The German Socialists August Bebel and Ferdinand Kronawetter recognized the human weakness for attacking proximate and weak targets instead of more distant and/or stronger ones. It's why they called anti-semitism"the socialism of fools". The Italian version, which explains Meloni's election and Musso-mini Berlusconi, is: "the mother of the idiots is always pregnant."

The plutocrats' plantation economy America has become, with its chronic scarcity of essential public goods and ever-present water-treading fear of downward mobility, creates this culture of hair-trigger hostility. The combination of private opulence and public squalor, which I found jarring on a recent trip from Latvia to Philadelphia for a family wedding, also fuels this hair-trigger defensiveness and blame-diffusion. It's the raw material of fascism and low-intensity civil war.