Sure it could. The same way fascism always happens. Not imposed, all of a sudden, from above, like a boot on your neck in the dead of night. It grows and festers in dark corners of society, feeding off the irrational fears and resentments and feelings of entitlement of an angry minority and growing ever stronger, with noone noticing it, until it bursts into pungent & infectious & malignant life, strangling its host. Fascism grows from the ground up and keeps growing uncontrolled until it stops – or is stopped.

Tim Wise at Redroom has written an eloquent and timely call-to-arms entitled “This Is How Fascism Comes: Reflections On The Cost Of Silence.”

Before you read the whole thing, I present some snacks to whet the appetite:

If fascism comes it will dress like a hockey mom, or a NASCAR dad. It will believe Toby Keith to be an artist, Larry the Cable Guy to be a comic, and that the world was made in six literal days less than 6000 years ago.

If fascism comes it will come from the small towns; the ones Sarah Palin, quoting a famous racist and Jew-hater, said “grow good people,” and which occasionally do, but which, just as often grow provincial, isolated, fearful and superstitious ones. 

If fascism comes it will come from faux populism, from anti-immigrant hysteria, from persons who have more guns in their homes than books, or whose books, when they have them, are principally volumes of the