A Political Party With an Armed Paramilitary Wing Is Not Consistent with Democracy

When I was a child there was a kid in our neighborhood who made my life hell. Dennis was a bully and delighted in chasing and beating up me and several others; we’d alter our route home from elementary school to avoid him.

Some of the kids he pounded on joined him as a way of protecting themselves from him — the way Lindsay Graham sucks up to Donald Trump — which only increased the terror level for the rest of us in our little lower-middle-class suburb as Dennis and his friends formed their own gang.

If there was an 8-year-old 1959 version of today’s Republican street-fighting white supremacist groups, it was Dennis and his buddies. They reveled in intimidating people and could smell fear from a block away. I knew they were authoritarians before I even knew the word or its meaning.

As we graduated into middle school, I learned that Dennis grew up feeling powerless and frightened: his father would tie him to a pole in the basement and whip him with a belt for the slightest infraction.

Powerlessness and humiliation are the soil in which authoritarianism grows.

When German soldiers returned home from their crushing defeat in World War I, they formed armed civilian militia groups looking for a leader: Hitler provided them with one, organizing them into the volunteer paramilitary group we remember as the Brownshirts.