Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

I can see his name being more of a disincentive in Europe than the Middle East, tbqh. The gist of DAMAC's statement was 'we don't condone his political comments but his company builds really good golf courses'. His face won't be plastered everywhere but in the grand scheme of things, people tend not to care too much about who owns the apartment blocs, golf courses and shopping malls they go to.

This is obviously tinfoil hat territory, but it's a little concerning to consider the damage that populist causes may be done by being associated with this huckster.

http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2016/02/what-i-think-about-when-they-say-donald.html

https://www.facebook.com/drdaviddukeFANpage/posts/1026085247449055

"Of what are they afraid?"

The fuck u bringing me into this

feel like this thread is just a historical record/repository at this point
http://theweek.com/speedreads/609311/time-reporter-choked-slammed-ground-donald-trump-rally

For a minute, I thought that headline said that the guy was chokeslamed to the ground, and reading the description, it sure sounds like he was.

Watching the gif, it sure looks like he was.

Kind of cross-posting with the other thread but it's interesting to see how different manifestations of what might ultimately be the same thing are being viewed as uniquely national pathologies when they appear.

A very common explanation for the rise of Putin was that Russians are just naturally more comfortable under a Tsar-like figure who'll sort things out for them in return for giving up a vibrant civil society / grass-roots democratic engagement. Berlusconi is explained away by the Italian love of flash and machismo. PiS and Orban fit with Poland and Hungary's Catholic revanchism and latent willingness to believe antisemitic and anticommunist conspiracy theories, etc, etc. There's a risk that viewing Trump primarily through a prism of threatened American masculinity / 'whiteness' is falling into the same trap. There's a grain of truth in all of it but the commonalities (primarily a general, international lack of faith in conventional Western capitalism and democracy to deliver anything other than managed decline) are more important and have more worrying implications for the rise of an international hard-right.

yes, i think this is why some of the recent work on authoritarianism is convincing, since it doesn't rely on a narrative that's exclusively american.

Chris Hedges:

Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer....

Fascism is about an inspired and seemingly strong leader who promises moral renewal, new glory and revenge. It is about the replacement of rational debate with sensual experience. This is why the lies, half-truths and fabrications by Trump have no impact on his followers. Fascists transform politics, as philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin pointed out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic for the fascist, Benjamin said, is war.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_revenge_of_the_lower_classes_and_the_rise_of_american_fascism_20160302

Rorty quote is remarkably prescient

I'm starting to rethink my engagement with pop culture at large, since the rise of Trump. The stupidness of so much of it is beginning to a look more sinister? nihilistic? than it used to. Or maybe just plane dum

hedges' book american fascism is where i first read that umberto eco piece that's been making the rounds again lately. i used to recommend the book just for the eco piece.

The stupidness of so much of it is beginning to a look more sinister? nihilistic? than it used to. Or maybe just plane dum

welcome to adulthood

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/06/donald_trump_vows_to_legalize_torture.html

There was a time when signing on to the Geneva Conventions was considered wise, to ensure that one's own citizen-soldiers, when captured, would not be subjected to inhuman treatment,and would not be exposed in combat to weapons such as nerve gas. Welcome to the brilliant era of the all-volunteer armed forces!

Slacktivist:
The national ID card and the Mark of the Beast

...Here, I think, the “authoritarianism” model isn’t quite as useful or explanatory as the idea of Herrenvolk. That’s a German word for something that found its nastiest and most infamous expression in 20th-century Germany. Herrenvolk means, literally, “master folk.” The idea is that of democratic government — but only by and for the ethnic majority (or, in places like Apartheid South Africa or the West Bank or parts of Mississippi, for the privileged ethnic minority).

This is helpful for trying to understand the appeal of people like Donald Trump or Alex Jones. Herrenvolk democrats are not opposed to “Big Government” in the form of welfare and assistance for themselves, but they’re fiercely opposed to any such assistance going to others — to the wrong kind of people. They want “Big Government” under their own feet, solidifying the foundations of their own lives, but they hate the idea of government offering the same support to those other kinds of people.

For the other form of “Big Government” — the kind that rests on one’s shoulders rather than under one’s feet, the kind that weighs us down rather than bearing our weight — Herrenvolk democrats take the opposite view. They insist on the Bill of Rights and full civil liberties for themselves, but not for others. They do not want government surveilling them, or hassling them for identification, but they want to see the government increasing its surveillance, harassment, stopping-and-frisking, etc., of those other people. They hate the idea of former NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s soda tax applying to them — that’s Big Brother and the nanny state. But at the same time they enthusiastically support efforts to police the grocery budgets of poor people.

Sounds familiar.

so how's everybody doing

http://www.cpbj.com/article/20160311/CPBJ01/160319967&source=RSS

Parliamentary cretins who consider themselves connoisseurs of the people like to repeat: "One must not frighten the middle classes with revolution. They do not like extremes." In this general form this affirmation is absolutely false. Naturally, the petty proprietor prefers order so long as business is going well and so long as he hopes that tomorrow it will go better.

But when this hope is lost, he is easily enraged and is ready to give himself over to the most extreme measures.

I don't remember Sutherland saying that

blu-ray extras

The truth is on your side, bubba

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/trump-coughlin-nazis-christian-front-kristallnacht-antisemitism-kasich-fascism/
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/donald_trump_s_terrifying_and_distinctly_american_authoritarianism.html

both about this idea of "american fascism"

jacobin piece otm. slate piece otm on and off:

He is not consumed with historical grievances; he’s not an anti-Semite; he hasn’t tried to build a mass party; and he doesn’t demand the restoration of tradition or an old moral order. Indeed, as a reality TV star and cyberbully on his third wife, he is himself a good illustration of the breakdown of any moral order possibly remaining.

bolded part is untrue: listen more carefully to his praise of supporters' thuggery. he loves invoking "the good old days". there is absolutely a moral order to which he longs, or enables a longing, to return. it's not very old.

the idea that trump's personal sleaziness is in irreconcilable contradiction with fascist purity -- or that his supporters are too dumb to see the gap -- is also wrong. over and over again you read supporter quotes along the lines of "he's pretty outrageous, but he's what we need" or "he might be sleazy, but he's what we need" or "sometimes i cringe, but he's what we need". the pertinent part here is "he's what we need". similarly, the absence of any serious policy prescriptions at all is neither a weakness nor a distinction from fascism. strength, order, mercilessness, and unashamed racism are themselves policy prescriptions. they are much more exciting, even more plausible, than "my health care plan" or "my tax plan". this question from the jacobin piece is (knowingly) the wrong question:

Trump has tapped into this anger and sense of powerlessness brilliantly. But is Trump a fascist whose real politics are being revealed drip by drip? Perhaps.

fascism has no "real politics" save 1) the attainment of supreme power via the direction of cathartic popular violence toward wicked and subversive classes and 2) the destruction first of any organization and then of any ideological system that opposes this power. slate:

When it comes to policies, he actually has none in the conventional sense. The conflict in the 2016 campaign is no longer Trump versus his Republican opponents; it is now Trump versus the American political system.

this is correct.

he doesn’t demand the restoration of tradition or an old moral order

dlh otm. I'm surprised a writer could sincerely believe that statement. I mean, Trump's signature slogan is "Make America Great Again"!

also aimless is correct to remind us in the other thread that as things currently stand, whoever walks into the oval office in january will instantly be in control of a vast and extralegal surveillance and targeted-death apparatus that has absolutely nothing even approaching a precedent in the midcentury totalitarian states. when people say, oh trump has no policies, trump doesn't want to be president, trump will betray his supporters, i want to shake them and ask them what they think a man with so few apparent interests besides power, and so many supporters unwilling to discern between protesters and ISIS, will do with this apparatus.

(i shouldn't concentrate on worries about president trump tho, because i still have no idea how this guy or anyone following him gets elected in a country with this many people in it who aren't white. what we're really in for is just some years of v ugly and dangerous politics.)

I'm not trying to deflect or to be clever but this was the case in January 2009 and why a man as intelligent as Barack Hussein Obama gave me the willies. And he's proven to be the perfect sociopath.

sorry, obama is sociopathic?

I don't think it's sociopathy as much as the immoral logic of power. Ends will always seek means, and the felt urgency of reaching those ends will (almost) always override the much more remote imperatives of ethics or morality. The very fact that such means (NSA surveillance, drones) exist ensures they will be used. It is an axiom of power.

Ends will always seek means, and the felt urgency of reaching those ends will (almost) always override the much more remote imperatives of ethics or morality.

Obama could almost have stood to do more of this, but this is a completely bizarre characterisation of someone who spent so much of his term tying his own hands behind his back in the search for bipartisanship.

I'm not defending any POTUS in particular, but I honestly don't know how anyone still believes that it's possible to skate through the presidency morally unscathed.

sorry, obama is sociopathic?

― akm, Monday, March 14, 2016 12:05 AM

Yes.

I'm not sure how you can sign an order requiring a drone to vaporize an American citizen and his son and go downstairs to Michelle and the girls and watch "Modern Family" and not exhibit sociopathy. I guess guidance counselors would call it "compartmentalizing."

Protip: If someone is running for president, they are probably a sociopath.

yep

yall need to hang out with real sociopaths more

but I follow Obama on Twitter.

what's the diagnosis for vaporizing foreigners?

If being a sociopath means being willing to authorize someone's death, then all presidents have been and will be sociopaths, since that's part of the job description.

Almost as if they commanded an army or something

i share most ppl's discomfort with the idea of drones but i think it's unfair to suggest that obama's just using them because they exist; he's responding to the continued existence of al-qaeda and related groups. you can argue that the negatives of using drones outweigh the benefits or that we shouldn't do anything that kills civilians no matter what or that the killings are creating more terrorists than they get rid of (all of which are good points), but if any leader responsible for signing orders that kill ppl is a sociopath then lincoln and FDR are presumably right down there with obama.

surely this belongs in the what is sociopathy and is barack obama a sociopath thread, which i am not making up

I think so. It's a description, not criticism.

sxpost