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A stark report from one of the main independent European think tanks says there is no going back to any sort of pre-MAGA America, and warns that even after the Trump years, unless drastic action is taken, the “core fascist” political beliefs of the MAGA movement won’t quickly disappear.

“By the 2030s, the vulgarity, corruption, buffoonery, cult-like loyalty to Donald Trump and gratuitous cruelty of this regime may fade into history,” writes Lincoln Mitchell for the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS). “As these most visible aspects of MAGA disappear many will choose to believe that the country has been reunified, but the core fascist political beliefs of the MAGA movement are unlikely to fade away so quickly.”

“As the Trump regime continues to sink into fascism and corruption, it is increasingly evident that the US will be forever changed by this era,” he continues. “If the US emerges from the Trump years as a functioning and cohesive, just in the legal sense, country, something that cannot be easily assumed, it will look very different than it did before Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015 and almost immediately became the dominant figure in American political life.”

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Mitchell, a political analyst, essayist, and lecturer at Columbia University, points to other times of crisis in American history, such as the Civil War or the 1960s and 1970s, and warns against those who “say that if we survived that, we can survive this.”

“That view cannot be ignored, but if we take it seriously, we must push back on the idea that the US simply survived those crises,” he writes. “The social movements that led to greater racial equality and expansions of rights for women, people of color, LGBT people and others-and the backlashes to all those movements that soon followed-still drive much of our political life and political conflicts.”

He says that even if, post-Trump, “the MAGA fervor cools a little,” it will be possible for Americans to reform the political system just enough to say to themselves that the fascist MAGA threat has passed — but they may be fooling themselves. The issues that spawned the MAGA movement will still be “central to our political life.”

Mitchell says it “should be clear” to all that now, more than a decade after Trump launched the MAGA movement, “there is no going back.”

He suggests that the question Americans need to answer is whether they want to return to “ineffective center-left administrations” or “fascist or fascist adjacent ones.”

Mitchell warns that to defeat MAGA, a few Democratic Party wins at the ballot box will not suffice.

“It will require an earnest rethinking not just of what American democracy can be, but of what the US is. It means accepting that the Constitution is no longer the core document that governs the US, so our political imaginations must not be bound by it.”

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 Image via Reuters