Nobody talks about the first Jewish president. If Berne Sanders becomes president it would be the final act in a play that began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt deciding to run for president.

In the 1950s and 60s Coatesville, PA sometimes called “The end of the Main Line”, the old money estate owning and fox hunting Main Line, a marriage between a Catholic and Protestant was a “mixed marriage” almost as forbidden as a black and white mixed marriage or a Jewish and Christian mixed marriage.

In 1959 most of the discussion about Kennedy vs. Nixon was his Catholicism in our heavily immigrant and black populated Coatesville, PA. 

You had the majority white Catholics on the pro-Kennedy side and a smaller Protestant and sometimes KKK on the pro-Nixon side. 

The first Catholic President was the most talked about part of the Nixon vs. Kennedy race.

In what white people call “back in the day” the United States was a Socialist Democracy experiencing economic boom times. Parents, white parents and even some black parents took for granted that their sons and daughters would be better off than they were. 

But if you called our Socialist Democracy a Socialist Democracy you risked being called “Communist” by the right wing of the Republican Party. I listened to black leaders begin with "I'm not a Communist" when talking about things as mundane as street cleaning.

***

Only 20 years before JFK ran for president politicians here were siding with Mussolini and Hitler. 

German American Bund
 rally poster at
Madison Square Garden,
February 20, 1939

Many Republicans in pre-World War II Times liked fascism. They hid their views after Germany declared war. 

Now pro-fascist Republicans are at the top of the Republican Party.

Some Republicans, among them Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were negotiating with Nazis after Germany declared war working out a non-aggression pact that would give Hitler England in return for not attacking the United States. 

Charles Lindbergh later came around and helped the United States war effort. His close association with and knowledge of the German aircraft industry helped our war effort. 

American GIs were startled when they saw Nazi Army Ford troop transit trucks. Henry Ford kept profiting from his German Ford division going 8 months after Germany declared war on the United States. 

SEE:
Ford and the Führer
by Ken Silverstein

The Nation magazine, January 24, 2000

***

All fascists campaign on racial purity. 

In Trump's case it's keeping the white race pure. Narendra Modi campaigns on keeping India Hindu. 

"The country is changing — it's getting browner, as population growth slows among whites. Non-whites now make up a majority of kindergartners; by the next presidential election, the Census Bureau predicts they will be a majority of all children; and by 2044, no one racial group will be a majority of the country." 

From: 

How The Browning Of America Is Upending Both Political Parties 

Domenico Montanaro

Population growth has slowed. That's what is behind the anti-abortion and anti-birth control politics of the Republican Christofascists.

About 1/3 of Americans are terrified that white people will not continue to dominate U.S. society, politics & commerce. The other 2/3 don't care. Trump makes the fearful more terrified guaranteeing they will support anything he does. 

***

FROM: 
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them 
by Jason Stanley

September 11,1941, Charles Lindbergh charged that British, Jews & the Roosevelt Administration are leading the America into War:

***

After World War II the fascists among the Republicans mostly stayed in the wings. They failed when Barry Goldwater was defeated by Johnson. 

Nixon did not favor fascism. But was racist and laid the foundation of mass incarceration of Black men. 

Then came Ronald Reagan a B actor who could be manipulated by the fascists among Republicans as long as something was in it for him. 

When a Black man ran for president and became president fascists quickly rose to the top of the Republican Party. 

The Republican Party joins the fascist revival with Marnie LePen in France, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Viktor Orban in Hungry, Sebastian Kurz in Austria, Matteo Salvini in Italy and Narendra Modi’s Bharatya Janata Party, a Hindu Nazi party, in India.

Fascism and Nazis are making a big comeback. A Jewish U.S. president could counter the Nazi revival.

Fascism and the far right in Europe: country by country guide, 2019

By Martin Smith and Tash Shifrin | 19 May 2019

***

Also see: 

“That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as anyone else.  

Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous. 

Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people. 

This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic. 

To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today. These movements play on all the fears, vanities, ambitions and insecurities that make up the human psyche. In democracies, at least for politicians, the only thing that matters is what the voters say they want — vox populi vox Dei. A mass political movement is thus a powerful and, to those who would oppose it, frightening weapon. When controlled and directed by a single leader, it can be aimed at whomever the leader chooses. If someone criticizes or opposes the leader, it doesn’t matter how popular or admired that person has been. He might be a famous war hero, but if the leader derides and ridicules his heroism, the followers laugh and jeer. He might be the highest-ranking elected guardian of the party’s most cherished principles. But if he hesitates to support the leader, he faces political death."

FROM: 

This is how fascism comes to America

Robert Kagan