The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, June 15, 2026

ne apparent paradox of this movement is that, even as it labels its political rivals as domestic enemies and dreams of using the power of the state to humiliate and destroy them, it does not view itself as authoritarian. Seen from the inside, fascist movements historically feel encircled and vulnerable, and the same holds true for today’s semi-fascist right. What’s more, their sense of weakness is not always a matter of pure imagination. It is true that social values around race and gender have moved leftward since Barack Obama’s second term. It’s true that the mainstream media treats claims by Republicans more skeptically than it has in the past. And it is also true that popular culture and corporate America have reviled Donald Trump. But from these isolated strands of reality, the National Conservatives have spun a fantastical narrative of victimization. One blind spot in their analysis is that they have dismissed the possibility that liberal society has any capacity to moderate. In the real world, Democrats nominated their most moderate candidate in 2020, the party is now actively funding the police, and the New York Times’ op-ed page publishes regular columns denouncing cancel culture, developments that the National Conservatives’ rhetoric presumed impossible. Instead, they have looked at the angry atmosphere of the post–George Floyd protests as the starting point of a social revolution that, they fear, will only accelerate. The National Conservatives have also ignored the causal role Trump’s grossly racist and sexist behavior played in inciting this backlash. One moment was especially telling: At a panel devoted to race, I asked if any panelists would agree that Trump had ever made racist statements in public, which even his Republican allies have acknowledged. None of the panelists conceded this. Indeed, the panelists’ entire narrative of the Trump era was one of persecution. So while his critics see Trump’s insurrection attempt as the defining event of the era, his supporters see this as at worst a minor lapse. By their way of thinking, the true insurrection was undertaken against him.

–From Jonathan Chait’s “How to Make a Semi-Fascist Party The hostile, paranoid, and increasingly authoritarian path ahead for American conservatism,” New York Magazine, Oct. 12, 2022.