Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

@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

happy 1 year everybody

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/Panic_in_year_zero_1962_poster.jpg

Fascism emerges from perceived systemic failure. It's the expression of people who feel there is a crisis, or a decline, and the state will not or cannot respond. It wants someone who can cut through the red tape and 'get the job done'. As such it eschew creeds and positions, being always willing to violate such things to do what is necessary. It's easy to see how the idea of 'political correctness' plays into this - the idea that the state is refusing to aid you during a crisis because of principles you don't share. So a leader promises to run things like a general, like a king, like a CEO. He understands your problems ('he says what we're all thinking') and more than that he has disdain for the structures that prevent a solution. Telling trump that his plan to stop immigration from Muslims is unconstitutional is confirming the point. They don't think the constitution says that, it's for them, and state structures that prevent necessary action have to be circumvented. It's the politics of the emergency state, especially when there is no emergency, when the state list a to people who at Not You while your problems are ignored.

List a = listens. I can't wait til I have a place to live again and I don't have to type stuff on a phone in the pub.

(I remember that lots of fascist ideologues rejected the idea of a statement of values, or a party programme, of a manifesto. But it's been a while since I sturdier that, and now it's just a vague assertion on my part)

@maggieNYT
"Everntually, it's not going to survive, just so you understand," Trump says of the United States.

Don otm

Yeah, cool, so let's elect President Kevorkian.

http://thebaffler.com/salvos/pity-o-god-republican-faludi

Jesus, I had no idea what's been going on in Hungary. The fuck is happening to this world

@BruceBartlett
In 1999 Trump said of his now strong supporter Pat Buchanan, he "has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler."

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/31/opinion/op-28208

Faludi article of special interest to me as a Jew married to a Hungarian, things over there are definitely sad-making. Have always talked about taking our kids to visit but man, not any time soon it sounds like.

shakey did i ever tell u about my friend i went to yeshiva w/ whose grandfather was a hungarian language poet and one of the 1,700 jews that kastner arranged w/ the nazis to escape the country? if you haven't already read it, there's a v provocative book on the topic that iirc is super readable (and is about hannah senesh as well), you might want to check out called Perfidy by Ben Hecht. it used to be impossible to find (after a couple years of looking i finally located a copy in the crown heights tzivos hashem bookstore lol) but now it looks like amazon has a bunch of copies including for the kindle.

oh, great. the austrian courts have decided to give the fascists another shot at the presidency.

i have no idea why i bother sobering up.

sounds interesting mordy! will see if the library has it

x-post

'cause the mainstream Austrian parties are fucking clowns too busy tripping over themselves to prove their hatred for foreigners and doing favors for their friends at the tabloids to run an election properly. The Austrian Court decision was good, what could come out of it is very, very bad indeed -- and rightwing English-speaking ratfuckers are already at work convincing the Angry Fascist Voter that the court decision was based on widespread fraud, which is simply a lie -- the court was clear that absolutely no evidence of voting fraud was presented, even by the FPÖ who brought the case.

the mainstream Austrian parties are fucking clowns too busy tripping over themselves to prove their hatred for foreigners and doing favors for their friends at the tabloids to run an election properly.

Sounds familiar.