Maybe they mean to repeat history When was America great the first time? Someone go ask Donald Trump. Maybe Jordan Klepper should query Trump rally attendees what “great again” means again. I’m guessing they really mean 1859. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. Historian Seth Cotlar (Rightlandia) will be in Seattle on Tuesday interviewing Rachel Maddow about her new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Those who listened to her latest podcast, Ultra, know the basics. She traces the America fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s in more detail. What Cotlar finds interesting is how this history disappeared down the collective memory hole for most Americans in subsequent generations: One thing we learn from Maddow’s book is that almost all of the seditious American fascists from the 1930s and 40s—people who literally wanted to work together with the Nazis to eliminate or deport the nation’s Jews and turn the country into an authoritarian homeland for white Christians—got off scot free after WWII and went on to live fairly normal lives as people who their neighbors generally thought of as “Commie-hating Christian Patriots,” if perhaps slightly eccentric or kooky ones. Likely, history will once again consign people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, convicted insurrectionists from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, et al. to the slightly eccentric or kooky category. Those who don’t go to jail will return…