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Q-sign: "The confusion and lack of ideological rigor in Trumpism 'is part of fascism’s nature,'" [1]
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Date: 2022-09-18
There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word “fascist.” The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist, or American-variety fascist—one of that kind, all the same. Future political scientists will analyze (let us hope in amused retrospect, rather than in exile in New Zealand or Alberta) the precise elements of Poujadisme, Peronism, and Huck Finn’s Pap that compound in Trump’s “ideology.” But his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government, whether Léon Blum’s or Barack Obama’s, is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and “success.” It is always alike, and always leads inexorably to the same place: failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original program of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe. The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history.
I claim no gift for prescience—I am one who insisted that Mark Sanchez’s talents only had to be unleashed to begin a dynasty for the Jets, and tipped America to the likelihood of Michael Ignatieff becoming Prime Minister of Canada—but I do claim a modest sum here, precisely because anyone who had read some history could see what Trumpism was. At the time, the media was more inclined to “analyze” appeal and motives (“Why’d he takes those documents?”) than to outline potential crimes. It’s part of the fascist inheritance to create such a fire-hose blast of corruption and lies that trying to focus on any one drop becomes impossible—that blast has the uncanny effect not of washing away the truth but of drowning your attention. You just want to get out of its way. Who now recalls that Trump was found to have confessed, in the testimony of his chief of staff, as reported by Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, how much, if how ignorantly, he admired Hitler’s dictation to his generals? That news appeared in this magazine’s pages four weeks ago, and it already seems part of the distant past.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/18/2123723/-Q-sign-The-confusion-and-lack-of-ideological-rigor-in-Trumpism-is-part-of-fascism-s-nature
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