Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

First they came for the sad vinyl fetishists, and I said nothing, for I was not a sad vinyl fetishist.

Then they came for the post-punk and britpop archivists, and I said nothing, because I always preferred new wave and synthpop.

Then they came for the rockists, and I said nothing, because I have a poptimist side.

Then they came for the Noise Dudes... and I showed them where the Noise Dudes were hiding, because fuck those guys.

America has a history of racial violence but it also has a history of different groups learning to live together, imperfectly, but mostly peacefully. The incredible diversity of New York is what makes it great. I’d rather build on that tradition of peaceful cosmopolitanism than live in fear of proud boys or whatever.

I have no opinion whatsoever on other progressives' decision to own a gun or not but it doesn't seem like reactionary violence has a tendency to just fade away.

Nothing but just sharing love for brimstead <3

A thought that has been troubling me lately: did fascism feel like fascism to everyone, on a daily basis, or mainly just to its targets? Like what if I'm the "ordinary German" this time around, able to just kind of go about my business?

It felt like it to its targets - if it had felt like capital f Fascism to the punters it would never have happened. The idea that it would be helpful in allowing "ordinary Germans" to go about their business was one of the main points of attraction, as the previous regime and financial crisis hadn't allowed for that. So people turned a blind eye to the obvious barbarism and convinced themselves that This Is Fine. And turning a blind eye to obvious horrors and injustices is still part of how we live, and how we always have lived, to some extent.

Note also that those ppl at least didn't have the historical example of fascism leading to total ruin as we do.

Treesh, the issue is that I also want peaceful cosmopolitanism rather than fear of racist violence, but the racists are making that harder and harder every day. And they're the ones patrolling the streets, tear-gassing people, and beating the shit out of people trying to take down their beloved statues of racist murderers.

"And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright shadows."

cathartic
https://i.imgur.com/8m4QAnt.mp4

On July 21 the Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) eliminated the special legal protections enjoyed by union grievance handlers for the past 70 years. In the interest of promoting workplace “civility,” the Board announced that employers will no longer be restrained from disciplining or discharging stewards or officers who use profanity or engage in other “abusive” actions in violation of an employer’s enforced code of conduct, even when these actions happen in the course of heated meetings with management.

The new decision, known as General Motors, overrules scores of NLRB rulings permitting grievance representatives to engage in “zealous” advocacy.

As far back as 1948, the Labor Board announced that:
The relationship at a grievance meeting is not a “master-servant” relationship but a relationship between company advocates on one side and union advocates on the other side, engaged as equal opposing parties in litigation.

In 1995, the Board said:
Some profanity and even defiance must be tolerated during confrontations over contractual rights.

In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court added that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA):
Gives a union license to use intemperate, abusive, or insulting language without fear of restraint or penalty if it believes such rhetoric to be an effective means to make its points.

In 1981, the influential Fifth Federal Circuit joined in, stating that:
The National Labor Relations Act has ordinarily been interpreted to protect the employee against discipline for impulsive and perhaps insubordinate behavior that occurs during grievance meetings, for such meetings require a free and frank exchange of view and often arise from highly emotional and personal conflicts.

"You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." -- Trump pic.twitter.com/OiF63qZaKx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2020

In case you were wondering: yes, absolutely.

How expeditious of you, Pom. I think we should give him time.

You're right, how is the world supposed to know for sure if he doesn't get re-elected in 2024?

We'll know for sure if he gets re-elected in 2020.

Perhaps "dysfunctional fascism" is the best description of this admin

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Wednesday, November 1, 2017 9:27 AM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Still stand by this, recent events only confirm.

let's wait til Jan 20

sometimes fascism gets a hand

yes I always thought of Trump as an "aspiring fascist" more than the genuine article but really who cares

I have to say that I increasingly think no, he is not a fascist. He is too incompetent to be a fascist. He is too chaotic to be a fascist. He is too petty and self-interested even to be a fascist. A fascist administration would take decisive action to slow the pandemic and then use the situation to consolidate power. He just kind of fumbles around and looks for opportunities for grift.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 11:08 AM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I get that there are touches of fascist demagoguery in there, like attempts to chasten the media, racism, etc. But there's not much sense of a larger program, just a kind of instinctual political survival game.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 11:09 AM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I guess he could just be a really shitty fascist. But he doesn't seem to have much of a program or organization. He has a bunch of ideas and he's influenced by some people (Miller e.g.) who seem closer to fascism. He probably borrows some ideas and style from fascists, and he even admires fascists. But Trump is ultimately just about Trump and too dumb and short-attention-spanned to really implement anything like a fascist program. And he wasn't put forth by a fascist party either, he more just kind of snuck in through the back door of the GOP.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 1:27 PM (seven months ago) bookmarkflaglink

still think this is right too, again, confirmed by his fumbling around at trying to maintain power. But sure, we can't be certain until we hit inauguration.

Karl what do you think is going to happen sp

i 99% think things will be ok, overall, as far as civil war 2. i think it's going to get ugly, but hopefully that will stay in isolated, deep red areas, and the militias and the like stay in their creepy KKK meeting spots.

but i think it's a little premature to think "aspiring fascism is in the rear window" when the trump faithful (literally in some cases) are still in deep denial, hold most of the country's guns, and in many cases are praying to the christian god to undo a fraudulent election that was clearly won by donald trump

i wonder if the macro flashpoint might be the refusal of about 40% of the population to take a covid19 vaccine. it sounds (and is) fucking stupid, but there are quite a few people out there who will see that as accepting the mark of the beast. wish i was joking.

the Esper firing/replacement with a Homeland Security goon who thinks it's fine to use military to quell protests is admittedly a little disconcerting and came just as I made my last posts.

I don't think he's going to get anywhere with it, but the mere fact that he made that decision now is worrisome.

Not just in the US, alas. I think about 30% of Europeans are anti-vaxxers at this point.

xps

Fascism will remain a threat, look at the grip it has on Hungary and Poland.

As long as the Alt Right exists, we're in danger

i also think that delusional, angry, scared people (like trump, like so many of his followers) are sometimes a little dangerous when they sense that they're in danger. in this case, they're in "danger" of being pushed aside politically for a few years, but they may very well interpret that as "the apocalypse is here, and our job is to carry out the lord's will"

also, since i'm spelling out my own delusions here (and again, i stress that i don't this is likely to happen at all), the stuff i worry about has little to do with trump himself. he is a fucking idiot, so is his family. they are incompetent. it comes from the second or third order-effects, the people that actually believe the bullshit they're being fed

otm, kind of where i'm at

the Esper firing/replacement with a Homeland Security goon who thinks it's fine to use military to quell protests is admittedly a little disconcerting and came just as I made my last posts.

i guess a slight bright side is that protests are likely to quell down soon anyway, because of winter, the worst wave of covid-19 we've seen yet, and the morale boost of already defeating trump. so perhaps a defense secretary willing to lend a violent hand to a fascist will find less people's lives to ruin

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that the police still love to murder Black people in cold blood at all times of year, so I wouldn't count on protests dying down, necessarily.

I more meant that you could read it as him preparing to pull some stunt that he expects to trigger unrest, that's all. It may very well be that Esper was about to resign so he just said "you're fired" instead. And it may just be a petty thing. But it seems odd to change secretary of defense just at this moment.

Just posted elsewhere but Sec of Def is supposed to be more than 6 years out of service. They can get a waiver (did for Mattis) but it does indicate another instance of a competence deficit

he doesn't have much time left, i'm not sure how much power he can consolidate through force at this point

I've read more about fascism since the start of this thread, including Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. I think Trump and his followers are more accurately described as a right-wing authoritarians. Trump's suppression of the opposition was half-assed, and his foreign policy was too random to be considered expansionist.

i read austerlitz, by w. g. sebald, and ended up doing a little re-evaluating myself. the one thing that really struck me about that book's account of the reich's arrival in austria and the czech republic was the absolutely off-the-charts administrative energy behind every single aspect of everything they did, but especially the relocating and disappearing and destroying people part. like, insane amounts of time and energy devoted to accounting in the 1930s version of spreadsheets and being responsible for and reporting on numbers and just relying on that as an overwhelmingly destructive reorganizational force. the reich had an administrative energy to it that was so amped up, possibly methed up, whereas the trumpists are like standard-issue alcoholics. they don't actually *do* anything. except for ice and the border wall and a few other areas that had some competency and a *work ethic* behind them. i'm starting to think that you can't actually be a full fascist unless you pair it with a culture of work. you can buy into the aesthetics and lick boots all you want but if no one is actually doing anything but messaging and play-acting you're just con men and religious nut jobs smoking white-supremacist and male-supremacist crack in the basement. it turns out it's a lot of work to do genocide and such. trump himself is way too lazy for that.

that's a really good post

Indeed. Comforting, to boot.

i think there's also a difference between what sebald describes as an almost ecstatic religious conversion in germany among *a lot* of people there and the u.s., which in 2020 has some institutional fascist tendencies that mainly translate into steady violence against non-white poor people. some of the people in trump's camp i think attempted to ignite white supremacist fervor on the level of germany but i feel like there's an element to it where they were looking back on it and so it became, or was from the outset, too self-reflective to generate any real heat. like in the substantive numbers that could lead to a large-scale killing project. fun stuff to think about lol.

The lack of a Nazi-like bureaucratic impulse in the modern American right is not at all comforting. Plenty of genocides have occurred sans pristine book keeping. All that spreadsheet shit is auxiliary to the main shit, not an essential feature of it.

Reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," I was surprised (in that I didn't know) how patiently Hitler played the long game. Trump is all sloppy impulse, but Hitler had a legit (for him) plan that he put into play. And from the start he was basically all or nothing, total victory or death. That is not Trump, either.

ok, show me genocides that happened without some kind of administrative competence behind them xp

Lol are you serious? Like almost every single one. Do you want me to start at the chimp wars?

Good posts map. Austerlitz is one of my favorite books ever.

Lol are you serious? Like almost every single one. Do you want me to start at the chimp wars?

― Dan I., Tuesday, November 10, 2020 12:05 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

no actually. i'm thinking of human genocides post third-reich.

Good posts map. Austerlitz is one of my favorite books ever.

― treeship., Tuesday, November 10, 2020 12:10 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's extremely beautiful.

Can you define your terms, map? Right now it's looking like you're saying that fascism isn't "full fascism" until it leads to organized genocide.

The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard was serialised on R4 last week and even in short 15 minute blasts was quite exquisite, might have to dive into that book some time soon.

I remember after Trump got elected I went on a major fascism reading binge - Wilhelm Reich, Trotsky, Adorno. The "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" was probably the best of the bunch though.

Reich is good too but starts going a bit haywire two-thirds of the way in.