitol with full intent of killing members of Congress to stop the certification of a lawful election. At first Republicans sought to distance themselves from that insurrection, attributing it (falsely) to subterfuge by antifa or to media distortion of  “peaceful,” law-abiding protests, even as hundreds of Trump-supporting seditionists were arrested for crimes ranging from assault on police officers to conspiracy to overthrow the government.

But the tone has changed. Now, instead of minimizing them, more and more Republicans are endorsing the events of Jan. 6, much like Hitler endorsed the crimes of his failed putsch in 1923, as a necessary response to government tyranny. The insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, fatally shot while breaking into the Capitol along with her fellow rioters, is being lionized by some Republicans as a type of martyr rather than someone who recklessly threatened to inflict violence. This shift in narrative from minimizing the events to extolling the perpetrators is calculated and deliberate: it fuels the idea that the insurrection was an appropriate response to a grave crime committed against a select segment of  the American people. And it makes no difference that this fanciful scenario is wholly derived from baldfaced lies.

Frum notes how Trump has pushed this narrative in the past week, praising the rioters as great people, calling Babbitt (who he certainly never met) an “incredible, wonderful” woman and darkly insinuating, again, falsely, that she was shot by a “democratic” head of security (implying that Chuck Shumer somehow orchestrated Babbitt’s death). As Frum observes, all of this nonsense is directly culled from the Nazi playbook, specifically the endorsement of violence as a a justified political tactic, and the elevation of those who commit that violence in the service of fascism. But the most important takeaway for Frum is that this is a new, evolving tactic, one characteristic of fascist regimes:

Emphasizing that fascism wears a coat of many colors, Frum cautions against relying solely on the European model as an analogue to what we are witnessing in the United States. In particular, the cult of personality surrounding the autocratic, politically opportunistic regime of Juan Perón of Argentina is most strongly suggestive of the following Trump has cultivated in this country:

Frum isn’t the first person to compare Trump to Argentina’s Perón. In May, writing for the New York Review of Books, Duke Emeritus professor Ariel Dorfman made the same analogy between Trump’s exile and that of the Argentinian dictator:

If this was just about Trump it wouldn’t matter much; he would simply occupy his place in a long list of presidents rejected by Americans for incompetence or other reasons, whining about his perceived mistreatment by an electorate who had finally, decisively taken the full measure of his character, or lack thereof.

But the true fascist cannot cope with such a desultory vacuum if he wants to regain power. He must constantly up the ante, driving his followers to more desperate extremes until violence appears as the only solution to their ginned-up grievances. What we are seeing slowly being developed in the U.S. is the cultivation of violence in a substantial segment of the population: in effect, the formation of a base of support carefully primed to endorse the use of violence to achieve their leader’s political ends. In fact, as Frum points out, the sheer number of ordinary Republicans who buy into the Big Lie nonsense is the very reason so many Republican elected officials feel compelled to embrace it, willingly or otherwise:

There is no longer any question about what we are facing in this country. The sooner all Americans realize that fact, the better we all will be equipped to defeat it, before it’s too late.