How far would corporate America go to stop Bernie Sanders?

In words commonly, if erroneously, attributed to American novelist and prominent 1930s socialist Sinclair Lewis, we are told that ‘When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross’.

Though no serious person would attempt to equate the current Trump administration with the goose-stepping fascism of Sinclair Lewis’s era, the aforementioned quote makes the salient point that cultural, historical and national specificities dictate what fascism looks, sounds and operates like in a particular country in any given period.

On the scale of fascist tendencies, we live in a worrying time wherein authoritarian and ethno-nationalist leaders bestride the world stage as they haven’t since the 1930s. Netanyahu, Modi, Erdogan, Orban and Trump reflect the rise of the politics of demonisation and dehumanisation with regard to the despised ‘other’ in their midst, offending a worldview forged in the womb of white and/or religious supremacy.

The most powerful antidote to fascism is and has always been socialism. And just as back in the 1930s in the context of a global depression that resulted in the collapse of the centre ground, leading to an ideological struggle between left and right of world-historical importance, so today we are experiencing a chilling parallel in the wake of…