Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

so admittedly a big motivation for using the f word is in the hope of inspiring some kind of effect beyond what other words would be able to achieve but it's accurate enough that any quibbling over it is immediately suspect

do these people who think you can verify fascism with a checklist ever try comparing the various 20th century fascist regimes/movements with each other, or with their ideal version of fascism? pretty sure a lot of things that are universally considered fascist today would fail their test if they were this stingy in applying the word to the past

Robert Evans would have started off discussing whether or not Trump was a fascist, but would have gotten distracted and then talked about how much he loved Ali McGraw for a few hours

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.

richard evans's "the coming of the third reich" is really good history, if a bit dry. his book on historiography, "in defense of history", is good too. he was also the main expert defense witness in david irving's trial against deborah lipstadt.

i don't have a problem with an expert on nazis pointing out the differences between the present situation and the nazis.

what is the intended effect of an intervention like this?

considering the number of credentialed historians who still refuse to call settler colonialism "genocide" I'm not inclined to just defer to the experts' definitions here

Yeah, it's a bit of a "let me tell you what real fascism is" and then waving away what fascism actually is... would Evans consider the US-backed Suharto regime fascistic, for example, because it didn't live up to his standards of organization and rigidity?

I don't get too hung up about the word fascist. Words have loose meanings, fuzzy edges. It's OK if you use it on Trump, it's OK if you don't think Trump qualifies.

saw this just now:

https://jewishcurrents.org/neofascism-after-trump/

brilliant, sic

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.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Five years on, I'd say he followed that road as far as his limited competence could take it. Lucky for us, he failed. But he still blazed a path that will be easier for someone else to follow, even if he dies, is imprisoned, or simply drifts into irrelevance.

"Again, it’s instructive to look at the case of modern India. The BJP came to power in India before Modi. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the first BJP prime minister, in the 1990s. He had little political support, and could not deliver on much of the cultural program so important to the BJP. But this period saw the infamous Gujarat Riots, in which Hindus engaged in a pogrom against Muslims for nearly two months, killing a thousand people. Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, was accused not only of neglecting the situation but actively inciting it. Meanwhile, Vajpayee proved the economic utility of a BJP government by accelerating market reforms and leading to stunning profits for Indian capital. The BJP did not win the following election; it was not repudiated, but it underperformed, and neoliberal “normality” was reinstated with Manmohan Singh. Modi came to power a decade later.

No analogy is perfect, but Trump is more Vajpayee than Modi. This is not the end of something; it’s the beginning. We have yet to see what Trumpism 2.0 will bring. There will be a fallow period as these forces regroup post-Trump, but neofascism is likely to continue to develop in the US. Meanwhile, we are likely to see an uptick in sporadic neofascist violence outside of electoral politics."

brilliant, sic

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