In the early decades of the 20th Century, Jack London's The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here showed how Fascists could seize America.
Although these books should both be required reading for all citizens, we also need to study non-fictional history to understand the forces at work in the Republican theft of the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Presidential elections.
In 1901, V.I. Lenin's What Is To Be Done? outlined his plan for a new kind of political party. The Bolshevik model was the key to both the spectacular success and the miserable failure of Communist revolutions in the 20th Century. The basic idea is that the core of the Party functions as a secretive, disciplined professional army following orders from above; internal criticism of leaders and their policies is discouraged, to put it mildly. This army of party cadres resorts to violence when it serves the party's purposes, but more often it engages in agitation and organizing, pressuring the regime it intends to overthrow and later consolidating victory by suppressing dissent. The Leninist model was adapted with some modifications by the far right; the Nazi Party was its distorted and exaggerated mirror image.
Once power is seized, Party membership is opened up to the general population. Millions join for personal advancement or because they more or less agree with its principles, but they don't become full-time fanatics.
This sequence was reversed when some Republican Party leaders adopted the Bolshevik model in recent years.
The Republicans' "mass membership" had been well established for a century when agents of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) crept into the Watergate building in 1972. Nixon's "inner party" was as tightly organized and covert as any gang of Bolsheviks or Fascists, but its commitment was very shaky. Consequently, its discipline broke down under pressure. About the only real "true believer" was G. Gordon Liddy. Nixon certainly had the support of "the masses" — his "great silent majority", alarmed by hippie college kids and urban riots, re-elected the President with a vast landslide — but he offered them no real ideology, so all they had to rally around was the flag and Nixon's own unattractive personality.
Nixon was overthrown from above, it seems. Kissinger, a Nelson Rockefeller protegee, was at least as guilty as Nixon himself, but emerged from the scandals as if he were some kind of hero. Most of the major players in Nixon's downfall had connections with the military, the CIA or other intelligence agencies (reporter Bob Woodward was in Naval intelligence). David Rockefeller's new Trilateral Commission (headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski) came on the scene, ready to rebuild a new elite consensus after the divisive era of Vietnam, racial strife, and Nixon's creepy campaigns. Nixon's cardinal sin may have been economic nationalism, tossing out the Bretton Woods financial system when it no longer favored American interests; global financiers (notably David Rockefeller) were appalled, and Europe and Japan (the other corners of the Trilateral triangle) were deeply offended they hadn't been consulted. It's also worth noting that the President of IBM was high on Nixon's "enemies list" for opposing the war — which shows how deeply divided the elite had become.
Pseudo-Christian political organizing got under way in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This provided a vast pool of potential recruits to a new, expanded, and far more fanatical "inner party" than Nixon had been able to pull together. The apocalyptic ideology of the pseudo-Christians, based far more on televangelical fantasies than on the Bible, was profoundly motivating — not because it made sense, but because it was typically associated with a deeply personal, irrational, emotionally-charged, and usually entirely genuine spiritual "awakening", as well as peer group pressure in tight-knit church communities, which function as an extended family of warm, supportive siblings under the benign paternal rule of the local pastor. Loyalty to God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost is a whole lot more compelling than loyalty to Richard Nixon, or to the Republican Party per se.
Such minor details as Jesus's own words in the Gospels were swept aside by absurd reinterpretations — in 1984, I saw a "voters' guide" claiming that Jesus approved of nuclear weapons and extreme divisions of wealth and poverty. I've also seen and heard pseudo-Christian preachers claiming that Jesus wants the earth totally wrecked to prepare for his second coming; environmentalists will burn in hell for defying God's plan. This evil nonsense is widely accepted only because the pseudo-Christians reject the Protestant tradition of reading the actual Scriptures and arriving at one's own understanding of God's word; instead, it's considered almost sinful to question the televangelical "interpretation".
Meanwhile, some of the old secular Nixonian cadre, notably Rumsfeld and Cheney, remained active and ready for a return to power. Few of the leading neo-Conservatives claim to be Christian, but their ideas were generally consistent with the preaching of the pseudo-Christians — at least in terms of short-term strategies. Ronald Reagan's claim to believe in fundamentalist "Christianity" and George W. Bush's genuine personal salvation (from alcoholism and other demons), provided a bridge between the secular and religious right-wing forces. New Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and other leading right-wingers don't seem particularly religious, but they obviously don't mind having their agenda regarded as God's will by millions of believers.
To cut a long story short, the emergence of "inner party" goon squads during the 2000 Florida recount revealed to the world that the Republican Party was no longer committed to free and fair elections. In the new Republican Party, as in the Bolshevik and Nazi organizations, the inner party's purpose is take power and keep power, by any means necessary. Laws are enforced when the law serves their purpose, and broken whenever it doesn't.
This is what we're up against.
Here's a view from the Guardian. A reader's comment attached to that article is worth repeating in full here:
The scale of voter disenfranchisement in America could put the Republicans back in the White House.
This is to be expected ... the United States is a banana republic.
... The same few families have held the reins of power for decades.
... The head of the secret police went on to become president not so long ago.
... The son of said secret-police-head-turned-president escaped drunken driving convictions and avoided war service through connections.
... This son eventually went on to become president himself despite it being clear to all he didn't have the intellectual capacity to run even a hotdog stall.
... This son only managed to seize power through widespread fraud in a state where his brother happened to be governor.
... This son's path to power was ultimately decided by an "independent" supreme court which just happened to be packed with appointees from his own father's previous regime.
... This is a country that is pitifully ill-equipped to deal with natural disasters and when such events occur its underclass are left to die and starve while the elites play golf or buy shoes.
... This country not only runs the planet's largest torture camp it also outsources it's torture to a sinister global network of third parties.
... For decades this country has cooperated with neighbouring banana republics to squash dissent through torture and assassination.
Banana republic.