>Infiltrating police departments and the enlisted ranks of the military<p>>Taking over school boards and local boards of elections<p>Just to play devil's advocate, is it possible that the far right has been under the impression that the far left has been doing the same thing?
All my Republican friends tell me this kind of talk is 'shrill' and would never happen. I certainly hope they're correct, but that story about Pinochet is terrifying.
We currently have this problem in Germany. The right-wing party AfD is claiming to be constitutional and democratic, yet they have constantly shown through small actions that they are 1. extremists, 2. unconstitutional and 3. not democratic.<p>The most clear example happened last year, when they tried to take power of the parliament of the state Thuringia. They attempted to remove voting rights to parliament members during a transition in order to strengthen their position.<p>While this was clearly unconstitutional, they pretended it wasn't, until the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that they were in the wrong. Only then they were like "Of course we accept this ruling", just to pretend to be democratic.<p>Their current path is to attempt to gain power in the Federal Constitutional Court, in order also influence future rulings so that the they can succeed next time.<p>This now brings the problem, that while there are many who want to rule the AfD to be unconstitutional, that is, to forbid the party to exist, it is a risky move to bring this case to court, because if it fails just barely to succeed, it would strengthen that party.<p>So they are always walking on the edge of legality and democracy in order to stretch the bounds, to get away with shortly doing illegal things like saying banned slogans to show the right-wing extremists that they can rely on this party to work for their interests or saying things like "Real men are right-wing, then they will be capable of getting girlfriends" [0]<p>In the case of the US, I think they now crossed this line. Let's hope that democracy is strong enough, but I still believe it is. In both countries.<p>[0] <a href="https://www-br-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/netzwelt/wie-die-afd-auf-tiktok-junge-maenner-umgarnt,UEdFx4Q?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true" rel="nofollow">https://www-br-de.translate.goog/nachrichten/netzwelt/wie-di...</a>