Trump Isn’t the First American Fascist.

What always bothers me about how liberals attack Trump from an ideological point of view, i.e., he’s a Fascist, is the lack of historical perspective in how they discuss what Trump and MAGA really mean.

I’m not talking about comparing Trump to Hitler — that’s a comparison which doesn’t have the slightest degree of relevance, if only because there’s absolutely no way in which the United States in 2016 was anything at all like Germany in 1933.

But if you want to look for historical antecedents in our national history as a possible guide to understanding not only what Trump is all about, but how and why he has built a significant political movement which continues to influence and impact the contemporary political situation in a new and powerful way, I suggest you take a look at the political career of Huey Long, who was the Governor of Louisiana from 1928 until 1932, then was elected to the U.S. Senate where he served until he was shot and killed in the Rotunda of the Louisiana State Capitol in 1935.

Long came out of a family which had been involved in local and state politics in the northern part of Louisiana, which is where Long was from. When he ran for Governor in 1928, he was warned that he had to find some way to deal with the fact that the northern half of the state was largely Protestant, whereas the southern part, the…