Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

he's made it abundantly clear his "commitment" to the Republican Party is conditional on how he's "treated" - he doesn't give a shit about the party.

he's using the party, he has no allegiance to it

i think he's going to try and start his own news network tbh

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.

Do you think fascism can be defeated? If these tendencies are ingrained in our culture -- they are

Possible? Yes. Realistic, probably not - but that last bit is the key. The tendencies are ingrained in our culture - 'socialism' demands the destruction of that political and economic culture (which is why it's continually ridiculous for people to feign shock that Jacobin writers don't just hop on board with American liberalism - they don't believe the same things).

Even in terms of abeyance, liberalism isn't good at it! That's Bessner's point in the more recent op-ed I linked to - a decade of dire warnings of fascism and the existential threat the GOP poses and things have only gotten worse, as Democratic support in core minority constituencies weakens.

Gabe Winant had a good tweet about Gaza protesters - the people getting smacked around by cops today under the watch of Democratic mayors, governors and Presidents are the shock troops you'd need to flood the streets in the event of a more successful January 20th. What do Democrats say to them then about the sanctity of property rights and the need for quiet dispersal when ordered?

Ok sure but can we talk about the self-righteousness of the leftists too?

I think the other thing which is quite interesting is people are put into particular categories as though they are manifestations of each category, and fit in each box neatly, these things become almost treated as immutable characteristics. Someone is Liberal or Leftist or Libertarian in the same way they are Tall or French, its just who they are

The smugness of the liberal is never justified, because liberals are never correct about anything afaic

Depends on what yr calling liberal, doesn’t it? Was the Warren court wrong on its civil rights rulings? Were Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the EPA and the Fair Labor Standards Act wrong? You can argue they have their problems, don’t go far enough, etc, but all had significant impacts and all are legacies of 20th century American liberalism. (The term “liberal” itself being hotly contested territory obviously.)

re: neoliberalism and fascism

so when i look at queer history, when i look at how queer liberation worked, the first people my queer ancestors had to fight were the people on the left. one of the major trans projects of the '00s was Camp Trans, a protest against the trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn's Festival. and you could look at that and say "surely conservative transphobia is more of a threat to trans people, why are you doing that", and probably some people did. am i against feminism, against "women's spaces"? absolutely not. there are just people who were structurally excluded from spaces where we _shouldn't_ rightly have been excluded, and it's sad that our fight for exclusion wound up with that space going away entirely. the people i talk to, they don't blame the trans people for causing michfest to "lose". it was the michfest organizers' inflexible, exclusionary position on trans exclusion that doomed the festival, not trans people's advocating for our right to be included.

that's kinda how i feel about liberalism vs. leftism. i hear _so much_ of liberals worrying and fretting about how to win over trump voters, and i mean

to me, the liberal tradition i was raised with was compromise. it's a question of what you give up in order to get those votes. and i feel like sometimes liberals don't know what they're giving up and what exactly they're getting in return. i personally, i mean it is an emotional decision, not a rational decision. i don't feel listened to, taken seriously, _valued_ by liberals. and it hurts, you know? i mean yes fascists want me and liberals...

liberal/neoliberal (in this specific instance i don't know that there's a meaningful difference between the two) transmedicalism, "progressive" transmedicalism, kept me ignorant, kept me from living the life i needed to live in order to be, like, _happy_. i bought into that ideology and it hurt me. i was taught, by liberals, to believe and act in ways that were contrary to my own best interest. i could just as easily have been taught that by conservatives or fascists. a lot of people i know were taught that. i was taught it by liberals. so yeah. i'd say i have a strong personal sense of hurt when it comes to liberalism and neoliberalism, and i don't have those feelings about fascism, because i've always fucking hated fascists.

and to me this is what punditry misses, how _personal_, how _individual_, each person's beliefs are. what can you learn about the relationship between leftism, neoliberalism, and fascism from my story? what lessons can you take from it? maybe none, you know? maybe there's no larger narrative. i guess i tend to think so, which is why i'm hardly ever on politics threads. i don't feel like the way my brain works, the experience i have, really equips me to engage with larger political discourse.

If we haven’t mentioned him yet, I’d suggest Alberto Toscano’s work is very worthwhile. He’s an academic who’s been working on this stuff for a while and published _Late Fascism_ with Verso Books last year.

Two convos he’s had in the last year or two are particularly illuminating, one on the show What’s Left of Philosophy:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-whats-left-of-philosophy-75162835/episode/88-on-late-fascism-w-172783195/

And one with the New Books network:

https://www.podplay.com/sv-se/podcasts/new-books-in-american-politics-1050777/episodes/alberto-toscano-late-fascism-race-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-crisis-verso-2023-261821887

One of the helpful points he offers is not to focus on what he calls “the politics of crisis in the interwar era” so much as the shit that happened in Latin America in the 70s, like Pinochet, and what was done to force those economies into neoliberal set-ups

Also he’s a good interview with a droll sense of humor

xpost

fwiw I think that's an important perspective Kate, because it speaks to how most people — most of us most of the time — actually experience politics, which is not along neatly divided ideological lines but via messy lived experience of how power operates in our lives and our intimate/proximate spaces. So the leftist-vs.-liberal tensions that have characterized the American left-of-center make perfect sense, because e.g. the Michigan Womyn's Festival is a closer political space in a lot of ways for trans women than, like, a CPAC conference. So of course that's where the fight happens is over access to the Womyn's Festival, not over access to CPAC, because if you can't even gain recognition from your putative allies how can you even see far enough to fight against the Right?

I identify as a left-liberal (yes there is too such a thing) because there are things I value in traditions from both "the left" and Enlightenment liberalism (their emphases on collective action and individual liberties, respectively), and also things I question or distrust in both, so I kind of sit cautiously between. But also a lot of my ideas and conceptions of power and politics aren't rooted in theory or really even ideology at all so much as in observation and experience of the world and my perceptions of what motivates people to political action (or inaction).

And thanks kingfish, those sound promising.

i listened to about the first half of the left of philosophy podcast and i thought it was really interesting! (about halfway through the people with the chainsaws next door started up again and i couldn't focus on it anymore.) even before the chainsaws, though, it was a difficult listen to me, a lot of which i think is that i'm not an academic, i don't have that kind of background. i've learned a lot by listening to and paying attention to academic leftist discourse, particularly in terms of challenging my own biases and preconceptions. at the same time there's this video essayist i follow and one of the things she says a lot is "read theory", and i _don't_ read theory. i think it's valuable and interesting work and just isn't really accessible to probably most people - not just as a matter of paywalling and academic gatekeeping and elsevier and all of this other stuff, but because a lot of it is very jargony. it's not a dialect i'm fluent in. i struggle to keep up.

the thing about academia to me is that a lot of it is very abstract. which i think is... i mean when one is in a situation where one doesn't have a lot of _practical_ ability to put one's ideas into practice, i think one of the more valuable things one can do is work on what i'd say is a... a healthy mindset. it's interesting because drilling down to things i don't see it as an intellectual practice, i see it as kind of a moral or ethical practice. when the time comes to make radical change, when crisis comes, a lot of times a bunch of fucked up shit happens, like, not even on purpose. people are trying to do their best but it's really fucking hard to do the right thing when crisis hits, and sometimes people mean well but wind up fucking shit up anyway. yesterday i was talking to a friend who, like me, used to be a boy scout, and she talked about trying to "be prepared" in a time of often overwhelming change. and for me a lot of it is "what the fuck is going on, what is even happening".

i grew up steeped in the tradition of liberal thought, which i _do_ think is distinct from the tradition of leftist thought. the tradition of liberal thought left me completely unprepared to deal with trump's victory. like, my idea was that under liberalism, something like this Should Not Happen. and once i did that i found out liberal thought had disadvantaged me in other ways, like, i was not theoretically equipped to understand or accept my own gender identity through a liberal framework. doing that required me to understand and accept some radical concepts... there's this idea of "gender incongruence", i guess i'd say when gendered expectations are incompatible with one's own subjective well-being, and like... for me, i'd say that my gender is incongruent with the liberal political philosophy i had.

which isn't to say that i wholeheartedly and uncritically embrace leftist thought methodologically! i definitely think there's a strong intellectual and theoretical component to my own leftism. being "transgender", for instance, that's an abstract framing of a concrete lived experience, one that's more suited to who i am than "transsexual" or "transvestite" were. it's just the idea of "social science", that framing, that gives me pause. in practical terms, framing something as a "science", you know, that had a material advantage in terms of access to resources, and i think that's valuable. i mean one does have to make compromises and i think that was valuable.

at the same time i look at academia and it doesn't offer what it used to. there's not the sort of security in it that there used to be. this is the challenging thing to me is that the theoretical leftist tradition sometimes seems to me to be getting in the way of effective leftist practice. i don't think the idea of the "ivory tower" is a fair or useful framing, but i do feel sometimes that there's a layer of abstraction between academic understandings of leftism and people's practical experience.

which is why the part of the podcast that i heard was so interesting to me... because building coalitions comes from multiple different directions. like, how do you make sense of somebody's lived experience that isn't yours? that's inevitably going to involve abstraction, figuring out what's the same and what's different between two groups of people. and i think saying look, why do we have to compare everything to hitler? is a valid question. like everything bad comes down to the nazis, that's the yardstick by which everything is judged, and it's a terrible yardstick. it's like if someone isn't Literally Hitler it doesn't get seen as a problem.

one of the things that i've taken an amateur interest in is genocide studies, the way that gets framed, the way that it was inceptionally a matter of _norm entrepeneurship_, and the first people to take up that framing after lemkin's original framing, after the UN gave it the seal of approval, was _We Charge Genocide_, in 1951, where Black Americans said "ok look what you're doing to us is genocide". and that wasn't taken seriously, and that to me is a major failure of the attempt to fight "fascism". because then you have a liberal democratic norm, you know, gatekeeping. the charge was basically ignored and nothing was done, and that inaction sent the message that the way the US was treating Black Americans was, I guess, acceptable.

so like as a theoretical concept terms like "genocide" and "fascism" are only important to the point where one can, you know, perform norm entrepeneurship, in _every individual case_, to convince the people who have the power to stop it that they should use that power to stop it. that's gonna be an adversarial process. as an outsider i'm trying to convince people to put themselves at risk to support my values. and the only leverage i have is, you know, the power to walk away. to say "these people aren't my allies, they're acting against my values". and then i gotta be in community with other people aren't part of "the system". i can say that oh i'm an anarchist, i don't believe in systems of coercive power, but ultimately my goal _is_ reform, is for there to be a system that has a _place_ for me and the people whose values and interests i share. if i call myself an "anarchist" or a "communist" that doesn't mean anything other than "i am not your ally", by declaring myself a member of a group that liberals _don't_ see as allies i'm trying to communicate that i'm not on liberals' _side_, while at the same time i'm declaring that people with a certain set of values and beliefs, i do work to ally with them. people who will not compromise on trans rights, people who oppose what the israeli government is doing to the palestinian people, people who oppose the racist carceral justice system, these are people whose values are congruent with mine, whose goals are congruent with mine.

of course by doing that i'm taking a risk, but it is a calculated risk, an intentional risk. the less people have to lose, the more extreme risks we're willing to take. in general, most liberals probably have more to lose than i do.

idk. i don't think about politics a lot, i don't know if that's coherent. just some random thoughts. these fucking chainsaws are giving me a headache. i'm going to lie down.

the theoretical leftist tradition sometimes seems to me to be getting in the way of effective leftist practice.

The traditional academic approach to any subject is to understand the object under study in such depth and detail that the academician is able to derive its 'truest aspect' and describe it to others, thus imparting a kind of changeless knowledge. Applying that knowledge to actively change anything in the world is left to others.

Because some form of politics is entangled with every group interaction at every level of society there is an endless supply of detail to be studied and reduced to theory, so that mastering theory can also become an endless task. As far as my observations go, effective practice can be informed by theory to a limited extent, but eventually it has to rely on a set of heuristics derived from and refined by trial and error, and informed by results not theory.

First we defeat Trump, then we defeat neoliberalism.

First we take Berlin, THEN we take Manhattan