Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

This may have already been covered but I think that fascism is generally defined more by what it's against than what it's for. Hitler, Franco and Mussolini were all about making their countries great again by being anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist and anti-all the minority groups. Trump seems to be going down this path by being against big corporations, the government and immigrants but being rather vague about how exactly he would achieve his goals

Then again maybe I'm just one of those European liberals who's all like 'look at this right wing American nut! He's just like Hitler!' I don't know

Mussolini, get it right.

@tinyrevolution
Most dictators need 20 years of absolute power to reach the level of hateful paranoid insanity that Trump is starting with

https://storify.com/case_face/a-trump-rally-in-greensboro-anger-in-here-is-palpa

Crowd won't clap for call for unity with LGBTQ

Bragging that he took credentials from WA Post. Crowd yells Kill them all.

Trump comparing immigrants to snakes

Crowd calls for Berghdal to be shot, hung

Confederate flags everywhere

Telling myself they're angry about the economy. About changing technology and industry. But there's so much base-level ugliness.

TLDR: he's a fascist

hi, am!

this is how nazi germany sharted

Has not convincingly indicated he believes in anything but the greater glory of himself.

Not provably a fascist, we'd have to see how he "governs." I'd prefer not to know.

I ran the how does it walk how does it quack test, and yeah he's a fascist

can a duck do the goosestep?

racist yes, fascist incomplete

suggest adopting working hypothesis

altamont reenactors

That rally livetweet is fucking chilling. Trump is just rubbing shit and dumpster juice into an already-festering boil on the ass of America. I can do without seeing the Mad Max-ification of this country in my lifetime.

dude is so explicitly a garden-variety fascist I'm a little mystified that we're still in disagreement. not all fascists have a coherent fascist ideology; there isn't any Soviet-style purity test for fascism. Trump's fascism is natural to his way of thinking: his ideas (a leader gets to respond to the mean old press as he sees fit; people should have to submit to whatever a leader thinks is good and right before they can do as they like in the country that leader runs) are instinctively fascistic

I don't get it either. I find the Cro-Magnons who support Trump vile but I at least get the vile place they're coming from. I totally don't get anyone who's still on the fence about Trump and doesn't see the legitimacy his presumptive nomination has gained him as a serious threat to civil society.

That 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.

Barring some cataclysmic event that shifts public opinion in his favor, I don't think he has a chance of winning the election, but that's almost beside the point since he's done such a fantastic job of drawing the morlocks out of their holes and giving them a figure to organize around. We're going to be wistfully reflecting on those halcyon days when the quaint Tea Partiers were the right wing fringe.

Trump in Atlanta today. The rally will take place at the Fox Theatre, essentially right on the edge of Midtown's gay district.

When this discussion comes up I do always recommend paxtons anatomy of fascism. And one of his main conclusions is not to judge fascists by what they claim, but how they act. That makes it hard to tell about aspiring fascists, of course.

That is, there is no coherent fascist ideology. Which is kind of the point.

that ok that gays love him he has the best gays xxp

I am not mystified in the least that we are in disagreement about philosophical categorization, but I am *so* not saying why.

Not having been a polisci student in 30+ years, i'll take your word that fascists don't need a coherent ideology, but that suggests maybe several hundred people in US politics might be as fittingly labeled? My local fave would be Giuliani, even tho he has mercifully failed at being elected to anything since 1997.

I think a fascist is kind of necessarily a nationalist. like you can have fascist-sympathizing mayors but like...if I'm a fascist in my house, that's a pretty weak fascism, fascism is nationalistic in character

like you can have fascist-sympathizing mayors but like...if I'm a fascist in my house, that's a pretty weak fascism, fascism is nationalistic in character

― The bald Phil Collins impersonator cash grab (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi)

otm. that's the extent i would place some kind of "purity test" on so-called fascism. it builds a pyre of vainglorious nationalism, defines itself in opposition to specific threat groups supposedly responsible for the national fall, and tends to assume an absurdly triumphal (and at least implicitly violent) character.

Trump currently talking about how horrific it is that Germany is being overrun by non-Germans

question answered, lock thread

You have to be fucking kidding me.

tbf he didn't say "non-Germans" but that was what he seemed to be implying

@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