The Lethal Enemy America Wrongly Thought It Had Already Defeated.
Bari, Puglia, Italy, March 15th, 2025.
Salaroche

America, the indisputable cradle of modern Democracy, the inexhaustible well of technological innovation, the most influential culture of the past 100 years, the mightiest military power in human history and, at crucial times, the most active defender of human rights.

Most of that was true up until January 20th, 2025. That day was a sort of culmination of a process that began 24 years ago. In a matter of hours on 9/11, relatively microscopic enemy forces were able to inflict a deep wound at the heart of the American psyche.

That wasn’t just a crack in the veneer. It awoke a gung-ho, blind patriotism whose unintended consequences unfolded in a small series of dialectical events. The utterly-misguided, excessive reaction of the Bush Administration backlashed as the 8-year progressive trend of the Obama years that in turn backlashed as the widespread authoritarian revival of the past 10 years.

In a way, the neo-Fascist forces at the heart of today’s Maga movement are the modern incarnation of the dark forces that triggered the Civil War back in the 1860s. The idealist universalism that elevated a black man to the Presidency in 2008 was obviously intolerable to those Americans with an authoritarian seed firmly planted in their hearts.

In their eyes, the culprits for such sociopolitical aberration were none other than the very institutions of government of the United States, including the American Democratic System. Something deep and transformative had to be done about it, come hell or high water.

America has for decades been ready to take on any foreign foes that may dare to challenge it, even as at times it has refrained from using the full might of its military power but, for the past 165 years it has been unprepared to face the most lethal enemy of them all, the enemy within.

Enemy foreign forces can put dents on America’s surface, some of them deeper than some others, but none of them can threaten the country's very existence, not unless they are willing to be annihilated in return. And that dictum is where the rub with domestic enemies lies, as defeating a powerful, widespread domestic enemy means defeating your own self too, as the country at stake is the same for both rival factions.

In other words, defeating a domestic enemy can ultimately be done only through one means: Civil War, which is perhaps the most self-destructive and counterproductive kind of war.

In America there has always existed a latent authoritarian tendency that had thus far been subdued and kept in check by a national consensus: The idea that the Constitution of the United States is the law of the land and that it has an uncontestable primacy over whatever differing political views there may exist between the two major political parties. But such consensus began to visibly crack open in 2016.

The shameful, incompetent wasted opportunity the Biden administration had to prevent the Maga Führer’s second advent to the presidency only served to fuel the impetus of the neo-Fascist movement and now it looks like no one can put a stop to it.

Nazi Germany never presented any similar deadly threat to the very existence of America and, perhaps aside from the Cuban missile crisis, never did the Soviet Union either. And China is still a few years away from attaining the capabilities necessary to threaten the country with any plausible probabilities of success.

But just as a terminal cancer can develop from the vowels of the seemingly healthiest of people, the Maga cancer that has developed at the heart of the country now keeps steadily metastasizing across the entire American body politic. Trouble is, for the moment there doesn’t seem to be any available chemotherapy to stop it and there may never be one.

The enemies of Democracy, the Constitution, and the American rule of law are the lethal enemy America wrongly thought it had already defeated. But that lethal enemy is now back with a vengeance and this time it has much higher possibilities than ever to succeed in its quest to destroy the country.

Salaroche