I see it coming too, that's why I have been studying so much Third Reich history lately. The situation in America today is reminiscent to what existed in Germany between the wars. For the first time in our history, the middle class sees itself threatened. It first noticed it in the 70s, but it has been getting harder and harder to ignore; and it is starting to realize that perhaps its spectacular rise in prosperity may be coming to an end. It is losing what it has, and it is starting to realize that they are not as prosperous as their parents were and that their children will not have it as well as they did.

This has bred the anxiety and fear that we see around us. Whatever is happening may well be manageable, at least in part, and perhaps it is explainable as inevitable economic and social forces, both domestic and worldwide, that we are just going to have to learn to deal with. But for the bulk of the people in this country, all they can see is a deterioration in prosperity, an increase in social friction, and growing competition and humiliation abroad. This has never happened to them before, and they are desperate for action, and for scapegoats.

The middle class fears the poor, they know exactly how easy it would be to slide back into poverty and they sense the desperation and anger of the dispossessed and expropriated. They also envy and mistrust the rich, but they find it difficult to see them as rivals or enemies because they themselves aspire to membership in the upper class; as always, the middle class apes the ethos and culture of the aristocracy.

It is no coincidence that political demagogues in this country now protect their hegemony and further their own interests by pandering to this demographic with a faux populism and by painting a picture of grasping and greedy masses of browns and blacks below, all manipulated by an effete over-intellectualized and over-educated elite pulling strings from above. You know, all those NPR listening, NYT reading, country club liberals. They are being cast in the role of Germany's Jews. You've heard the rhetoric, haven't you?

It's a recipe for fascism, the dictatorship of the middle class.