Editor's note: Radhika Desai is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

After the 2016 election that made Donald Trump president, some commented, wryly or swaggeringly, that we had likely witnessed the U.S.'s last election. Trump would find a way to abolish them. He did not do that but did attempt the second best in 2020: to question and ultimately deny the election results. These attempts culminated in the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results.

As the world watched in shock, hoodlums, encouraged by Trump and associates, rampaged through the complex. Senators and representatives hid and cowered in barely defended offices. The massive U.S. security apparatus that habitually over-polices African American communities appeared helpless before this overwhelmingly white crowd. Far more rambunctious Third World democracies have not witnessed such spectacles. U.S. democracy, and its reputation, lay in tatters. Words like "Civil War" and "fascism" filled the air.

A year later, they are not easily dismissed. Historian after historian has underlined how the political division that brought Trump to power in the first place maps fairly neatly on that between warring Red and Blue states of the Civil War. It was fought, inter alia, over whether slavery should persist. Though the abolitionist side won, race remains the U.S.'s deepest social and political divide.

A study by political scientist Robert Pape showed that most of the people who participated in the Capitol Hill riot "came from places … awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture."

Joe Biden has stood helpless as these divides have become more entrenched. Despite his shocking transgressions, Trump retains support among a formidable majority of his party. A Pew Research Center poll showed "two thirds of Republicans want Trump to remain a major political figure" and just under half want him to run again in 2024. Put these divisions in the same picture as several other facts.

The U.S. state has no monopoly on violence thanks to its infamous gun laws. Already in 2020, one major historian of the U.S. military warned in the liberal monthly, The Nation, that either loser could seek to mobilize supporters to contest the electoral outcome, requiring the military to determine the election outcome.

While in 2020 the military was not thus politicized, three retired senior military officers recently warned in the Washington Post of the potential for lethal chaos after the 2024 election since "a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military took part" in the Capital Hill attacks. The terrifying possibilities need sober contemplation.

As for fascism, it is traditional to dismiss the possibility of it ever occurring in the United States. However, such traditions rest on fairy tales of U.S. republican and civic virtues. They forget the centrality of race in the United States. They forget also that fascism is not rooted in national cultures but in capitalism.

The Frankfurt school theorist, Theodore Horkheimer, stated a critical truth: "He who will not speak about capitalism should keep silent about fascism too." American author Sinclair Lewis's powerful 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here" refuted these fairy tales, and many writers evoked it in the aftermath of the Capitol Hill riot.

Fascism is like other authoritarianisms in stigmatizing underprivileged groups to build false unity around the privileged and, in the U.S., the festering problem of race is ready to hand for this. What is distinctive about fascism is the mobilization of lumpen elements, mostly male, into para state troops that supplement state repressive forces to maintain the rule of capital. In the U.S. today, Trump-supporting groups like the Proud Boys and QAnon stand at the ready.

Today, U.S. democracy's political malaise ensnarls even attempts to heal it. Yes, the electing of Biden was certified in the end, but not before eight senators and 139 representatives voted against. That many of them later said they did so because they feared for their or their families' safety after witnessing what Trump's supporters could do that day adds to, rather than detracting from, the sense of menace.

The inquiry into the January 6, 2021 events is itself dogged by partisanship. The proposal for a bicameral commission, involving both houses of Congress, failed and the Democrat-controlled House had to settle for a House Select Committee on the January 6 riot. Four of its six seats for Republicans remain empty.

The committee is rushing to complete its work by summer because mid-term November elections could return a Republican House majority that would abolish it altogether. Undoubtedly, the report, when it comes, will only fuel further partisan divisions. Until they remain, the specters of fascism and Civil War will not be propitiated easily.

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