Some might point out that only 28 percent of U.S. voters are registered as Republicans. True, but Republican-leaning independents constitute another 17 percent, and actual swing voters are relatively rare. So the best-case scenario is that only 14 percent of voters are really dedicated to installing a fascist dictatorship. However, history tells us that that is a sufficient critical mass to send a country spinning into horror. When Milton Mayer visited Germany in the early 1950s to interview former low-level members of the Nazi party, he concluded that perhaps only a million out of 70 million Germans were “Fanatiker” (fanatics or true believers)—the rest were just along for the perks or to simply avoid unwanted scrutiny for lack of ideological purity.
In my own experience as an analyst in U.S. Central Command who studied insurgency, I estimated that you only needed 10 to 15 percent of the population to be supportive of the insurgents to get a situation like what I saw in Iraq in 2005–2006. In short, you don’t need all that many people dedicated to dictatorship, theocracy, or any other awful possibility to absolutely collapse a country into barbarism. (I have few other words for the horrors I saw committed by insurgents in Iraq over that time period.)
Which leaves us where we are today. One party is dedicated to bringing about a dictatorship that plans to seize power for “a generation or two,” purging society of the enemies that are purportedly destroying the nation from within. The other party is a vaguely center-left coalition, too weak to bring about effective change because the country’s Constitution and societal fragmentation make it politically and legally impossible.