otherwise the festering wound he leaves behind will never heal properly, and every unsuccessful attempt to treat it by well-meaning liberals who follow him will be dismissed as pointless and ineffectual. Everything that goes wrong in our future will not be seen as the result of bad luck, incompetence, or even malfeasance. It will all be blamed on the absence of Trump.

No, this disease must run its course in order to build up the antibodies necessary to see it never infects the body politic again. In a way, the analogous situation occurred with Obama. The competence, decency and compassion of the man never brought the change we expected, instead it just pulled the scab off the festering rot left after the Civil War. The Obama Presidency is what convinced the fascists and racists that their jig was up (to coin a phrase!). They needed to strike back because their majority and hegemony was over. Its not that America was basically racist, but that it was becoming less so. He was elected twice, and with white support. That's what scared the shit out of them, not that we had a black president, but that he was elected with white votes and the world did not come to an end. Trump is their guarantee that that never can happen again.

Trump must not just fail, he must fail in a spectacular and grotesque way, or they will be making excuses for him and his philosophies forever. Hell, his followers are making excuses for him now. Hitler had to lose a war and have his country leveled, occupied and divided before that lesson was driven home to Germany. Mussolini had to be dragged naked through the streets by his own people before Italians learned that lesson. Japan needed unconditional nuclear defeat to cure itself of racial self-importance and cultural superiority. In Spain, Franco died in his bed after a long and comfortable life and the nation never fully recovered, already fascist nostalgia is starting to divide the country.

But Blake is right, Trump has accomplished much more in his short time in office. He has demolished forever the myths of Conservative moral rectitude, patriotic political correctness, scrupulous constitutionalism and fiscal self-righteousness. Politicians running for national office today can proudly proclaim Socialist ideals, and in just a few years of Trump a national health system in America has shown itself to be not only possible, but necessary. And of course, only the most self-deluded Republicans can deny any longer the religious fanaticism, militarism, nativism, racism, fascism and anti-intellectualism that saturates modern rightist ideology.

Democracy is not easy, and sometimes its not too effective or efficient, either. It is easy for the people to become impatient with its slow and bumbling progress. The temptation of fascism, its alleged ability to force law and order, let the trains run on time, and allow decent people to lord it ruthlessly over the weak and inferior, will always look better to those who can't make any sense of their failures without blaming someone else for them.

Trump needs to be defeated in a landslide. Not just a loss, a complete rout is required to cauterize this wound. And if that does not happen, we may need another four years of him and his allies in the White House to bring this nation back to its senses.

Yes, American democracy may not survive another five years of Trump. I'm painfully aware of that. But that may be what it takes to get this fascist poison out of our system once and for all.