Trump was definitely a match but the right having been pouring gasoline on this country for decades now. From the John Birch Society, to the Evangelical movement of the 70s and 80s, to Ronald Reagan, to Rush Limbaugh and right wing talk radio, to Fox News, to 9/11 driving the country crazy, to Barrack Obama's election driving the rest of the way off the cliff, this country has been primed for extreme conservatism for decades and the roots are deep now.
Historically speaking the far right and the far left don't take to the streets when things are headed for continued stability. There might be LARPing going on but after years the sides harden, people start dying, and liberal democracies flail trying to do as little as possible to confront the underlying issues. The Spanish fascists started out as all talk but we all know how that ended up.
The divisions are simply too wide for pithy Democratic party unity to mean anything and the Republicans are still trying to hold the tiger by the tail to maintain political relevance. I don't know how this all shakes out but with the rich/poor gap continuing to widen and global warming growing as a destabilizing force I don't see how this ends without more violence.
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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