“If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime,” wrote John Ganz, a left-leaning author, in a Substack newsletter on 21 January. “It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics.”