This is the original introduction for our Yes, It’s Fascism Ballad. The current introduction is shorter and less reactionary.

We read with interest Jonathan Rauch’s Yes, It’s Fascism January 25, 2026 article in the Atlantic Monthly.

We like so many of our fellow countryfolk—both real-ish and mostly-imagined characters—feel like the nation is in free fall and we should do something but

well,

what’s exactly going on and what exactly should we do and can’t we just move to Europe or Canada or back to the 1990s or whenever it was that we were young and cuddled within an infinite democracy that was on the march and spreading far and wide, and yes, there was still much injustice and much work to be done, but we had the tools to do it—a government that was ultimately responsible to the people and a people that were ultimately responsible to their conscience and to the shared faith that we are all in this together and can use our representative democracy and free conversation to together move towards the better and away from the worse

??

Of course we all know that a government is many things, but one thing it is is a weapon, charged both with exacting selective violence within its borders (example: fairly and nonpolitically stopping people from harming each other, with force if necessary) and with being ready to use violence to defend itself and its inhabitants from foreign aggression.

And who can really run away from such a big weapon in this shrinking world? And if democracy falls here, then thuggery has most of the military might in the world.

You can be cynical and say the US was always just a thug, but that’s an oversimplification. The US has always been imperfect and, as wealth and might make a nation’s reach wider and more impactful, great power tends to amplify both the good and bad behaviors of a nation. This moment now of exploding information makes it harder for a free people to remain ignorant of errors carried out under their flag and in their name. Or does it? We can cocoon in entertainment, in media bubbles, in having to work too much and spend the rest of our time trying to hold our lives and families together. Or we can let people with money dominate the conversation and call it “freedom of speech”. Or we can let a totalitarian state’s state media dictate the conversation and call it “the freedom to share the truth” (or be escorted to a dark place for to disappear).

You can be cynical and say the US was always just might makes right, but that’s not fair. Might makes Right is Hitler’s Germany, Putin’s Russia, places where the citizens are punished for saying the truth and doing the right thing. It’s not that such perversions of justice never happen in liberal democratic republics, but that they don’t win the game—mistakes eventually come to light and policies are eventually changed and actions reversed.

We won’t debate the last century of prodigious activity; but we will note that cynicism is another side of triumphalism: If everything is either hopelessly evil or perfectly good, then there’s nothing to do but either pout or exalt. The alternation between pouting and exalting is a tool of demagogues. The truth is that those of us living in the USA in 2016 had a pretty good hand and it’s looking quite a bit worse; and the world is looking more dangerous and less safe for competence, honesty, and the rule of law.

You can be cynical; you can be exultant; you can be by turns cynical and exultant as it fits your needs for feeling the way you need to feel to justify what you’re doing in a given moment. Or you can relax and try to see things as they really are as best you can in a given moment and

Yes it is an ongoing effort that combines both your ever-evolving relationship with the ultimately intellectually and emotionally un-capturable Truth and your ever-evolving piecing-together-on-the-fly provisional account of this world of appearances, but what of it? What else is there? Only pouting and exulting over lies that you clutch like great gods.

Be that as it may.

We’ve long attempted to get some kind of foothold in this moment. Perhaps an overview of this longstanding political project is in order, but much of it is not even published anymore, so let’s set that overview aside and focus on the little mini project we’re here prologuing. Or we’ve meant to be prologuing. Not sure what all’s gone on up there.

To (we plead with our many whip-snaking strands) return:

We read Jonathan Rauch’s essay with interest and we thought

Maybe here is a sound foundation for a protest song, or at least a song of political contemplation.

How to get people to together focus on this moment and to together work through it? Art is a way to examine a moment without dogmatically demanding an interpretation; but this moment cannot be well thought-through without a careful examination of pertinent facts. And so we decided to write a footnoted ballad based on the essay.

However, our time is limited and this weekend will die before we complete (or perhaps before we even start) number three of the eighteen eight-line verses (or sets of two four-line verses) that we had envisioned (one for each of JR’s categories in his list of why, taken as a whole, the way Donald Trump and co are currently governing is best labeled “fascism”).

We’ll keep working on this, but we offer up this little project as a fun game we can all play together. Write a verse! It’s fun! If you want to keep working in the same rhythm and rhyme scheme as we’ve been working: ABAB CDCD, with A and C being eight syllables of unstressed-stressed & B and D six syllables of unstressed-stressed.

Before we show you what we’ve got so far, perhaps we should discuss whether or not we think Donald Trump’s second presidency should be considered fascism.

Short answer is:

What you call Trump 2.0’s governing style isn’t as important as thinking about why it might be fairly described as “fascism” (totalitarian submission of the nation to the will of the leader), “patrimonialism” (the state is treated as personal property of the leaders), and/or “thuggism” (a patrimonialism with a particularly gangster vibe), while also considering why we prefer liberal (as in basic human rights are guaranteed to all regardless of who they are and who their friends are) representative democracy (as in people choose their representatives in regular fair elections) over those styles of government.

We think that liberal representative government is a spiritual good because it allows people to share power and meaning and to work together to keep their government safe for the universal values (aware, clear, honest, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing), which in turn gives people the ability to be publicly virtuous while still keeping themselves and their loved ones safe and sound. And we think that the current White House is undermining our existing imperfect-but-still-functional-and-thus-improvable liberal representative democracy, and that we should all work together to find a way to preserve, improve, and strengthen our liberal representative democracy. We’ve written a great deal on all this elsewhere; for now, let’s pass on to today’s project.

This is the original introduction for our Yes, It’s Fascism Ballad. The current introduction is shorter and less reactionary.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson