Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

That rally livetweet is fucking chilling. Trump is just rubbing shit and dumpster juice into an already-festering boil on the ass of America. I can do without seeing the Mad Max-ification of this country in my lifetime.

dude is so explicitly a garden-variety fascist I'm a little mystified that we're still in disagreement. not all fascists have a coherent fascist ideology; there isn't any Soviet-style purity test for fascism. Trump's fascism is natural to his way of thinking: his ideas (a leader gets to respond to the mean old press as he sees fit; people should have to submit to whatever a leader thinks is good and right before they can do as they like in the country that leader runs) are instinctively fascistic

I don't get it either. I find the Cro-Magnons who support Trump vile but I at least get the vile place they're coming from. I totally don't get anyone who's still on the fence about Trump and doesn't see the legitimacy his presumptive nomination has gained him as a serious threat to civil society.

That rally livetweet is fucking chilling.

unbelievably so! i made the mistake of watching the youtube of that event out of curiosity this morning and i've been depressed ever since.

Barring some cataclysmic event that shifts public opinion in his favor, I don't think he has a chance of winning the election, but that's almost beside the point since he's done such a fantastic job of drawing the morlocks out of their holes and giving them a figure to organize around. We're going to be wistfully reflecting on those halcyon days when the quaint Tea Partiers were the right wing fringe.

Trump in Atlanta today. The rally will take place at the Fox Theatre, essentially right on the edge of Midtown's gay district.

When this discussion comes up I do always recommend paxtons anatomy of fascism. And one of his main conclusions is not to judge fascists by what they claim, but how they act. That makes it hard to tell about aspiring fascists, of course.

That is, there is no coherent fascist ideology. Which is kind of the point.

that ok that gays love him he has the best gays xxp

I am not mystified in the least that we are in disagreement about philosophical categorization, but I am *so* not saying why.

Not having been a polisci student in 30+ years, i'll take your word that fascists don't need a coherent ideology, but that suggests maybe several hundred people in US politics might be as fittingly labeled? My local fave would be Giuliani, even tho he has mercifully failed at being elected to anything since 1997.

I think a fascist is kind of necessarily a nationalist. like you can have fascist-sympathizing mayors but like...if I'm a fascist in my house, that's a pretty weak fascism, fascism is nationalistic in character

like you can have fascist-sympathizing mayors but like...if I'm a fascist in my house, that's a pretty weak fascism, fascism is nationalistic in character

― The bald Phil Collins impersonator cash grab (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi)

otm. that's the extent i would place some kind of "purity test" on so-called fascism. it builds a pyre of vainglorious nationalism, defines itself in opposition to specific threat groups supposedly responsible for the national fall, and tends to assume an absurdly triumphal (and at least implicitly violent) character.

Trump currently talking about how horrific it is that Germany is being overrun by non-Germans

question answered, lock thread

You have to be fucking kidding me.

tbf he didn't say "non-Germans" but that was what he seemed to be implying

@tinyrevolution
I kind of admire Trump's determination not to change as the nominee and to stay the same narcissistic fantasist bigot he's always been

i have obviously known about trump as a persona for a long time but seriously was there ever any indication prior to the past several years that he was like this? he always seemed like a complete dick of course, but not this level of dick.

i'm sure "The Apprentice" had an editor.

There was a documentary made about what a dick he is.

the birtherism seems like an early indicator xxp

... maybe even two of them? (xp)

Trump just said "We are having the blood sucked out of our country."

he's also never had a platform of this size and reach and duration that allowed him to do anything but promote his (literal and figurative) brand. which basically amounted to selling shit, including himself, and given that he needed partners (macy's to sell his shitty ties, broadcast tv to sell his shitty show), i have to imagine he was canny enough to know to keep the demagoguery in his back pocket until his moment arrived.

that theory of course hinges on how much you believe that he really believes any of his horseshit and this whole horror hasn't just been a sociopathic racheting-up of the "selling his personal brand" trump.

lol are we still on this "what does he REALLY believe" nonsense

his dad was arrested at a KKK rally, there's the NYT jogger-rape case ad etc. Dude's always been a racist crackpot buffoon, he just has a bigger megaphone now.

oh i don't doubt he believes it.

yeah i was curious because i didn't pay him much attention until recent years, my thought of him was always as a particular kind of NYC type of tycoon buffoon and a relic of the '80s with a reality show, like a vulgar lee iacocca and nothing more. i don't doubt he believes what he says. yeah mordy my first indication that he was more than just a dick was the secret muslim bullshit.

more that if his campaign had flamed out in the early stages he might have just gone back to shilling shit, and all of this bilge might have remained a little more...bottled up.

I'm inclined to think that Trump doesn't have 'beliefs' as we understand them, inasmuch as his excessive credulity and his vampiric relation to positive regard and his undiluted narcissism seem to hamper his strict adherence to any particular ethos. And I think that's instructive in terms of what kind of a president he would be (particularly inasmuch as he would likely fall under the spell of anyone canny enough to both worm their way into an advisory position and push their own agenda through strategic employment of the ego stroke). But the existence of a belief system is also completely immaterial in terms of the real-world impact of his words and actions.

I'm not sure you can be a successful fascist authoritarian with any real moral/belief system. It's almost primitive in its simplicity: what do I need/want done, and how do I do it as quickly as possible? The answer to the latter is almost always power/force.

Yeah, the ontological void within that orange-hued corpus is the only real argument against Trump as a garden variety fascist. I've never thought that he intended to do much more with the presidency than use it as money-making leverage.

Stalin was a similar void, albeit a much more skilled one

the central-park jogger thing was the first major indication of the scale of trump's assholery, the birther stuff confirmed it

of course he first appeared in the NYT for being the target (w/ his dad) of a race-discrimination suit brought by the city housing authority IIRC, so basically as long as he's been in public life, he's been known as a shitbag.

i do think trump is mostly an amoral opportunist and narcissist, but if he has core "beliefs" they have a lot to do with racism.

Amateurist otm. He's not an "ideological void." He's a fucking racist.

also stalin wasn't an ideological void either - he was a leninist

hat rally livetweet is fucking chilling.

unbelievably so! i made the mistake of watching the youtube of that event out of curiosity this morning and i've been depressed ever since.

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Wednesday, June 15, 2016 9:52 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just awful, i'm genuinely terrified of the shit that is gonna happen in cleveland this summer

this is so bad

i can't tell if trump's rhetoric is going to incite something terrible upon someone in the opposition or upon himself but i get an increasingly bad feeling about all this.

yeah i really worry about the new levels of hatred he's legitimizing and inflaming... esp. since we know he will throw more and more epic fits as he realizes he's not going to win (and even worse once he loses). every time he says that obama is a traitorous foreign agent, etc., that seems to make an attempted assassination or an oklahoma-city-bombing type thing more and more likely.

I re-read They Thought They Were Free last week and managed to work myself up into a pretty good depression. Relevant part: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

...

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

i really think a GOP civil war may yet occur next month, but the main obstacle to a fight to take the nomination from Trump may be fear that his supporters would assassinate the traitors.

no one is going to do anything about trump. it's likely the grease fire won't burn down the neighborhood but the gop isn't going to put it out and we're all going to have to wait and see.

I like to think that even if he somehow won, he'd be so neutered by the machinations of govt that nothing much would happen and he'd look like a useless blowhard. Which has its own problems in making the US look pathetic on the world stage, but... eh.

i think looking pathetic is the greatest good possible for all, but not via that means

I like to think that even if he somehow won, he'd be so neutered by the machinations of govt that nothing much would happen and he'd look like a useless blowhard. Which has its own problems in making the US look pathetic on the world stage, but... eh.

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Wednesday, June 15, 2016 10:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this has been how i sleep at night --- i just dont think he'll have the political capital in washington to actually be able to do anything substantial, policy-wise

Wouldn't he, though? There are all kinds of things he could do without the blessing of congress, executive orders and the like that would be at the least disruptive and at worst massively destructive. The question really is how far congress would let him go before stepping in and stopping him.

Lot of grassy knolls out there.

Trump legitimises hatred. a Trump rally is like a 'safe-space' for bigots to say and do what they want, and even when Trump is mocking protestors saying things like 'take him home to Mommmy', it opens up a jokey, accessible door to all kinds of other hate-speech for his followers. It's fascism, but with cheap laughs instead of seig heils; an evil, grinning clownface.

a clown nose honking on a human face forever