That's the thesis of this essay, which is worth a look. I've noted before that American federalism--the traditional control of state Governors over health and safety in their jurisdiciton--was a bulwark against Trump's incompetence the first time around. The author of the preceding essay may be right that academics and journalists "barely seem to understand how their country functions," but I am not reassured by the author's own understanding:
Consider public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve. Any American fascist worth his bright red tie would be able to subdue the schools and begin to teach MAGAdemics, or at least get all those pesky liberal books banned—all of them, because fascism doesn’t demand anything less. In the United States, there are nearly 14,000 separate public school districts with more than 94,000 elected board members. Some of the larger counties, like the battleground of Loudoun in Virginia, have a single board. Others are carved up into so many exhausting and segregated duchies that consensus can never be achieved. On Long Island, among two counties, there are 125 public school districts. A child in Hempstead and a child in Garden City, growing up a short drive from one another, will have radically different educational experiences; they will effectively live, racially and sociologically, in different countries. Either way, whether the school board is wealthy and white or poor and Black, it is designed, for better and often for worse, to resist the encroachment of any federal power. There is no such thing as a centralized education system in America. Beyond doling out cash [bold added], the Department of Education does little in this country. Our educational sprawl is Hapsburgian, with no single monarch able to dictate its direction for very long. Moms for Liberty or anything Trump-adjacent can no better cow a Democrat-dominated school board than a liberal politician can suddenly get a district in Mississippi or Alabama to stop banning Gender Queer.
It's curious the author doesn't understand the significance of the bit I bolded: the federal government can coerce localities to do all kinds of things by withholding federal funds. Apparently the author does not know why public schools finally began to desegregate more than a decade after Brown: because LBJ's Department of Education conditioned federal funding on non-discrimination. This is the tool that Trump 2.0 could wield with dangerous results, including for the universities. So, yes, the size of the country and federalism are obstacles for a fascist central government, but they are not wholly insurmountable.
(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)
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