I‘ve given up trying to get invited to a cocktail party but I‘m going to the egg roll. I swear. - Rachel Maddow

Climate disaster has put a spotlight on the need for human society to evolve beyond dependence on petroleum, but our very capacity to decide on that — or anything — remains at risk as long as the industry is still ranging like a ravenous predator on the field of democracy.

Here was both a very American personal success story and a glimpse of what post-democracy strongman rule might look like in the United States, signaled not by a uniformed march on Rome or a Reichstag fire but by a governor who became senator while simultaneously keeping the governor’s job, breaking the spine of democracy in his state with the help of a cadre of brass-knuckled bodyguards, engineering kidnappings of his enemies, and defeating or sidestepping multiple impeachments and indictments and investigations, all while soaking up adoration at a muddy rural rally with farmers or in a roaring ballroom full of tuxedoed and gowned admirers, his vast and disparate audiences too in love with his charm to much care what he actually meant. Somehow simultaneously cherubic and menacing in appearance, Huey Long was a populist, a rule breaker, a shockingly gifted orator, and a thug. He once commanded National Guard troops to mount an actual true-blue armed military assault on the municipal government of the largest city in his state. The man launched an armed invasion of New Orleans! — and got away with it. The best contemporaneous biography of Long in Louisiana was subtitled “The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship.

A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover.