Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

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

http://i.imgur.com/pIdOAV3.jpg

Aslan!

i don't think obama is a sociopath any more than i am a sociopath for using an iphone created with lithium strip mined from bolivia. everyone compartmentalizes.

you should've seen how I tore into my bag of organic sweet potato chips over lunch today!

Curious if any of you read the NYT Sunday Mag piece on an Arizona Trump rally, which had a near-transcript of a stump fiction he tells ("The Bullet," NYT author called it), about General Pershing executing Muslims in the Philippines with bullets soaked in pig guts. Had a very fascist demagogue vibe, even for DT.

Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/04/19/trumps-putin-fantasy/
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/19/donald_trumps_avenging_angels_how_the_orange_haired_monster_has_rewritten_the_history_of_american_conservatism/

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

― flopson, Thursday, 24 December 2015 16:45 (3 months ago)

http://i.imgur.com/mfoTccj.jpg

for a second i read that where the infowars repost was going to end up being about the results of an M:TG tournament

flopson that is the greatest thing

There he goes! To the center!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87yzwq7X8yE

Astounding 2011 Prophecy!!! 'Donald Trump Chosen to Lead America'

"Some pious people say casino owner Donald Trump is not a godly man. Should we, however, ask: Is Donald Trump God’s man? Retired firefighter Mark Taylor claims the Lord has chosen Mr. Trump to pull America back from the cliff. Rick Wiles interviews Mark about his amazing 2011 prophecy that Donald Trump has been marked by God to lead America."

http://i.imgur.com/nv4C4QH.jpg

I thought this had to be satire, but a part of me wanted it to be real, so I checked out the guy's description for his Youtube channel:

http://i.imgur.com/UqrEXr3.jpg

If these people are part of Trump's coalition, I sure as hell hope he doesn't win. I don't want to know what an emboldened version of this guy looks like.

That video is amazing. And the comments are even better.