Humiliation, Kowtowing, and Authoritarianism
Appointing unqualified loyalists is only the start.
Steven’s post this morning on “The politics of humiliation and gaslighting” is ties well into an exchange on the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show, “Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails.” His guest is the journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made quite a career of reporting on authoritarianism.
As regular readers know, I find the Trump=Hitler meme more annoying than helpful, it’s simply undeniable that there are troubling parallels between the 45th and soon-to-be 47th’s President’s style and that of many prominent authoritarian leaders. And Klein and Applebaum do an especially good job of separating out the helpful and unhelpful in the comparisons.
Klein’s setup gets at the heart of the dilemma:
One of the challenging things about covering Donald Trump is that it is hard to talk about him without sounding unhinged — and that is because he acts in ways that are by any reasonable standard unhinged.
It is this remarkable transference Trump is able to effectuate. He makes his opponents look like rabid antagonists by making them respond to a reality that leaves no room for neutrality, no room for a wait-and-see open-mindedness. He creates a wild reality — and then you sound wild simply describing it.
This, in particular, resonated with me. Referencing the most absurd and alarming of Trump’s nominees for important posts, including the now-withdrawn nomination of Matt Gaetz for the Attorney General post, Klein observes:
What we’re seeing here is that in the areas of government where Trump cares most about full control — the military, the intelligence services, the Department of Justice — he is trying to do what he could not do last time: He is trying to put true lackeys and loyalists in charge. People who have no loyalty aside from their loyalty to him. No patron aside from him. No viable path in politics or public service aside from him. And these are the parts of the government that can be weaponized most dangerously. And even if Matt Gaetz is rejected or withdrawn, as he very well may be, the intention is there.
Trump’s other lackeys and loyalists can certainly find him a hatchet man who isn’t known around Washington for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old and for burning every bridge he had in the traditional Republican Party.
I’ve heard some people say that the saving grace of these appointments is that these people, at least in the agencies they are trying to run, they’re inexperienced. They’re ridiculous. They’re incompetent. They won’t get anything done. They might even fail to win confirmation.
That is not a saving grace. That is a signal. In other countries, and at other times, when would-be authoritarians try to consolidate power, they do so by placing fools and jesters into positions of extraordinary power.
The absurdity is a cloak. The fact that they are underestimated is a feature. The loyalty they have to the strongman is the thing. And no one is more loyal than someone that the rest of society looks down on. No one is more loyal than someone who would never get this kind of chance, this opportunity, this power under any other person.
When I listened to that on my commute Tuesday, I was in the middle of teaching our lesson on Russian strategic culture. One of the readings was an April Foreign Affairs essay by Maksim Samorukov titled “Putin’s Brittle Regime.” The parallels are hard to ignore:
Putin’s Russia is vulnerable, and its vulnerabilities are hidden in plain sight. Now more than ever, the Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary way that lacks even basic quality controls. Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian political elite have grown more pliant in implementing Putin’s orders and more obsequious in pandering to his paranoid worldview. The costs of these structural deficiencies are mounting.
[…]
Although the comparison may at first seem unlikely, Putin’s situation today resembles in some ways that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev instructed conservative apparatchiks to press ahead with political and economic liberalization. Accustomed to blindly executing orders from above, the officials offered little resistance. Putin has none of Gorbachev’s idealistic humanism, but he does resemble Gorbachev in one critical respect: his ability to impose his personal vision on the Russian state.
Although the comparison may at first seem unlikely, Putin’s situation today resembles in some ways that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev instructed conservative apparatchiks to press ahead with political and economic liberalization. Accustomed to blindly executing orders from above, the officials offered little resistance. Putin has none of Gorbachev’s idealistic humanism, but he does resemble Gorbachev in one critical respect: his ability to impose his personal vision on the Russian state.
[…]
Putin’s inflexibility and obduracy have been strengthened by his many years spent surrounded by toadies and yes men. Shielded from negative feedback and objective counsel, he is susceptible to tunnel vision, muddled priorities, and emotional outbursts, all of which are channeled into his decisions. Russia’s foreign policy, domestic security, and economic prospects all suffer as a result.
Trump has not consolidated power to the extent Putin has and I continue to believe the nature of our system and our political culture make doing so next to impossible. But he does seem to have largely neutered Congressional Republicans, removing a huge check on his power.
After Applebaum briefly discusses the controversial nominees in terms of their likelihood to break institutional norms and help Trump get revenge for perceived wrongdoings, Klein gets to an aspect of this alluded to in Steven’s post in a way I haven’t really given much thought to before:
This reminded me of when Trump forced Sean Spicer to go out in 2017 and say Trump had the largest inaugural crowd ever — which we could see was not true from photos.
A point people made was that this kind of thing is a loyalty test — making people do something that they know is going to humiliate them, that they know is going to go against both their values and the way they have traditionally seen themselves and acted in the world.
The Gaetz pick, in particular, felt like that on a larger scale, felt like Trump forcing this on Senate Republicans who do not like Matt Gaetz, who view him with complete contempt, and forcing him on the Republican Party more broadly. Trump could have picked a hatchet man whose name nobody knew. He picked the one who would outrage not just Democrats but actually Republicans — and in doing that force them to really choose a side.
Applebaum concurs enthusiastically:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Very often this is what — if you look at other autocratic regimes in other places — very often it’s the forcing of people to adhere to a conspiracy theory or say things, as you say, that are patently untrue. That’s the loyalty test. And hitherto in the Republican Party, the loyalty test was: Are you willing to say that the 2020 election was stolen?
That has functioned as the loyalty test up until now. But you’re right: I think that the appointment of Matt Gaetz is another, maybe more severe one, because Gaetz is somebody who can break all boundaries. He breaks the definition of what an attorney general is supposed to be, what kind of person it is, and also that he would be — because he has no other allies, he has no friends in the Republican Party — he would be loyal only to Trump.
He would not have any other loyalties: not to the party, not to the Congress, not to the Constitution. He would be loyal to Trump. And so I think that’s another piece of the story, too.
Trump clearly enjoys humiliating people in order to establish his dominance. That “Little Marco” Rubio has gone from a fierce anti-Trump attack dog to a lap dog being rewarded with the State Department post—from, which, incidentally, Trump can fire him at any time—is a clear example. But forcing Republican Senators to defend the likes of Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense is the ultimate troll. Gaetz was the icing on the cake but, even for Trump, it was going to be hard to pretend that was a serious nomination.
Another aspect of the farcical nominations—and this is why Klein is such an elite interviewer—is this:
I’ve been thinking about something Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — another one of these books that when you begin quoting it, you know things are not going great — which is: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
Klein is not only incredibly widely read but manages to retain considerable detail. (I’m assuming he also has a crack staff. But, with the possible exception of Reason’s Nick Gillespie, I can’t offhand think of another show host who so routinely pulls together such a wide swath of references.)
Regardless, Applebaum responds:
So, of course, the quote comes from a book in which she talks about history. She talks about the history of both of the Nazi regime and also of the Soviet regime. And those were both one-party states where there were loyalty tests and where people were given jobs and promoted into power, not for being good at something — for being an excellent manager or a superb policymaker. But were given jobs because of their level of their loyalty to the leader. And that is one of the things that characterizes an authoritarian regime.
If you look around the world now and you look at both authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, you see that’s how it works. I lived in Poland between 2015 and last year, when we had an autocratic populist government that didn’t develop into full-blown authoritarianism, but it did replace people according to whether or not they were loyal. And they succeeded in degrading the quality of the civil service and of the state.
And I think this gets to a deeper problem, which I think will also begin to play itself out, which is: What is the purpose of government? Why do we have a civil service? What do all these people in Washington do? Are they there to solve problems? To improve the lives of Americans? That’s why we send them there. That’s what we’re paying them to do.
Or could they be used in a different way? Could they be used to do the bidding of the president? In some countries, it’s to make the president rich, or in other countries, it’s to make the president popular. Or it’s to carry out policies that are one way or another in the interest of the president.
So one could talk about using the Food and Drug Administration to approve and disapprove drugs in a way that benefited friends of the president or which benefited the president’s policy interests. If the point of the Department of Justice is not justice and is something completely different, then Matt Gaetz is the perfect person for it.
If the point of the Federal Communications Commission is not to regulate communications but to punish the president’s enemies in the media, then it, too, begins to have a different purpose. And that’s why all of these questions about personnel — and again: What’s the purpose of all these institutions that we have, all these three-letter agencies in Washington?
What are they for? Are they for Trump? Are they for Americans?
Regardless of whether one views Trump as merely a tantrum-throwing toddler or truly evil, it is hard to deny that he’s possessed of a deep solipsistic worldview. He truly doesn’t understand that the apparatus of government doesn’t exist to cater to his every whim.
I want to skip ahead quite a bit in the conversation to this bit, which really gets at something I’ve been wrestling with for quite some time.
Klein:
I really struggle with how to talk about this and how to even integrate this history into the way I think about the present. Because I do think there’s this reality that when you use the word “fascism,” people’s thinking shuts down. “Nazis,” even more so. “Communists,” certainly to some degree. That some of these leaders, some of these movements, they really just exist in the American lexicon now, not as complex things that actually happened that people liked when they were happening in many cases, but as slurs.
And so these sort of nationalist authoritarian movements that I think have symmetries or echoes or shades of what’s going on with Trump — to talk about them is almost to commit a kind of etiquette violation. And at the very least to get sidetracked onto these other arguments.
Applebaum:
So I’ve had a lot of arguments with people about the word “fascist.” I’ve tried to not use it. Just because it makes people think of the Nazis, and it makes people think of movies they’ve seen about the Nazis, and that’s the image that they have in their heads. And as I said already, most modern autocratic or illiberal governments don’t look like that at all. There are no storm troopers; there aren’t mass arrests. Instead what you have is the slow takeover of institutions, the elimination of alternative or independent media.
The takeover of courts is usually a big part of it. And that doesn’t mean, in our case, having conservative courts — but having judges who do what the president wants. Which is something very different from being a conservative judge or an originalist or anything like that. And so I try not to use the word. It’s hard to escape it precisely, because as I wrote, he’s using that language.
He, himself, does it, and former chief of staff John Kelly was using it about him because John Kelly had this conversation with him about Hitler’s general. So it’s Trump himself who brings up those analogies and that makes us fall into them.
But I agree that it can be unhelpful, because it creates the wrong expectation. It makes us think they’re going to be Brownshirts and storm troopers, whereas I don’t think it’s going to look like that at all.
Klein:
But I also think we flatten them in our own minds when you hear “fascism,” certainly when you hear about Nazis. But let’s stay on the fascists for a minute. What you hear is “totalitarian,” “evil,” “disaster,” “World War II.”
After a bit more back-and-forth, Applebaum chimes in with:
I always tried to understand not just the people who were oppressed by the regime but also the people who supported it. What did they think they were doing? Why were they there? And after the Second World War, in Eastern Europe, there was this sense of — somewhere like Poland, for example, or Hungary, there was a sense that the prewar system had collapsed and failed.
So the world of the 1930s was gone. And the war had erased whole institutions, had erased the aristocracy and had erased the whole political and economic system, and therefore we need to start from scratch. And therefore, Communism, to a lot of people, seemed like a brand-new ideology, — that we could build something from scratch at the moment.
And a lot of people adhered to it for that reason, and not merely because they were evil or because they were cowardly. Eventually, many of them were evil and cowardly, and those regimes did a huge amount of damage. So I’m not making an excuse for them.
I’m just saying that, yes, you’re right. They were attractive to people in those countries at that time for reasons that are now hard to understand because we know how it ended. But at that time they didn’t know how it was going to end.
Which is the dilemma. We don’t know the future. Trump has repeatedly uttered some violent, if not eliminationist, words. That’s a huge red flag. While I don’t think we’re going to round up six million people and put them into death camps or set off pogroms against opposition party members, Trump’s actions show a deep disregard for our most basic institutions. Congressional Republicans—who will have a majority in both Houses for the next two years—have already demonstrated that they will mostly go along with him. While the Supreme Court checked him time and time again the first term, they’ve abandoned the fundamental principle of stare decisis, overturning at least two landmark cases, to get to a preferred outcome.
And I think Applebaum’s vision of what this looks like is spot on:
So I would watch government agencies and institutions and, as we’ve been discussing, who runs them and with what purpose.
Are they still being run to benefit the American people? Or are they being run in order to perform some political narrative or in order to achieve revenge or retribution for the president? I would look at judicial appointments, looking not for whether somebody is a liberal or a conservative — that actually in our system is a normal debate.
A liberal judge, a conservative judge — how they interpret the Constitution can be very different. And we are all deeply divided about that. But that’s not the kind of judge that would worry me. The kind of judge that would worry me is someone like Aileen Cannon — someone who seems to be there in order to do favors for the president or for his friends.
[…]
One of the things that happens when you lower guardrails or you remove these rules about conflicts of interest or you remove the rules about security clearances or you get rid of the inspectors general or you muzzle the media or you threaten people and make them afraid to speak out — obviously, one of the effects of that is to make repression possible. If they decide to go that route. And that would be a more obvious thing to do.
But another effect of it is it makes it easier for people to steal things — or to use the government as a way of making money. There’s a lot of issues about how transparent the American government’s relationship is with American business already. And the role of lobbyists is already very huge.
This is an element of American democracy that’s already declined pretty far. But you could push it a step further. And most of the modern authoritarian regimes — and this is one of the other ways in which they’re very different from the regimes of the 1930s — are what we would call kleptocracies.
So those are systems where the leaders are not only very politically powerful, they are also billionaires. So Putin is a billionaire. Xi Jinping is a billionaire. We don’t necessarily know how they’re billionaires or why or how they got there, but they are. That’s part of their power, and that’s part of what keeps them in power. Because they have the money to be able to bribe people or to influence people or to run influence campaigns or to buy people off — in a way that Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini didn’t have.
None of this is what springs to mind when one talks of fascism, much less Hitler. But it’s what modern authoritarianism looks like.
Sadly, I think Trump will not only get away with this but that many of his supporters won’t even see it is wrong. One of our few regulars who supports Trump commented the other day that President Biden, the Cheneys, and others who opposed his guy were raking in huge sums from kickbacks from the defense industry in exchange for their support of Ukraine. There’s zero evidence for that, of course. But there are huge numbers of Americans who think the system is already corrupt—most of our successful politicians wind up getting rich, after all—and so it might as well be their guy who benefits.
But it does!
Hitler famously compromised some of his generals (i.e., members of the old Prussian army establishment and thus a potentially alternative power base) by personally gifting them large amounts of money. By accepting these sums, it made them his lackeys.
Hitler also famously allowed his Gauleiter (regional party bosses) to be horrendously corrupt.
Paying off his loyal followers was always an integral part of Hitler’s way of governing.
Another funny thing: the very word “privatization” is derived from the German word Reprivatisierung which was first coined in the 1930s to describe Nazi economic policy.
Privatization was deliberately used as a tool to improve the Nazi party’s relationship with big industrialists and to increase support among this group for its policies.
A personality cult + literally paying off the wealthy and powerful is literally what Nazi government entailed.
I obviously agree that Trump is not Hitler from 1942. But Hitler from 1932? The parallels are not comforting to say the least.
(I am also not implying that Hitler from 1932 would necessarily become Hitler from 1942, but even in the 1930s Germany was not a fun place to be.)
Your references like Klein/Applebaum talk about “authoritarianism” as being separate from the liberal-conservative axis. I question that, especially in the red states “conservative” (so-called) and “authoritarian behavior” look to me like there is plenty of correlation.
ETA and maybe a bit OT: I have been watching “Babylon Berlin” on the TV machine. If it is accurate, it’s an interesting depiction of the late stage Weimar Republic.
I agree that it’s not very helpful to immediately start talking about how the new regime will set up camps to exterminate trans or gay people (or Mexicans or Muslims or what have you). They will of course change legal stuff to make life very difficult/unbearable for groups they don’t like. And later Republicans will say ‘Ha! You said there were going to be camps! There aren’t any camps!’ and ignore whatever was actually done. And there’s a lot that can be done without making gas chambers.
(That said, I may of course end up completely wrong and they will jump straight to the worst case scenario)
One form of humiliation that Hitler used was to assign multiple people with authority over the same domain of power and let them fight it out, something I think we’ll see quite a bit of in the Trump 2 administration.
To some degree, all of Trump’s agency-mission-hating cabinet nominees will participate in this, but RFK Jr. will be particularly useful in this area because of his combination of name recognition, confidence, and incompetence in medical issues. And because of RFK’s fame, his continued humiliation will be necessary to keep Trump at the top of the news cycles.
I do agree that the systems we have in place make it far more difficult for a Hitler-like person to consolidate power than it was in 1930’s Germany, but Trump’s going to give it a try.
@drj:
As I’ve said before…visit the Documentation Center of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg. It’s sobering, how close the parallels really are.
Trump is different as in he just needs the attention and adulation. He will say deport millions even though it does not happen. As long as he sees reports that something related to that objective happened and he is “the guy” then his need is fulfilled. If some other guy gets credit or attention in the news that in his mind is lessening his stature, then he will lash out. Similar to the RFK Jr attention he was receiving, you could tell he was irritated by it and reacted by doing things and saying things to remind Jr. That “hey, I am still the man”. These unqualified plants know this is how it works. Requests they receive will be like “@#$%, how can I do this to make him happy, yet not overshadow him, still keep my job and close it so he goes on to the next thing.” You give him too much credit in thinking he wants to fundamentally change the government. It is a reality show of the grandest scale and he is the star. All these other “actors” are in roles to do what the star says and make him look good. It’s about the ratings of the show. It’s this fact that all he cares about is the adulation and worship that makes him most dangerous, as others in the world know he is easy to game to your advantage as long as you feed his ego. But do I think he genuinely has a thirst for complete authoritarian rule of the US and desires a total government reformation, no. I think he has a thirst for constant adulation and to get that he does authoritarian things
In the interview, Applebaum says:
Well, I’m not so sure.
This seems to be just at the southern border. For now, anyway.
He has a thirst for any sort of attention, he needs to be in the center ring of the circus all the time.
“Heat” to use the WWE term, even negative attention as long as he gets more than anyone else.
What Trump wants are inchoate fantasies, like deporting an entire workforce or getting rid of the federal government. Maybe American fascism just deals directly with the sources of these fantasies and cuts out the organizational middleman? In the same vein, the way to cut government isn’t to provide a better model but to treat the employees really poorly to force them to leave. Or the America version of the Freikorps is a blob of unfulfilled business-class men dreaming of putting a roofie in the drink of the hot woman who is ignoring them at the conference and assaulting her, just like Pete Hegseth. (And getting away with it.) While meanwhile the conference is run by a tech-backed group who thinks that all non-profit media orgs who do investigative reports on their industry are terrorists and should have their 501(c)3 statuses revoked. Which is basically like getting away sexual assault.
@James: You beat me to talking about this podcast, but I agree that it is quite good and worth a listen.
I would note that Applebaum doesn’t say it isn’t fascism, just that she avoids the word because it triggers people. And because it is associated with the Holocaust.
I long avoided the word, too, because as Klein notes it often simply used as a slur.
I would note that none of the definitions I have provided require camps or mass violence. I honestly think that the go-to to focus on camps as the sine qua non of fascism misses the point. But, by the same token, the fact that the word conjures such images is perhaps why it is problematic.
The lack of camps and brown shirts is not enough to ignore the other signs, in my view. And, as noted above, there has been some groups prepared for violence. Let’s not forget J6 and the groups that were involved.
Quite frankly, I think that Putin is almost certainly classifiable as a fascist, as is Orban.
And I think that “authoritarianism” by itself is both correct and inadequate.
The PRI for most of the 20th Century ruled Mexico in an authoritarian fashion. Castro’s Cuba was authoritarian. Pinochet’s Chile, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Salazar’s Portugal, Duvalier’s Haiti. South African Apartheid and the Jim Crow South had substantial authoritarian elements. They were not, however, governed the same.
@charontwo: that’s his whole thing. I get why people eyeroll when Hitler comparisons are done. Hitler led a coup, was jailed and wrote a manifesto. Trump watches TV, sics a crowd on the Capitol and the one book he wrote, reportedly was never even written by him. Nevermind he does not read all. I get he is an authoritarian in the premiere power position of the world, but his true desire is himself, not some grand vision of a rebuilt America. To compare the two can be silly. He is not dedicated to some grandiose Vision ideology and reform etc…he is all about himself and whatever populist idea he can attach to that supports that goal
Ok, so you can’t criticize el felon without sounding unhinged, and you can’t call them fascist because people need all fascism to be identical to nazism in every last detail. So we should oppose this tinpot dictator without talking about them.
Sure. no problem.
For almost 50 years, America has lived under the lie that deregulating business, lowering taxes for the wealthy, decreasing the power of unions, and decreasing all forms of welfare, would lead to greater prosperity for everyone, but especially for those at the bottom of the economic scale.
What we’ve had instead is a flow of wealth from the bottom to the top, fewer consumer options, longer work hours, runaway deficits, and a national debt growing dangerously large.
A large majority still believes it, and keep voting for more of it.
Why?
IMO, because somehow the words “communist” and “socialist” are not verboten like “fascist,” and those who most benefit from the lies keep pressing such propaganda rather effectively.
The Gaetz replacement pick, Bondi, is a potentially knowledgeable enabler, which is a worst case scenario.
I’m curious, James, what aspects of our political culture do you think immunize us from fascism and authoritarianism?
@Kathy:
If I could give you a thousand thumbs, I would.
@Steven L. Taylor:
People usually also fail to distinguish between the “normal” concentration camps and the later extermination camps of the Endlösung.
Do I expect Trump to engage in an organized campaign of mass murder? Not exactly. But the state of Texas already offered the Trump admin quite a bit of land to build a new immigrant deportation center.
So there will be camps, it looks like. And don’t expect the conditions in these new “facilities” to be remotely humane if Trump tries to make good on his promise to deport millions.
@Kathy:
Only if the shade of brown matches exactly are we allowed to draw lessons from history.
On a more serious note: if the parallel needs to be exact, no lessons from history are ever possible because history does not (contrary to the saying) ever repeat – at least not exactly.
I think the ask is not to stop opposing Trump, but to change our tactics. I’m also not sure how much it matters for people like commenters on this blog, but it’s not out of the question.
The change in tactics is to focus not on the big picture, but on the details. Matt Gaetz is a bad pick because of sex with minors, on an air hockey table, with other people watching.
Pete Hegseth is a bad pick because he roofied a woman and also has no relevant experience.
Voters rejected the case that Trump is a fascist. Even if he is, they won’t have it. So we need to make a different case for why he’s bad, and that case has to focus on details.
We need to create the circumstances where people have a “road to Damascus” moment, where they just see things differently. That comes from them, not us. Our job is to amplify their doubts, and put things in front of them that make them question things.
It grieves me that the part of the Right that gets people elected understand how to do this better than their counterparts among Democrats.
As a case in point, Kevin Drum has recently changed his tune from, “Well, those trans advocates are kind of radicals and we should be willing to negotiate on things like trans people in sports and gender-affirming care for minors”. And then the Nancy Mace thing happened, and he realized that it was bad faith all along. Which it was. I am very exasperated with him, and yet I can celebrate the fact that he gets it now.
Conversions are going to be like this. If you tell them “Trump is a fascist” it engages their “no he isn’t” reflex. This is why the Alt-Right says, “do your own research”. And counts on people not doing it, or only following the bread crumbs laid out in front of them.
@Kathy:
For some time, the GOP has been really good with their proganda about mythic success in past times when trickle down led to a strong economy. (They’ve unrealistically claimed, for example, that the Clinton economic boom was lingering effects of Reaganism or that Trump’s economy didn’t owe everything to Obama.) They’ve whined about whites being victimized by affirmative action and Christians bakers being victimized by gay couples. They sing the praises of the order they expect from an unconstrained police force and deploy every means possible to fill the judiciary with those who will interpret the law in their favor.
Why do these words keep coming up over the last 50 years? It is a wonder.
There has been a lot of commentary at OTB over the last 10 years about how Trump isn’t sui generis, but rather the next natural position on a trajectory the Republicans have been on for decades. I think this is true. The GOP apparatus has been getting the American voter comfortable with fascist elements for some time. And Democrats have been accused of being “unhinged” whenever we’ve called it out.
Klein has really been on his A game for about the last year.
WRT fascism, I think they hit a lot of important notes. Here’s why I think it is both dumb and inaccurate to keep trying to stick the label on Trump:
– Fascism is way overused. Those of us around at the beginning of this blog can remember when it was use for Bush with the same kind of stupid and childish pet names like “Bushitler.” Liberals have, over decades, used the label for pretty much every Republican President. The label is weakened from decades of overuse and I think most people instinctively understand that it’s most common usage is intended as hyperbole.
– It’s not an accurate label in the minds of most people and certainly not if you compare to classical fascism (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and others). As the Klein podcast notes, people think of Hitler or maybe Mussolini when the hear the term. And this ties in with the point above – people have overused the label specifically because it conjures those images. The attempts by people like Steven and others to redefine fascism as something else by removing the totalitarian and other components just don’t work IMO, at least not unless and until one can come up with a new term for the classical totalitarian fascism. If Hitler and Trump are both fascists, then the term is too broad to have any real meaning. See also my previous comments on Baathism.
– There are lots of flavors of authoritarianism. Fascism is a specific subset of authoritarian governance. For some reason, people don’t like to admit this and want to stand on a rhetorical binary where authoritarianism is basically the same as fascism. Well, if one is going to argue that, then at least be consistent and correctly label every authoritarian government as fascist.
– Similarly, people who claim Trump is a fascist do not use the label for leaders and governments who are much closer to the classic definition than Trump is. This gives the game away. If Trump is a proven fascist and Erdogan, Maduro, Orban, the various CCP leaders are not, then there is a huge consistency problem. If one is going to claim a label and definition, then one shouldn’t selectively apply it.
– Using the label on Trump has incontrovertibly not worked. A huge number of the population do not believe he is actually a fascist, and even many of those who claim that he is do not match the rhetoric with behavior and actions, which leads one to believe it is just a talking point. It should be obvious that it is not convincing at this point. Those who want to continue to try to pin the fascist tail on the Trump donkey should consider why – after 9 years – that effort has largely failed and perhaps try something different.
Trump humiliating Republicans in the Senate over his new cabinet nominees feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic when our ship of state hit the iceberg when the Senate acquitted Trump of the J6 impeachment. What’s signing off on Pam Bondi when you’ve signed off on the Big Lie?
@Andy:
I propose that the new term for fascism that has not (yet) become totalitarian be Trumpism. That’s what the history books might call it when they look back at this sorry period in US history.
@Kingdaddy: A second thousand from me.
@Jay L Gischer:
Did they tho?
This is a viral quote from Harry Wolfson, a 45-year-old Trump voter in Pennsylvania:
“People say he’s a dictator. I believe that. I consider him like Hitler. But I voted for the man.”
Add Harry Wolfson to the list of Trump supporters who say he is Hitlerian. Why should the rest of us disagree with RFK Jr., JD Vance, and other Trumpers on this?
One, maybe without the case for Trump’s fascism he might’ve won the popular vote by 9% alongside 400+ electoral votes. After all, every incumbent party in the developed world lost voter share in the post-COVID environment, but American Democrats in 2024 are one that did the least poorly.
Two, maybe folks like Harry Wolfson, JD Vance, and RFK Jr. voters either agree with Trump’s fascism or don’t find it disqualifying.
There’s no reason to leap to the belief people voted for Trump despite this awful thing, or because they didn’t believe Trump is that terrible thing. It could be voters believe Trump is awful and terrible and want exactly that. Authoritarianism is not without fans. Some citizens prefer a Big Strong Daddy with absolute power to protect them from perceived enemies.
For voters who aren’t insecure and afraid, perhaps reminders of Trump’s fascistic terribleness prevented Dems from suffering the total wipeout UK’s incumbent Tory Party did.
We don’t know. But I wouldn’t assume. It seems some are making assumptions about voter reaction to Trump being described as Hitler or fascist because they just don’t want to admit who their neighbors really are, and what America is really capable of.
A lot of discussion on ‘fascism’ these days seems to be on the margin, in the neighborhood so to speak. But there are many general lessons carry on from the fascism of the 1930’s and 1940’s.
I do not believe that it’s going to be the ‘fascism 1944’ however ‘Berlin 1933’ seems to be the vibe today.
Did anyone here see the 1985 documentary ‘Shoah’ by Claude Lanzmann? It documents through countless interviews exactly how ordinary people could be directly or indirectly conscripted into service to the fascist state and its goals.
In her book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’ Hannah Arendt offered that Adolph Eichmann was not inherently evil, rather he was a dull gray competent man who was easily conscripted into service of fascist goals.
I see it, America’s current romance with authoritarianism, as Anne Apfelbaum does.
I don’t know what is going to happen, and I’m not optimistic.
@Andy: Honest question: what term do you want to use?
As you note, authoritarian is an umbrella term in many ways.
I will be intellectually honest and acknowledge that I understand the critiques of the application of the term. If anything, the deep association with Hitler, specifically, is an obstacle. I don’t think most people really have much of a conception of Mussolini, let alone other examples.
But I also have to state that while I have tried to find other categories in which to place Trump, the fascist one keeps coming back to being the most appropriate.
He is reactionary.
He promotes Us v. Them.
He is illiberal and does not value democracy.
He favors power over expertise.
He rhetorically merges himself as the leader of a political movement with the state.
His rhetoric propagates an alternative reality and is propagandistic.
He relies heavily on symbolism associated with himself as leader.
He engages in ethno-nationalistic rhetoric that extols his version of the nation.
What do you want to call that?
@Jay L Gischer:
I would suggest that it is almost impossible to make any statement that the election proves
“voters” rejected (or accepted) any very specific thing.
@Steven L. Taylor: He also appeals to social frustration, as described by Umberto Eco in Ur-Fascism: “…one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
@Steven L. Taylor: I see your point Steven. Here’s mine:
How should I describe the fact that elements of Trump’s behavior that I consider utterly disqualifying – trying to overthrow the government, etc, etc, – were ignored, discarded, disregarded, or perhaps celebrated as positives, by millions of voters?
What simple language can I use to make this point? How can I employ English to describe this?
@Andy: You’re conflating two different things, fascism and authoritarianism. Fascism is a political movement. Authoritarianism is a form of regime. You can have left wing and right wing authoritarianism, as in Venezuela and Spain (under Franco). You can have authoritarianism without fascism. It’s hard to imagine fascism without authoritarianism, once the fascists take power. But fascist movements exist before they take power.
Ditto for totalitarianism, by the way. The two great totalitarian regimes that immediately spring to mind, the Third Reich and the USSR, could not have been politically more different.
Shot.
Half of Americans see Donald Trump as a fascist: POLL
Chaser.
These Americans told our pollsters Trump is a fascist. They’ll still vote for him (ABC)
What’s 5-10% of 77 million? I agree with Harry Wolfson, JD Vance, RFK Jr., and the millions of other Trumpers who believe he’s fascist. We just disagree on whether Trump’s fascism is disqualifying or not.
Gaetz said today that he won’t be rejoining Congress.
@DK: I take your point, but I don’t think it changes the strategy I outlined.
Calling him a fascist has done all the work it can, is what that data says to me. I think it’s better to focus on details. If we think that Trump’s relentless focus on ignoring institutions and expertise in pursuit of political loyalty, then lets point out concrete examples of that.
For instance, Hegseth’s opposition to women in combat would have a very bad effect on readiness of our forces. It’s silly, the modern battlefield has little use for big beefy guys with bulging muscles. (Not “no use”, “little use”. Please read carefully.) Powerful spirits, keen observation, knowledge and dexterity are far more valuable than beef. Anyone can have those, male, female, gay, straight, cis and trans.
But Hegseth wants to chop out valuable functioning members of the armed services. Why wouldn’t we oppose that?
(See, no mention of fascism at all).
@Jay L Gischer: You know, the description I just gave about how being big and strong doesn’t count for much in the military? It pretty much applies to most of modern life. I do wonder if that isn’t part of the whole masculine complaint. Being big and strong was supposed to make you the top, and it doesn’t. Not really in any line of work, except maybe a few. And those few tend to absolutely shred the bodies of the men who follow that path: football, professional wrestling, and so on.
If you’re Pete Hegseth, you are probably mad that being big and beefy doesn’t even get you laid whenever you want to get laid, and you have to resort to roofies.
@Kingdaddy:
I don’t think so, I specifically said that fascism is a subset of authoritarianism. You can’t, in other words, have fascism without authoritarianism. My point is that just because something may be authoritarian doesn’t make it fascist.
Yes, I also mentioned Baathism which is also totalitarian, shares most of the features of fascism, yet is its own thing because it is sufficiently different to merit its own label. But somehow people keep arguing that Trump (and others like him) doesn’t merit his own label and want to use fascist.
See my long response to Steven here for more.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I don’t think there is a neat single-word term that would be agreeable and understandable to the general populace. I think you have to use multiple words. Difficult, I know.
There is “Trumpism,” but Trump supporters, Trump opponents, and the sea of people who don’t pay attention to politics likely all would define the term differently.
Maybe if all the time spent over the last 9 years trying to fit Trump into the fascism label had instead been spent on creating an accurate label thing would be different. As it stands, I think one needs to use multiple descriptors.
@Kingdaddy:
@Steven L. Taylor:
While the first step is to identify what didn’t work, it frustrates me to hear a detailed analysis of why it didn’t work, without even am obscure hint of what to do instead.
@Andy:
This is the rub, I suspect. While I understand the need to communicate to the public, the issue of what the proper analytical category is (which is always my main goal in these discussions) and what the right buzzword for marketing to the masses is not the same thing.
I know the two get conflated here, especially in the comments, but I think my intent in all these conversations should be clear.
To Kingdaddy’s point above, which I think you missed, you are definitely conflating the idea of a fascist movement with a fascist regime. Moreover, I would argue that you are ignoring definitional elements of a movement verses a maximalist iteration of one historical example a fascist regime.
@Andy: I find all the discussion about labels somewhat irritating but probably necessary. However, maybe there is something new here and requires a new label. I keep thinking about a label applied to China that is totally new but may be descriptive. China’s system was called techno-authoritarian capitalism. Which is certainly descriptive of China’s system. Maybe we are entering a totally new era.
As an aside, I read a couple of years ago, a speculative novel entitled “The Resisters” by Gish Jen. Through the illegal act of playing baseball, it discussed a American society under the thumb of AI and capitalism. Kind of fascinating vision of the future about 30 years in the future.
@Steven L. Taylor:
@Andy:
I agree that defining Trump as ‘fascist’ faces a big obstacle because most people associate fascism with Hitler and the annihilation of 6 million Jews.
Republicans just don’t accept that analogy.
I believe that Trump wants to rule as a fascist would, and guys like Wolfson in PA want him to. They want the federal government torn down and reconstructed.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Sure, academics and the public frequently disagree on definitions. However, for elections, where it’s important to convince the masses how to vote, public definitions matter much more than the ivory tower. And yes, I know you come at things from an academic context much of the time here. But you also know who your audience is.
Then perhaps people ought to not just use “fascist” which refers to both.
I’m happy to agree that there is a difference between a fascist movement and a fascist regime – I don’t think I ever claimed otherwise – but this is another example where just using the “fascist” shorthand as a general label and then expecting everyone to understand the academic subtleties will create confusion.
That’s a real problem, too.
All the way back in 2016, when we thought the worse could not possibly happen, on message boards were it was pointed out el felon intended political persecutions, and was a grifter, and so on, a lot of the responses were a variant of “All politicians do the same.”
Pointing out the very low number of senators, representatives, former cabinet secretaries, assorted judges, and former presidents and presidential candidates currently incarcerated, on trial, or under criminal investigation, failed to deter them from this view.
Presidents in particular grow rich only after their term ends, if they weren’t rich before. They may also benefit from savings and investment from their salary. Come, the person int he oval office makes $400,000 (before taxes) plus $50 K “to assist in defraying expenses relating to or resulting from the discharge of his official duties.”
Since it also comes with free room and board in a XIX Century palace, free travel, and a free weekend retreat, expenses are bound to be few. that’s a lot of money that can accumulate in 4 to 8 years.
Campaign financing data in the news mostly tells of how much comes in and some of the bigger media and GOTV buys. Little or nothing is said about paying the very large staff, and even providing amenities for the large number of volunteers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the candidate draw a salary from their own campaign, whether they need it or not.
Remember Reagan cause a big stir post 1988 when he was offered ONE MILLION DOLLARS for speaking somewhere? Does anyone think the price for such things has gone down since?
@Andy:
Maybe it’s not intentional, but your comment is just a bunch of hand-waving.
You make a couple of related points regarding Trump and fascism:
1) The label “fascist” is counterproductive; and
2) the label “fascist” is inaccurate; and thus
3) Trump deserves his own label.
Point #1 is debatable, I guess.
But you do not even attempt to explain why the label is inaccurate in the case of Trump.
Steven L. Taylor provides a basic, widely accepted checklist to determine whether a political figure can be labelled “fascist.” But you do not engage with this at all.
Is the list wrong or incomplete? Does Trump not meet these criteria? And what is the connection between people being unwilling to label Maduro a fascist and the inapplicability of this label in the case of Trump?
Apparently, you don’t like it if people call Trump a fascist. But you provide absolutely nothing to support the assertion that the label is wrong.
@Steven L. Taylor:
To give a further example of what I mean, let’s compare Trump with Orban and Erdogan. I think there are many more parallels there than there are with fascism; neither Orban nor Erdogan are routinely called fascists, except maybe by their political opposition. Maybe in the academic world it’s different – you tell me – but if Trump happens to be successful in making the kind of changes that Orban and Erdogan made in their countries, it still would not be either a fascist movement or a fascist regime. Authoritarian, yes, but not fascist.
@Andy:
Or perhaps people should use the term more relentlessly.
As @Kathy notes above, Republicans have been calling Democrats “communists” and “socialists” for decades – not because the terms are accurate descriptions of Democrat objectives, but because they have derogatory connotations from historical reference.
Using the label on Trump has incontrovertibly not worked yet, but we should keep hitting him with it. Right now, the Democrats are bringing semantics lessons to a gun fight.
@Andy:
Yeah, let’s.
And the things that immediately set Orban and Erdogan apart from Trump are:
1) Orban and Erdogan still pretend to respect democracy and the rule of law; those pretensions are absent in Trump. In the latter case, it’s primarily the leader’s will that matters, not a (falsely claimed) democratic mandate.
2) In the cases of Orban and Erdogan, there is nothing like the cult of personality surrounding Trump.
Which makes Orban and Erdogan authoritarian and fascist-adjacent (IMO), while Trump is the real deal.
@Scott:
China is a good example. The current leadership has a decidedly different ideology than the Maoist history. I think in many ways it currently resembles and autocratic oligarchy.
@drj:
On the contrary, I’ve been engaging with Steven on this for a long time now. See this in particular. There are many other threads which I don’t have links for.
Secondly, I have two main points, not just one.
The first is that the fascist label for Trump is not accurate, for reasons I’ve described at length. People disagree with my reasons, which is fine. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me and I don’t think people who don’t agree with me are bad or immoral or anything else. Agreeing to disagree on academic questions is totally normal.
The second point is that, as a political matter for the goal of defeating and/or opposing Trump, it’s been both a failure and counterproductive and provably so, considering the most recent election results.
Additionally, I’ve pointed out the disparity between people who say Trump is a fascist as a matter of rhetoric, and their revealed preferences. A lot of people are calling Trump a fascist in the same shallow way they called Bush a fascist or Reagan. It’s merely a signal to demonstrate how much one dislikes the subject with no real intention of following through. I think most people can see that and correctly judge that it’s just signaling and rhetoric. Consider, for example, how the Cheneys have been redeemed by opposing Trump. Go back 20 years and Dick Cheney, especially, was characterized as the dark, fascist puppetmaster.
@Scott F.:
It has been used relentlessly! The label no longer holds power because it’s been so overused. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of crying wolf. What is using it more relentlessly going to accomplish, exactly? It’s been 9 years with Trump and he’s improved margins with almost every demographic in the latest election. Explain to me how being more relentless on using the fascist label will actually do anything.
And yes, Democrats have similarly been called communists and socialists forever. It’s the same thing there. Who has it convinced who aren’t already drinking the GoP koolaid?
Personally, I think it would be dumb for Republicans to base an election strategy on trying to convince/cajole/bully voters that Democrats are actually communists and socialists and then be all lecture-like about definitions to try to prove the point.
@drj:
You have a very different interpretation of Orban and Erdogan than I do.
@Jay L Gischer:
You’re right, but both can be done. And need to be done, since voters are more responsive to slogans and simple messages than detailed minutiae.
There’s an imperative for truth-telling beyond utilitarian strategy. The sly suggestion that ethics should be dictated by outcomes is Orwellian; if this is what kids are taught, no wonder Trump won.
Trump’s opponents have spent the past decade calling him a liar. This is not just some sanctimonious tactic. It’s just truth: Trump peddles falsehoods constantly.
We should not now quit accurately describing Trump as a liar because of an election result. Many of us were not raised that way, so we’re not going to do that. That others would do that explains American cultural decay. In much of Europe, Trump would’ve won less than 25% of the vote vs. Harris; I’m reminded how Europeans stereotype Americans as speaking in euphemisms and avoiding directness. Maybe America’s political crisis is downstream of a spiritual crisis where basic honor is now conditional.
Should Hitler’s opponents have stopped decrying his violent hate because Nazis won elections? No. Should anti-Trumpers stop warning of his fascist desires because of a 1.5% popular vote spread? No.
Trump is an authoritarian Hitler-wannabe. It takes no special righteousness or insight to say so: plenty of his own supporters past and present admit it. The truth is the first casualty of anti-democratic regimes, but on that score half our of country won’t bend the knee. Thank goodness.
@Scott F.:
Or maybe it has prevented Trump Republicans from having a 60-vote Senate majority and a 25-seat cushion in the House.
I don’t think people should sweat it one or the other. Trump’s the guy who tried to overturn an election with a mob attack on the Capitol. Fascist or authoritarian? Who cares.
But there’s this weird policing impulse to go after any type of correct moral judgement about an amoral act, as if the judgement is the real problem here. The Democrats do this as well. Blaming reactions to atrocities while justifying the atrocities as complicated. It’s just obvious moral emptiness.
This “fascist” debate reminds me of the Gaza “genocide” debate — it meets the literal definition, but a segment is so obsessed with Hitler that they use a much narrower definition.
Also, Matt Gaetz is an ephebophile rather than a pedophile.
A popular reminder from various authors is
@Mikey:
The above observation, shared by Mikey, is pertinent, I believe to the 2024 election.
It is tiresome to get caught up whether Trump is a fascist. The label doesn’t matter, as various forms of totalitarianism, autocracy, communism, fascism, etc. have risen before and after the Bolshevik Revolution, WWI, and WWII–and the War on Terrorism? Within the lifetime of living folk, Stalin might be the first example. The mechanics and effects of autocracy are often the same.
I started to read “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” by Tony Judt after Trump was elected. I’m now re-reading it, and the parallels between 1930s Germany and Russian and the post-war struggles to rebuild Europe causes my spine to tingle from the revealed lessons of history. In the book, he outlines a high level pattern for the allure of autocracy during periods of social unrest:
1. Something disrupts the economic well-being of a country (e. g., war, pandemic, deregulation of the housing market and extending adjustable rate mortgages to the economically vulnerable, part of the elected leadership refuses to cooperate to enact bipartisan improvement of the country).
2. The citizenry become frustrated with existing leaders.
3. They reject democracy and elected autocrats of some flavor.
4. Unconstrained by democracy, the autocrats DO solve problems the people demand (trains run on time, autobahn, elimination of unwanted ethnicities, implementing popular programs without constraint of legislation, etc.)
NOTE: Tony Judt died in 2010 from Lou Gehrig’s disease. His writings and interviews are not informed by events after that date, but are still relevant. I find the Wikipedia entry for Tony Judt to be balanced (i. e., mentions his messy personal life, criticism by Dylan Riley of UC, Berkeley, and reaction his unpopular stance on Israel and Palestine). However, where Judt excels is in the difficult job of presenting a higher abstract view of complex history. On the political side, he became an advocate of Social Democracy as a way for society to leverage personal initiative AND appropriate government programs to elevate the welfare of society.
What IS different in present day America, in my view, is the rise of Christian intolerance.
Also, I’m thoughtful of the role of Musk. Is he a modern day Albert Speer?
It remains to be seen what level of cruelty the administration may present. Separating immigrant children from their parents was a disturbing precedent.
@Andy:
Republicans aren’t trying to convince voters that Democrats are actually socialists! They are trying to convince voters that Democrats are bad (or even evil) and “socialist” is the derogatory term they’ve adopted as their shorthand. They are not even bothering to worry about historical or academic accuracy of the term.
And, of course it’s working. Polls consistently show that voters think Republicans are “better on the economy” despite all the pertinent economic data that says otherwise. Why? Socialist = Bad Economy. There’s no lecturing involved, just 40 years of repetition.
And the term “fascist” hasn’t been used relentlessly to describe Trumpism! Relentless and Frequent are not same thing. The Democrat ticket didn’t start calling Trump a fascist until Trump’s former chief of staff said it first. It took the Republicans a long time to cement liberalism and socialism as dirty words. Calling Republicans fascists (not just Trump, but the party that is completely Trumpist now) is just getting started.
In my opinion – supported by polling shared by @DK above – the election results can be explained not because the fascist label did not stick to Trump, but because of voters’ errant belief that Trump’s fascism wouldn’t be so bad to bring about genocide, so maybe it would be worth trying in order to bring down the cost of eggs and gas. That’s why I hope the Republicans aren’t completely blocked in enacting their policies. Telling the voters that fascism is bad wasn’t enough, so they’re going to need to feel it to believe it.
I would add that the Republicans have upped their game in branding the Others as evil. Sitting GOP congresspeople call Democrats pedophiles and groomers. Not because that is accurate, but because it is scary and bad. Meanwhile the Others sit around in the parlor debating whether it is “fair” to brand Trump with fascism. If I had my druthers, we would be branding Trump as the anti-Christ.
“When they go low, we go high” is what failed.
We almost need a Fascist bingo card. Trump is so all over the map on things it is hard to pin just one definition to the guy. He is very erratic and inconsistent. Is he really a movement? He garnered what 2.5 million more than 2020, that’s a weak movement all things considered. He is maybe a reaction, as a true movement would have won in 2020 as well.
Hey guys. I would like to do what I can to help trans children and their parents obtain good gender-affirming care. Trans adults, too, when that is an issue.
Can anybody recommend an organization or two that’s active in this area?
@Andy:
Or maybe the people who voted for Trump don’t care, because they don’t believe they will be the victims.
If you weren’t white, America was basically no different than pre-war Nazi Germany until the mid-60s. And if you were white, those were great times! (If you were gay, and in nowheresville, move the date to the 2000s.) The heart of America has always been about either being indifferent or actively supporting authoritarianism. The idea that Trump voters were out there weighing whether or not Trump is a fascist is ridiculous. They just didn’t care.
On the question of fascism or no, to riff of the bard, what’s in a name? Would an Amorphophallus titanum by any other name smell any worse?
But don’t let anyone stop any of you from arguing about which way this particular hair has been split, least of all an ignint cracker.
@just nutha: Please, folks, if you honestly want to know “what’s in a word” read Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). The first job of a discussion is defining the terms. Saves time.
I don’t think its a good idea for ordinary people to try and play armchair political consultant, where they try to be sly and speak in terms of what might persuade other people to vote this way or that way, and temper their words.
I think its better to just be honest and speak what we believe to be the truth.
I know that a lot of people’s eyes glaze over at the word “fascist” but I think that’s because right now it is all abstract.
Look out your window- does it look like a Hollywood reboot of the Hunger Games? Of course not, don’t be hysterical.
But think for a moment of how people reacted to actual government edicts that touched them personally, the masking mandates during Covid.
They were obviously much less draconian than the mass deportations and crackdowns on journalists being promised by the Trumpists.
And yet, people howled with rage and indignation and yes, they frequently used the words “Tyranny” and “Fascist” to describe them.
Think of those women you are hearing about, who have pregnancy complications and are forced to writhe in screaming agony while the hospital staff is forced to watch.
And when they learn this is because of laws passed by Republicans, do you think their surviving families are mincing words about the people who passed those laws?
I live in downtown Los Angeles, and during the George Floyd protests, there were National Guard Humvees stationed at the foot of my apartment building, and frequent police lines with riot shields shooting pepper balls at protesters.
What was amazing was that dozens of residents were leaning out their windows, screaming epithets at the cops and Guardsmen calling them fascists.
When it is happening far away and to people you don’t know, it is of course abstract and it seems hyperbolic to use strong language.
Until you find yourself walking home from the grocery store and having to pass through a cordon of jittery young men holding automatic rifles. That sort of thing as they say, tends to focus the mind.
I still think “fascism” as per German Nazism is not a useful descriptor of Trump/MAGA politics.
It is not a totalizing state and/or ethnic ideology.
It is not based on a quasi-military mass party organization.
It does not seem to be, at base, “revolutionary”, which both Italian Fascism and German Nazism conceived themselves as being.
It seems a lot closer to the quasi-fascist populism of Peronism in Argentina.
Fascism for lazy people?
However, history indicates there is a lot of leeway for even non-fascist idiots to screw things up quite comprehensively.