Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

Actually Donald Trump isn't a fascist, he is a dumb whiny man-baby with freedom fries where his testicles should be

anyway I agree w what Alex in SF and JCLC have said so far and stand by what I said on the og campaign thread: there's enough overlap between the positions and statements Trump has made and traditionally fascist ideologies to merit the use of the term imo. I think it's strange and inaccurate to act like his racism and eagerness to exploit racism in his base are situational responses to particular conditions - there is no "problem" with undocumented immigrants or Muslims in the sense that Trump and his base think it is (that they're "taking American jobs", depressing wages, destroying American culture, pose a security threat, etc.), those are all window-dressing manifestations of deep-seated racism rooted in the sense that the volk (white + Christian) of America feel threatened. That his statements don't mirror or match the extent of Hitler's views is irrelevant, it's the appeal to the violation of "true" Americans, to the sense of aggrieved identity, that is fascist.

xp

since we've got this thread and part of the title is "what is fascism," let me ask a question i asked facebook yesterday:

In 1944 George Orwell wrote in "What is Fascism?":

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make.

Here's the link for full context: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

back to iatee's point, beyond our potential (ab)use of the term in our little backwater of the internet, to the limited extent that the press/media has any impact on the polity's grasp of the candidates I think it's useful for major media outlets to be comfortable applying the term to Chump, it could be useful in solidifying opposition to him and making the views he espouses less acceptable in the general discourse. I think the degree to which we can limit the general acceptability of hateful demagoguery with potentially violent consequences is an important end-goal in itself.

xp

What do you suppose are the admissions Orwell thinks Fascists, Conservatives and Socialists are unwilling to make?

I would assume he means they don't want to admit how much alike they can be

i don't know why you think in a political context saturated with accusations of fascism applied to all sorts of disparate figures, ideas + parties calling trump a fascist would be anything but another trump in that bucket

guys this is all just pre-opening hype for his DC hotel

https://www.trumphotelcollection.com/washington-dc/

mainstream media has always been p hesitant to apply the label (justifiably so), Trump campaign is the first time I've seen the term used in places like the Washington Post, for ex. Trump is different.

xp

I would assume he means they don't want to admit how much alike they can be

In politics the name of the game is gaining and maintaining broad popular support. This is as true of monarchies and oligarchies as of democracies. So it is not surprising that the tactics and strategies used by practitioners of the art, as opposed to the nostrums of political theorists and philosophers, will align in many basic ways. For example, scapegoating is universal and propaganda is indispensable. Machiavelli's advice is evergreen.

I'd say the features that distinguish fascism are more of degree and of emphasis than of kind. Stalinism and Nazism manipulated very different narratives and mythologies to enlist popular support, but their overall practical strategies were extremely similar and have been widely mimicked worldwide. In turn, those strategies were derived from long standing principles used by monarchies since forever.

Trump is piecing together a set of narratives and mythologies that would be very adaptable to establishing an extra-constitutional regime based on the presumed need to secure the nation from the dire threats posed by a set of easily-scapegoated outsiders, Mexicans and Muslims in this instance. He also casts himself as so far superior to his rivals as to be, in effect, a 'supreme leader'. These are primary foundations upon which to build a cult of personality and a police state.

So, yeah, Trump is following the fascist road, which is also the road to a totalitarian, extra-legal government focused on one leader.

Mexicans and Muslims in this instance

let's not forget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDrfE9I8_hs

Along these lines, part of his appeal is "fight Putin with a Putin."

"Political scientists have long known that “government legitimacy,” or the popularity of particular administrations, is going down. But many of them have argued that “regime legitimacy,” or citizens’ attachment to democracy as a political system, is as strong as ever. Our research shows that this is just not true: Attachment to democracy has fallen over time, and from one generation to the next. … For Americans born in the 1930s, living in a democracy holds virtually sacred importance. Asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how important it is to them to live in a democracy, more than 70 percent give the highest answer. But many of their children and grandchildren are lukewarm. Among millennials — those born since the 1980s — fewer than 30 percent say that living in a democracy is essential."

http://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2015/12/18/9360663/is-democracy-in-trouble

gee it's almost as if capitalism's undermining of democracy over the last 80s years has made democracy look pointless

gotta love those hilariously alarmist graphs though

negative opinions of democracy have SKYROCKETED from 17% to 23% OMG WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO

btw, if you are looking to establish a popular, ultra-nationalist police state, then you don't need the intellectuals on your side, but you damn well better have strong support in the working class. intellectuals tend to shrink both from breaking heads or getting their own heads broken. they're more likely to take a principled stand and wind up safely buried as political prisoners - or corpses.

i hope this trump episode shows lots and lots of people that a supreme danger of laissez-faire trickle down bullshit is unqualified spoiled assholes are empowered to take over, but i'm not holding my breath

it's going to show more unqualified spoiled assholes they can run for office imo

like this distinction is very subtle but he wants to keep muslims out of the country bc of worldwide islamic radicalism and he wants to deport 10 million undocumented immigrants bc they broke the law being in this country.

no bearing on his 'fascism' but i think this distinction is a little too subtle. trump doesn't seem too wedded to the rule of law; he wants to deport 11m undocumented immigrants because all mexicans are rapists and drug dealers. he wants to keep muslims out because all muslims are terrorists. he enjoys chatting with jews because they're all nearly as shrewd at negotiation as he is. see also the central park five, statements about women, obama birtherism, etc. he has a very simplistic worldview that, funnily enough, boils down to people who aren't like him not deserving the same rights

anyway i'm less concerned about about trump himself than that he makes other assholes like cruz seem less extreme than they are

Shakey otm about how it's not that useful to view the thread as a referendum on the state of Trump's soul: "i don't think that trump thinks that mexicans or muslims are an inherent evil" isn't the point as much as whether, as a politician, he's willing to say things that warm the hearts of those that do.

The use of the word is (okay, ideally) less "we have successfully attached this label, minus 20 points to you" as much as you know, a description of a pattern that we can look for - basically http://www.theonion.com/article/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-h-26183

Trump is an idiot without a coherent ideology but what if he picked an actual evil smart fascist dude for VP or something

An idiot without a coherent ideology can definitely get elected, make decisions that lead to the loss of important rights, turn democratic institutions into empty facades, and generally turn the country in a totalitarian direction, while remaining very popular. A smart VP isn't necessary, just an instinctive sense of what measures he can take that increase his arbitrary power, and which he can sell to the public as appropriate, each step along the way. Any canny opportunist will do the trick.

ok replace smart with "has Tea Party friends in the House"

nevermind me, just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLKnCeeAW48 ing things up as usual

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWTffIhWEAAdxTq.png

USA at the time of european fascism was prob more racist or nativist than trump's wildest fantasies in 2015. i mean, ok there was WW2 going on but i mean

Approximately 600,000 Italian aliens lived in the United States in 1940. About 1,600 Italian citizens were interned, and about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to move from their houses in California coastal communities to inland homes.

There were approximately 264,000 German aliens in 1940. During the war 10,905 Germans and German-Americans as well as a number of Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians and Romanians were placed in internment camps.

In 1939 pollsters found that 53 percent of those interviewed agreed with the statement "Jews are different and should be restricted." Between 1933 and 1945 the United States took in only 132,000 Jewish refugees, only ten percent of the quota allowed by law.

Congress in 1939 refused to raise immigration quotas to admit 20,000 Jewish children fleeing Nazi oppression. As the wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration remarked at a cocktail party, "20,000 children would all too soon grow up to be 20,000 ugly adults."

otm

*strokes beard* america was more racist 70 to 80 years ago than now...hmmm maybe

so the argument is that the relative racism of a given society determines what constitutes political fascism?

i don't think trying to keep jews out of the united states (a decision that i am well aware cost many jews their lives as they found themselves stranded in nazi europe) was a fascist decision. it was a racist decision. just like trying to keep muslims of the united states is not a fascist decision, it's a racist one. imho ymmv etc.

balls: pt is just that the policies trump advocates that get him called fascist were done by us when we were fighting fascism. it's kinda like when ppl call obama a socialist or communist; US introduced more socialist policies during the cold war (when there were legit full commie countries) than in the past 30 years and probably in the next 30 years.

however i agree with joan that

OTOH it's really fine to call him a fascist because calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition and we're not all fedora-sporting EXCUSE ME THAT'S NOT WHAT THE WORD MEANS bores

associating him w/ racism is probably a better tactic than associating him w/ fascism.

cause everyone knows what racism is, everyone (even republicans) accepts that it.is.bad. calling assholes fascists is such a time-honored tradition that the word fascist kinda just means asshole to a lot of people. whereas racist means racist.

my intro to the word fascist was when my ill-tempered spoiled nerd friend called his mom one for not driving him to a magic the gathering tournament when we were 11

it has a whiff of sputtering, imprecise anger

early in Obama's presidency it seemed like some people on fox news (and elsewhere) were having trouble deciding if he was a fascist or a socialist ha :/

Maybe they were running tests to see which word stimulated growling among their viewers more.

his mom is definitely more of a fascist than donald trump, she sounds like a true monster

it has a whiff of sputtering, imprecise anger

it's the fricative-sibilant combo, first you spit then you hiss

He's a racist (keep Muslims out) and a Fascist (lock down the internet, kick out the press). Plus, under Trump I doubt the trains would even run on time. He'd cut Amtrak money, because the free market has shown it doesn't work. Plus, only losers take public transportation.

everyone itt probably knows both the strict and loose definitions of the word fascist

Actually, no, I'm not that clear on what the strict definition is and the Vox article has not convinced me that there is one.

Or if there is, it does not seem like one that amounts to a very coherent ideology.

iirc, the strictest definition would be: a member of Mussolini's National Fascist party before it was outlawed.

Well, Trump is def not a fascist by that definition.

my intro to the word fascist was when my ill-tempered spoiled nerd friend called his mom one for not driving him to a magic the gathering tournament when we were 11

ill-tempered spoiled nerd friend otm, what has parenting come to

imagine if Hitler's mom had taken him to a magic the gathering tournament when he was 11.

Regarding Trump's racism (I understand that that's orthogonal to the thread topic), what he said about Latinos in his campaign announcement was essentialist racism. I don't care to quibble about Trump's "actual" beliefs about race; all we have is what he's said, and he seems all id to me anyway. It is true that he hasn't apotheosized racial struggle into an "ideology" the way Hitler did, but I think that claiming his statements about Latinos and Muslims are rationally grounded is wack.

i think what i was trying to say by [hamfistedly] contrasting a kind of reasonable racism of trump to an irrational mytho-poetic racism of hitler is to suggest that the way that the US treated european jewish immigrants in 1938 and the way hitler did were both 'racist' in that both essentialized ppl acc to their group racial identity but that only one, as you say, apotheosized racial struggle into an ideology. i see the former as existing in any number of political + social ideologies but the latter as being a phenomenon unique to fascism. i wasn't trying to claim that non-fascist racism (if you buy this distinction) is somehow actually rational or appropriate. just that it bears a different relationship to reality than fascist racial categories + mythos.

i think that this idea that trump isn't principled enough to be a fascist is maybe buying into a bit of a myth about fascism, that it was actually principled and not a presentation of the right ideology at the right time for what was a more important goal beyond any principle, the rise to power of a hierarchical faction. trump basically embodies this imo but the right ideology for the time in re: a rise to power is different right now in the US, it's .. whatever he does, macho grandstanding and reality tv cooing and an ADD-addled racism that will hate anyone it makes sense to hate in the moment. whether or not the bourgeois who backs him is large enough to make his rise happen is a measurement of how much of a fascist undercurrent there is in the culture right now. i guess my take is, why not make the word work for a contemporary reality that is just as real and full of unfulfilled potential as the reality was in germany during the 30s. i don't think it diminishes the word to make a connection where it's appropriate instead of walling it off in history.

v otm I think

i think that this idea that trump isn't principled enough to be a fascist is maybe buying into a bit of a myth about fascism, that it was actually principled and not a presentation of the right ideology at the right time for what was a more important goal beyond any principle, the rise to power of a hierarchical faction.

That's more or less where I was wondering. Do many political scholars actually regard fascism as a coherent ideology in the way that e.g. classical liberalism, democratic socialism, or Marxist-Leninism are coherent ideologies? Genuinely curious. Point 4 of that Vox article is basically an open admission that it had no real ideological position at all when it comes to the economy, which is sort of a huge aspect of how any society is governed. Point 1 mostly tells us what fascism is not. I followed the article to read Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fascism (written a decade after the March on Rome), which does give enough info to suggest that the term may well not be apt for Trump but also seems to basically acknowledge that the 'ideology' (or at least 'theory') fascism was largely made up on the go:

The years preceding the march on Rome cover a period during which the need of action forbade delay and careful doctrinal elaborations. Fighting was going on in the towns and villages. There were discussions but... there was some­thing more sacred and more important... death... Fascists knew how to die. A doctrine - fully elaborated, divided up into chapters and paragraphs with annotations, may have been lacking, but it was replaced by something far more decisive, - by a faith. All the same, if with the help of books, articles, resolutions passed at congresses, major and minor speeches, anyone should care to revive the memory of those days, he will find, provided he knows how to seek and select, that the doctrinal foundations were laid while the battle was still raging. Indeed, it was during those years that Fascist thought armed, refined itself, and proceeded ahead with its organization.

I mean, who knows, but I think he was always going to fail in this final endeavor to become the first American dictator.

if he'd had the institutional support to hold onto his position regardless of election results he would and could have done. someone who is just as racist and authoritarian but with more establishment support and/or a better-organised mass movement behind them could easily do or have done so. I could even see more powerful interests proping up (a) trump if someone from further left had won the presidency

True. I think Trump’s greatest contribution toward future dictatorship was his incessant testing of limits and boundaries which ultimately showed just how soft and malleable they are.

yeah I think the brazenness in which Republicans have shown their willingness to defend literally anything, up to and including a violent insurrection, bodes very very poorly for our future, especially now that it's been telegraphed that nothing's gonna happen to Trump and guys like Hawley & Cruz are gonna keep their seats

Then you have these kinds of fascists:

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, @Reuters finds https://t.co/bsudhNVHEF by @AramRoston 1/5 pic.twitter.com/igVSVCKOzK

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 27, 2021

“I don’t know any of this,” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html

this is so fucking funny, they've built him a little fake Twitter that does nothing to keep him busy pic.twitter.com/NozGe89UVa

— 📻 thomas website (@nailheadparty) May 10, 2021