Before you get too pleased with how well this aligns with the president-elect, think about how well this lines up with the current president, or any administration in the past few decades.
My point isn't that all of those administrations were fascist, it's that each item in this list allows too much range for critical analysis.
I think a lot of his "not being good at it" may be supplanted by actually skilled folks of the neoliberal/neoconservative establishment.
It would be amazing if he could actually bring jobs back into the US. I really really doubt this is possible, without making the corporations hurt in the short/mid term, so I doubt it's really possible, as they have essentially captured government.
This is my preferred reading as well, but neoliberalism likes to keep its oppression and overt violence overseas, while Trump's rhetoric brings it out into the open at home. This is not denying that America was always a racist, sexist state, but now the elected power is no longer shy about hiding it.
My tone may have been blunt but I will stand firmly behind that America's race and gender relations, despite great progress in the last few decades, leaves much to be desired and in most parts of the country it is dangerous to be a part of a marginalized group.
You missed my point. I don't care what you happen to believe.
I'm pointing out that people probably objected to inserting a debatable & unpopular held view as a subclause in another argument. That forces people to either go along with accepting your point or getting into a pointless & unsettleable argument that's not even being discussed.
"My point isn't that all of those administrations were fascist, it's that each item in this list allows too much range for critical analysis."
Well, maybe any one of them taken alone. Combined together it seems to give a pretty helpful lens through which to view a society.
A related book is _Friendly Fascism, the New Face of Power in America_, by Bertram Gross. It highlights how modern "corporation/government" fascism differs from the earlier "strongman" fascism. It was written back in 1980 but is (even more) applicable today:
https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Fascism-America-Forbidden-Bo...
Funnily enough, this list of characteristics doesn't even map completely to Hitler's Germany. They were very gender progressive for the time.
Regarding "Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.", surely the author hasn't seen any other societies from the times of notable fascist regimes, they might realize that anti-abortion and anti-homosexual legislation were prettymuch everywhere. Until fewer than 50 years ago, both were completely illegal in Canada.
As for it aligning "well" with the president elect; I don't think that's accurate. "Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause" is off the table, since the unifying cause is "making america great again" and the stated avenues are "enforce immigration law", "reduce taxes for commoners, and simplify the tax code", and "maintain government infrastructure". As for "Corporate Power is Protected" he's got the fewest corporate sponsors of any candidate we've seen in quite a while, so it's hard to imagine who he owes. The rest of the points are largely questionable, and the descriptions largely sound like the ravings of a tween marxist.
Seems like it's just mostly bollocks, and some salty HNer just wanted to insinuate something.
It was later extended into a book length treatment (https://libcom.org/files/Robert%20O.%20Paxton-The%20Anatomy%...) which is very worthwhile, and readable, if you are interested in what he calls (paraphrasing) the most significant political development of the 20th century.
“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
Heaping the likes Pinochet and Franco with that of Mussolini is conflating authoritarianism with fascism, and that can only debase the meaning of "fascist". No wonder the word is thrown around so often.
This list excludes the essential characteristic of facism and without it reads more like an ultra right-wing, ultra-nationalist state. I'll let Il Duce wax authoritarian about it:
"We have created the united state of Italy remember that since the Empire Italy had not been a united state. Here I wish to reaffirm solemnly our doctrine of the State. Here I wish to reaffirm with no weaker energy, the formula I expounded at the scala in Milan everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state." [0]
"We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state. We stand for a new principle in the world, we stand for sheer, categorical, definitive antithesis to the world of democracy, plutocracy, free-masonry, to the world which still abides by the fundamental principles laid down in 1789. "[1]
Does this kind of united state, with everyone marching in lockstep towards a common goal, sound even remotely close to America? A country hurtling towards facism would not allow people protesting and crying in public areas days after an election. Healthy protests that aren't broken up by jack-booted thugs are a sign of a healthy democracy. :)
[0] speech before the Chamber of Deputies, May 26, 1927
[1]Speech before the new National Directory of the Party, April 7, 1926, in Discorsi del 1926, Milano, Alpes, 1927
I find it a bit disturbing how this focuses on people in power's attitude, and not on the mass of people's behavior, like if fascism was something a handful of people put in place and the rest of us had nothing to do with/about it.
Well, I'm certainly not an historian, so this is just my two cents, but it seems to me that the very core of fascism is anger and defiance. And believing just a few people can make history (thus, the exaggeration of the leader role).
I would say the main characteristic is the murdering of people who oppose the fascist government. All the rest is just wishywashy blah blah. Oh, and watchdogs on every corner, prepared to punish you if you step out of line.
Honestly, I wish all the people comparing Trump to Hitler would spend some money and read a book on how the Nazis came to power and what went down in Germany when they had grabbed power.
Mass killings are an excellent bright line test for recognizing that an authoritarian regime is spiraling out of control, but it seems like a good idea to find indicators that work a little earlier.
I kind of made one of the low-vocabulary posts on the page here, I guess that is part of the problem with our politics, that people don't really have the tools to reason about it. I would certainly defend criticism of the US as being (for a long time) excessively authoritarian and oddly patriotic a lot more strongly than I would hang on to the 'fascist' label.
Good point with the warning signs. I think Hitler was always driven by hate and given to hateful speeches and writing, including his infamous book. He and Stalin also emerged from turmoil of WW I, bloody revolutions, socialism (nazis are socialists). But I admit I don't know enough about other fascist dictators to generalize.
It's just that Hitler's story is the complete opposite of Trump. There are zero similarities there. What motivation would Trump have to go on a killing spree among the US population?
This is remarkably stupid, at best descriptive of convergent evolution in generically authoritarian regimes. It's not too far from describing the current Chinese government, which to put it mildly has no connection to the thought of Benito Mussolini.
"Fascism" is a word that actually means something, it's not a signifier of generic BadGov. It was a specific historical movement driven by WWI veterans with socialist backgrounds, whose core idea was using militarism & nationalism as a way to suppress class conflict. It's related to but distinct from Nazism; Franco, Mussolini, Gömbös, etc. didn't have any elaborate racial theories.
It's really not always 1934. Pick a different historical analogy, it's as ridiculous as seeing everything in light of the Russo-Japanese war or continually worrying that we're seeing the rise of Orléanist governments.
Trump cares mostly about staying in the headlines. If saying fascist things accomplishes that goal, he'll ape a fascist. If the public starts to resonate with Bernie Sanders post-election narrative, Trump will start sound like a union organizer.
As a result, I don't fear Trump because of his politics (which I actually think in many ways are center-left), but his inability to execute effectively. Until Macau cratered, I think he was basically the only man to lose money in the casino business.
This is very far fetched for current US administration and making assumptions about the upcoming one is a bit too early.
BUT like 95% of this applies to Russia
Are you saying that makes it okay, or that you are not surprised, or ... I guess, what is the point of saying that Trump is a continuation of existing trends? Is there anything that we could do differently because of that to not move towards fascism?
One thing missing from the list: a real worker's movement that is threatening to the wealthy.
People remember the Russian Revolution toward the end of World War I, what they tend to forget is that Hungary had a revolution and became a Soviet republic in 1919. Many things happened happened in different European countries at that time.
Germany had an attempt communist revolution starting in October of 1918 which went on for months, you could even say years.
So in four years you see an increasingly powerful communist party going from getting one in ten German votes to one in six German votes. You also have communists and socialists outnumbering Nazis. Unfortunately for the left, the Catholic Center party got 11% of the vote, and after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi seizure of power occurred, and the the Center party voted for the enabling act and the de facto Nazi seizure of power became de jure.
But it was prompted by 37% of voters being reds, and 16% of voters being communists. Red voters outnumbered brown voters.
In Italy, the 1922 march on Rome followed the Biennio Rosso. The working class tried to take over and failed, and the fascists took over.
Returning to red power in Germany at the turn of 1932/1933 - on February 20, 1933, Hitler met with representatives of German industry - Gustav Krupp, Fritz Springorum from Hoesch, an IG Farben board member, Fritz von Opel, a board member of Siemens etc. In the midst of stormtroopers taking over the streets he asked them to bankroll the Nazis in the upcoming elections so they could pass the enabling act. German industry bankrolled the Nazis, because they feared the 37% red workers (the majority of the working class) and the rising power of the KPD.
The situation is nothing like that in the US. If anything, the little existing of the worker's movement is disintegrating - Michigan and Wisconsin just became right to work states. Board members of the Fortune 100 are not going to bankroll a party like the Nazis. There's no left to fight. The wealthy and upper middle class are becoming increasingly liberal, as there's no socialist movement to worry about, in comparison to 20th century Europe.
I appreciate your careful reply here. You have pointed out a lot of useful historical background, in particular, the fear the German industrialists had for the Communist party, and the fact that the Nazi party never had great success at the ballot box.
Certainly the US situation is different (no potent workers' movement to fear).
But elements of the wealthy Right are fearful of national health care, environmental regulation, the costs that might come from climate change. They see great advantages in changing tax rates. These fears and forces could play a similar role to fear of a workers' movement.
6 and 14 are the only ones missing on the list, but some could easily argue that 6 is already here in a minor way and 14 was attempted through voter purges in potential swing states and the repeated attempts at suppressing votes and/or upholding needlessly cumbersome voter registration rules by both parties (one more aggressively than the other).
Government control of media could be on the way, Trump stopped speaking to mainstream press in the last few months of his campaign while also hiring Steve Bannon from Breitbart. Don't be surprised if Breitbart becomes (and perhaps also Fox News) the official media outlet for the Trump administration while traditional news outlets are denied access.
Kind of like how Obama's admin locked Fox out of FDA 'sneak preview' press briefings? Or Hillary's sparse and nearly non existent press conference scheduling over the past few years?
Maybe those traditional outlets ought to be denied access -- they demonstrated almost historic bias this election.
(6) is already here. Read the DNC email links, and how the media was more or less taking directions from the Hillary campaign. (This is probably due more to sympathy than control.)
The best kind of control is when the object being controlled does the controlling themselves voluntarily. In political media, that happened a long time ago when reporters started being more concerned about "access" than reporting facts and asking politicians hard questions. The fear of "losing access" to politicians means unsubstantiated claims are rarely challenged and scandals are ignored or re-framed to not sound as offensive.
This process was amplified when CNN (and others) started pretending every story had two sides that needed equal coverage or the story would be "biased". Now any claim can gain legitimacy and unchallenged air time, with the media acting as if their claim is equally probable.
So politicians (and anyone else that wants to push propaganda) can now make any claim they want, knowing that it will go unchallenged. Even if someone argues against their propaganda, the media will present the propaganda anyway.
(and for a look at where this will evolve into, see HyperNormalisation's description of Putin's (and to some degree, Trump's) strategy of "confuse everybody by generating as many conflicting stories as possible")
A constant litany of complaints about unfair and rigged main stream media by the president elect (his latest tweets about the NYT being an example) has convinced a significant portion of the public that the main stream media cannot be trusted.
With social media the propaganda can now directly be delivered to the base, so control of the main stream media is no longer needed, except maybe to limit the dissemination of unwanted information to the opposition.
For a couple of days I was hopeful that we would witness a more reasonable Trump, but it seems that he seems intent to continue following the fascist playbook. If he follows through on his promise to appoint a special prosecutor for Hillary Clinton, we will know for sure.
If you haven't done so already, I would implore everybody to subscribe to the NYT/WaPo or any other reputable newspaper. I did so today, and I'm not even from the US. Digital subscriptions are only a couple of bucks per month. They could use the support. The USA cannot afford to lose the independent media.
For far longer than that actually. Newt Gingrich (the one soon-to-be of the Trump administration) spent the 90s trying to defund public media as House Speaker.
> A constant litany of complaints about unfair and rigged main stream media by the president elect (his latest tweets about the NYT being an example) has convinced a significant portion of the public that the main stream media cannot be trusted.
You have this backwards. Many people voted for Trump because they could see with their own eyes the media bias against him (and read the DNC emails working with the media to block out Sanders). NYT/WaPo are not reputable sources, they are extremely biased and so obviously so that they're working against their own mission out of arrogance.
Why shouldn't a special prosecutor be appointed? Is not Hilary under investigation for criminal activity? He foundation pay-to-play activities for instance -- highly illegal.
When you say "highly illegal", what sort of legal expertise and/or understanding of this do you have? I'm a lawyer, but don't know much about pay-to-play crimes. My understanding is that it's a pretty goddamn hard crime to prove (need extremely strong link between donation and reward), and that most of what is characterized as pay-to-play is actually legal, just the normal unseemly way politics gets done in our country. I'm no fan of Hillary, but I suspect she and her assistants are well aware of the laws, may have stretched things to limit but careful not to step over. In any case, the bald-faced statement that what she did was "highly illegal" strikes me as suspect. (The situation with email server strikes me as similar.)
>>but I suspect she and her assistants are well aware of the laws, may have stretched things to limit but careful not to step over.
What actual evidence is there of this? The clintons receive more than enough money through paid speeches and those would be the route you would use if you wanted to set up a quid pro quo. Using a charitable foundation to do this doesn't make sense generally nor in this case. Of course, lobbying and getting on paid boards after a government career is basically a quid pro quo( the presumption is that after you work for the industry you get a cushy career paid by the industry you helped) but that has been totally ignored this election cycle.
>>He foundation pay-to-play activities for instance -- highly illegal
Not sure how soliciting charitable donations is pay to play. On the face of it laundering donations through a charitable foundation is pretty stupid and pointless and it seems unclear how donations would drive her to take the risk of doing a quid pro quo when the quid has little personal benefit to her.
My point isn't that all of those administrations were fascist, it's that each item in this list allows too much range for critical analysis.