Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

Did he want to bar Muslims from entering the country? Yes. Did he call Mexicans rapists and "bad hombres"? Also yes. But did he have an operating plan to build the country's economy through strategic investment and tax reform on big business? Not on your nelly, baby. We were rounding the fourteenth hole - Don was working on his slice, while I was fishing one out of the old-fashioned my caddy, Cherice, had handed me - when I asked him "Donald, if you could have it all over again, is there one woman you'd stick with?" He might have answered, but I was already thinking about Ali, and how I could now afford to have some Venice Beach muscle men send that rat bastard McQueen to FedEx to sign for a new set of teeth.

You've made me want to rewatch The Kid Stays In The Picture all over again.

just want to chime in that i am also extremely here for that post

reading through the fauci interview, one of the most frightening things to me about the modern paranoid republican movement is how instantly, devastatingly effective it is at designating enemies.

anyone can be called out as a baddie at any time, and the mob will swing unhesitatingly into line. death threats, social media campaigns, texts to daughters' mobile phones, the apparatus works extremely well and it works almost instantly.

so, i don't know if that's fascism. but it will make any public figure think very hard about taking certain stands, contradicting certain people. it's not about 'guts' really it's about personal capacity to endure these threats and harassment not just to yourself but to your whole family, and not everybody will be willing to do that. i honestly don't see a way out of this situation. social media and the amount of information available on the internet makes this sort of intimidation trivial.

Yes, we live in the age of social media-enhanced, weaponized mass paranoia.

anyone can be called out as a baddie at any time, and the mob will swing unhesitatingly into line. death threats, social media campaigns, texts to daughters' mobile phones, the apparatus works extremely well and it works almost instantly.

This is exactly what they say about "the left," btw

also, K-Pop stans

Trump was 100% intending to continue along that path toward fascism/dictatorship. His first term he was just testing his limits. If he had won a second term, that term would have been focused on putting pieces in place to cement his power for a third term and beyond. Whether or not he would have succeeded is questionable, but surely if he was able to put enough enablers in the right positions (say, another hand picked SC justice?) and continue driving militant furor among his base for intimidation and leverage, it could have happened.

yeah when the right talks about "cancel culture" I'm pretty sure they're just talking about fascism, they have zero problem getting people fired for taking a stance on racism

I think these judges he appointed were loyal to the conservative project, not Trump himself. (Look how they dropped his spurious lawsuits!) I don’t think they’d have been reliable allies in cementing his power. Even his AG had a line and it was this coup stuff.

I mean, who knows, but I think he was always going to fail in this final endeavor to become the first American dictator.

if he'd had the institutional support to hold onto his position regardless of election results he would and could have done. someone who is just as racist and authoritarian but with more establishment support and/or a better-organised mass movement behind them could easily do or have done so. I could even see more powerful interests proping up (a) trump if someone from further left had won the presidency

True. I think Trump’s greatest contribution toward future dictatorship was his incessant testing of limits and boundaries which ultimately showed just how soft and malleable they are.

yeah I think the brazenness in which Republicans have shown their willingness to defend literally anything, up to and including a violent insurrection, bodes very very poorly for our future, especially now that it's been telegraphed that nothing's gonna happen to Trump and guys like Hawley & Cruz are gonna keep their seats

Then you have these kinds of fascists:

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, @Reuters finds https://t.co/bsudhNVHEF by @AramRoston 1/5 pic.twitter.com/igVSVCKOzK

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 27, 2021

“I don’t know any of this,” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html

this is so fucking funny, they've built him a little fake Twitter that does nothing to keep him busy pic.twitter.com/NozGe89UVa

— 📻 thomas website (@nailheadparty) May 10, 2021

As this is-he-or-isn't-he war enters its 9th year, this a good (if long!) 1-2 by Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer. He's very much on the "yes obv he is fascist" side, but mostly what he's concerned with her is the resistance/skepticism from other leftist scholars who think that worrying too much about Trump and fascism is a distraction from the defeating the real enemy — libs and neolibs.

Not shockingly, I'm on Zimmer's side here.

From Part II: The problem is that we have reached a point where their devotion to this anti-liberal struggle has led them to propagating positions that are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right. Their incessant warning that the real danger lies in liberal hysteria has turned into sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence.

Part I: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/fascism-in-america
Part II: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-anti-liberal-left-has-a-fascism

"mostly what he's concerned with HERE"

I mean, can’t these fascist goons be fascists and neoliberal goons also be fascists? Why not both? That’s the way I see it.

Probably not — if we can't get to scholarly agreement on Trump being a fascist, you're gonna have a much harder sell on the Clintons. But they can all be terrible, sure.

Zimmer's point, which I feel deeply, is that some quadrants of the left seem rooted if not mired in a neoliberal triumphalist moment that compels them to insist that liberals are the actual Real Enemy and everything else is a distraction, which wasn't even actually true in say 2016 but was at least an easier case to make. (Albeit, primarily for those who live in liberal cultural centers removed from the realities of modern conservative American rule.)

But if you live in Texas or Florida or Tennessee, the idea that what you really need to be focused on is fighting the libs just seems bizarre.

neoliberal goons also be fascists?

They can be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.

One of the phenomena I have to explain to friends who live outside Florida is that for thousands of South Florida Democrats the idea of socialism is a total non-starter, especially the ones who actually lived in Cuba and experienced a warped personality-cult totalitarian version of it. Even with my students their paradoxes fascinate me. Growing in privation in Cuba and Venezuela and the DR, they want their phones, leased cars, streaming subscriptions, and indulge in heteronormative fantasies about the home but also want some government overseeing of basic services....so long as you don't call it socialism.

I find the entire framing questionable? I've never heard anyone on the left call Trump or the rise of far right nationalism a "distraction"; rather the argument is that neoliberal orthodoxy lead to these developments and as such is incapable of defeating them.

The cruel joke is the actual fascists are also neoliberal.

No, there is a very small contingent of leftists who still are like: “Trump’s not so bad you’re being hysterical mom and dad”.

Yeah if you read those two blog posts you'll find plenty of citations saying it is more or less a distraction, a liberal deflection, etc. Not universally on "the left," which is no kind of monolith, but there is definitely a strain of thought (to which, say, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi succumbed) that sees no greater evil on the planet than the neoliberal consensus of the '90s/'00s.

xp: I don't think the modern American right — whether you call it fascist or not — can be called neoliberal. They're anti-"globalist," anti-internationalist, anti-NATO, pro-government-intervention in the economy etc.

First we defeat Trump, then we defeat neoliberalism.

Trumps administration was still very neoliberal, he made some minor tweaks to NAFTA and that’s it.

I mean for gods sake the actual existing fascist governments of history worked very well with international capital.

Ok, didn't know this was about "a very small contingent" and Greenwald/Taibbi. Don't personally think anyone needs an academic article to know what's up with those guys but ok.

The article barely mentions Greenwald, it's mostly about much more respectably people like Corey Robin and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.

As for Trump's neoliberalism, I don't know, he threatened to leave NATO — that's not very neoliberal! He didn't do it, but one of Zimmer's points is that using Trump's failures to enact a fascist state in his four years in office as evidence that he isn't actually fascist is kind of a weak argument. It's wanting to see him as more a part of a postwar American continuum than not. And he is part of a postwar American continuum, but one that runs through the John Birch Society and the Southern strategy and paleoconservatism, not through the IMF and the DLC.

He's not anti-capital, of course not! But he is at best skeptical of any kind of international order and the multinational institutions that neoliberalism built.

Bessner's last Jacobin op-ed (not radically different from the four year old stuff he links to but a bit more timely) - https://jacobin.com/2024/04/liberals-fascism-rhetoric-democrats-election

This does not read like "fight the REAL ENEMY ie liberals" to me. Seems more like "liberals, do better."

The real objection I see from Zimmer is that the leftists are not sufficiently onside with seeing Trump and the contemporary GOP as a radical break with history rather than a continuation of the reactionary political project supercharged by the failures of (neo)liberalism over the last decades.

^ ^ ^

I don't think he thinks they're a radical break from history — quite the opposite, they're a continuation of multiple strong strands of history, which largely predate neoliberalism and have never gone away. (I mean, unless we're going to retcon history and say that slavery, e.g., was a neoliberal project.)

I think he thinks the lib-obsessed leftists underestimate the actual threats of the Trumpist/authoritarian front, because they find it politically and philosophically inconvenient to contend with.

_neoliberal goons also be fascists?_

They _can_ be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.

But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?

Like, I am thoroughly of the belief that many of the qualities of our current state and society are fascist. Things can get much worse, of course, but part of why I don’t like this kind of shit is that it puts all the blame on obvious right-wing ideologies and their promulgators rather than acknowledge liberal and neoliberal complicity with these ideologies as demonstrative of how we got here.

But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?

neoliberalism being seamlessly compatible with fascism is most exemplified by Modi imo

it's maybe worth mentioning that there isn't consensus on what "neoliberalism" is either. For example, there are interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize "government-intervention in the economy" as being key to the neoliberal project rather than antithetical, in that the function of the government is to serve the market which often requires quite a lot of govt intervention in the economy.

I associate that view with Quinn Slobodian, and I skimmed this interview w/Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, might be worth a look? https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/quinn-slobodian-crack-capitalism-interview/. He addresses the question of whether neoliberalism has ended in the last question.

I am sympathetic to the idea that some critics of neoliberalism don't reckon enough with the kinds of overt social control and enforcement of caste hierarchies (race/gender/sexuality etc.) that animate the conservative movement in the US and beyond and aren't so easily reduced to capitalist ideology (imo)

I mean, both fascism and neoliberalism have the problem that it can tempting to start applying them to everything — is Putin a neoliberal?

But in practical political terms, what Zimmer’s talking about is a concern (which I share) that some perspectives on the left lend themselves to “there’s no difference” or even “the Dems are WORSE” rhetoric, which he thinks seriously misunderstands what’s going on.

Robert O. Paxton about 15 years ago defining fascism:

– A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

– The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

– The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

– Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

– The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

– The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

– The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

– The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

– The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

I tend to think a neoliberal believes in social democracy, even espousing it openly, while being a slave to market forces, whereas the average Trump voter believes in the social democratic state so long as the Right People benefit under it, thinks little of economics if at all (i.e. so long as I and people who look like me benefit I don't care what system we live under), and so long as it actively persecutes people who don't fit The Leader's paradigms.

I mean, you can argue not much separates the Dem neolib from the Trump fascist voter except the former has way more degrees. I know a lot of Dems who put their kids in charter schools and believe in capitalism and otherwise have nothing else in common with their enemies, including self-diagnosis.

See, if you're a leftist, fascists hate you and want you to die, and don't give a fuck what you think. But liberals, those dupes, want to recruit you into common struggle against the fascists. Which is why liberals are so much more fun to spit on and call no different from the fascists, because they get so hurt when you do it. They make that sad, shocked-and-betrayed face that brightens a true leftist's whole day. Look how important your approval is to them! And how wet their eyes get when you withhold it!

As a definition of fascism in full luxuriant bloom Paxton's set of criteria do wonderfully well. Looking at the best historical examples, that is where the 'pure' fascist road leads. It doesn't describe societies that have only partly traveled that road, which muddies the discussion of where the USA currently resides on the becoming-fascist progression and how Trump fits into that picture. I was trying to piece that out in my earlier posts on this thread.

You have the liberals and the leftists mixed up, but okay

Yes, libs are often not leftists.

(I was speaking to unperson fwiw. The smugness of the liberal of the species is truly breathtaking)

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