Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

here you go guys

good question!

literally fasciscm was a political movement/totalitarian ideology but I guess most people use the word metaphorically now, not unlike how nazism is used (though I guess a few people identify as nazis but hardly any consider thmselves fascists)

Donald Trump is not a Fascist, a truth so obvious as to be worth the clusterfuck that's about to ensue

he is far-right
he has a hate campaign against members of a religious group that he sees as enemies of america
he is pro-war

but
besides being a birther he seems to be ok with democracy

i'm not an expert on this stuff but i think fascism was thought of as a reaction against both democracy and communism, which just seems idiotic now. so no, trump is not a fascist. yet.

he seems to be ok with democracy

imo Trump does not actually have a coherent ideology (whereas most memorable fascists adhered very closely to the ideology in which they explicitly believed, the ideology of fascism), but I'd be comfortable classifying him as a berzerker fascist because he says shit that's right in line with fascist governance -- national registry of Muslims, closing mosques, his obsession with national strength & power -- not security and robust health, but "beat the other guy" strength. so, in the imaginary world where he gets elected, he might well govern like a fascist, and he's certainly said plenty of fascist things.

but he probably couldn't, himself, provide any definition whatsoever of fascism. a fascist, however wrongheadedly, believes he is doing good for his nation. Trump's pathology is messier.

OTOH it's really fine to call him a fascist because calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition and we're not all fedora-sporting EXCUSE ME THAT'S NOT WHAT THE WORD MEANS bores

boomin' post

was Mussolini an asshole though?

Guessing this has already been linked elsewhere: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism

Donald Trump has been endorsed by Stormfront's Don Black and by David Duke.

I'd be more concerned with Trump's supporters, who seem comfortable with fascist ideas and who would benefit from fascist policies.

Not that I think we are in danger of a fascist government, but the "Patriot" movement is fascist.

i like the distinction made in that vox article. for example there are numerous problematic governments + parties that don't deserve the fascist label like apartheid south africa which was a repressive, draconian, racist regime, but not really a fascist one. ppl calling their political opponents (on either side of the aisle) fascists has a long history but it kinda flattens the meaning of things. is trump a risk for inflaming racist violence? yes. would POTUS trump be a risk for shutting down the other 2 branches of govt and concentrating all State power into his hands? i don't think so, and there's no indication that's his plan. by contrast, hitler in 1923 was already trying to coup the government (which is to say that despite his later participation in the democratic german process his intentions to disassemble said democracy was present from the very beginning. even Stormfront racists are not necessarily fascist - bc if the word is to mean anything besides "political/ideological pov with whom i disagree" it needs to mean a particular political program. said program might include horrific racism, but that's not the trademark. also it's not like the left has a monopoly on misusing the term cf jonah goldberg's "liberal fascism" book.

thank u for starting this thread, mr. loves chachi.

also in a more general sense i'm v wary of flattening / histrionic language. it seems like inflammatory accusations (in various political arenas) are designed to inflame the passions of yr ideological cohorts more than make a sensible argument. but surely if trump deserves to be shunned + marginalized it's not bc he maybe fits some of the definitions of the word 'fascism,' but bc he has done and said actually terrible things. why add the extra step? a. trump said disgusting racist thing. b. we should shun him for that. why do we need to squeeze "therefore he's a fascist," in between? iirc slatestarcodex has written about how categorical language is used to collapse distinctions in the listeners' mind. really the use of fascism as a term of condemnation is a syllogism - x is a fascist; fascism is wrong (why? bc fascist european govts did disgusting things); therefore X is wrong. but if X is wrong on its own merits then it's unnecessary to compare X to Hitler or whomever is the stand-in in this argument for "we all agree he is evil and therefore anyone like him is also evil."

not a fascist. a poster child for why we need steep inheritance, income, and capital gains taxes. smug incurious privileged bullies like DT have way too much sway in our neo-feudal system

if anything the kind of robber baron demagoguery that Trump specializes is more unappealing than Fascism but i like the distinction because broadly speaking Fascists are team players (assuming you're on their team) where is Trump is a piggy-eyed leech who doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his own gratification. even his Team America shtick is half a front and half his own wet dreams

also he's absolutely a product of American capitalism not a reaction against it

i'd be fine if a bunch of major media outlets wanted to run with the idea that trump is a fascist. who cares, nothing is sacred in that arena anyway. i got over the fact that obama was a 'socialist.' by the time the 'real fascists' arrive it's probably not going to matter much what we call them anyway

something that came up on the other thread is whether his desire to ban muslims (non-citizens?) from entering the US, and deporting 10 million undocumented immigrants, is an example of the obsession fascism has with cleansing but i'm not even sure if that's true. sure you could describe it as a cleansing but i don't think that trump thinks that mexicans or muslims are an inherent evil (and certainly not in the way Hitler felt about Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc). like this distinction is very subtle but he wants to keep muslims out of the country bc of worldwide islamic radicalism and he wants to deport 10 million undocumented immigrants bc they broke the law being in this country. both of those decisions are toxic and their implementation would lead to horrific violations of human rights. but both of those motivations are within the realm of rationality - there is radical islam in the world and there are a number of undocumented immigrants in this country. his solution to those problems is terrible but they are real problems. by contrast when we talk about fascist cleansing i think we mean an attempt to cleanse the population of the Other entirely - which is a motivation buried in a kind of irrational mythological understanding of the nation as a particular volk. in fact on a number of occasions i've seen trump say things like i love mexicans some of my favorite people are mexicans, whereas it wouldn't make sense for hitler to have been like no i like the jews i just think we need to figure out what to do w/ them until we have a solution to jewish terrorism. they were inherently a blemish on the unified nation by din of their coincidence of birth (which is why the racial laws were necessary), not bc of any kind of rational political motivation.

if anything the kind of robber baron demagoguery that Trump specializes is more unappealing than Fascism but i like the distinction because broadly speaking Fascists are team players (assuming you're on their team) where is Trump is a piggy-eyed leech who doesn't give a fuck about anything beyond his own gratification.

There was an interesting piece by Ollie Carroll, i think, this week suggesting that there are only two genuinely political parties in Ukraine at the moment - Fascist and Communist. Everyone else, including the whole of the mainstream, is a front for robber barons. Trump is not a fascist or 'genuinely political' in any meaningful sense but arguably one of the main dangers he poses is that blurring the lines of what passes for acceptable political discourse without actually proposing anything to address the economic and social grievances his supporters have is going to make irl fascism more attractive in the long run.

I think Trump's impulses re: Muslims and "Mexicans" are very much in line with fascist and other far right totalitarian regimes. Worth keeping in mind that Nazism didn't explicitly advocate ethnic cleansing as part of their platform (which is not to say that Hitler didn't believe that they should all be murdered as early as 1920) but were much initially focused on expulsion of non-Germans.

I gotta say I'm really confused by the "well he's not trying to dismantle democracy" line. I mean, if *you* decided to enact my tinfoil hat scenario from the primary thread, would you actually mention any antidemocratic intentions at this point?

Idk, maybe the term isn't fascist, but I feel like some form of widespread labeling needs to be done in order to differentiate him and whoever picks up his banner in four years as a different animal from the usual "Jesus told me to cut taxes" people, especially in the minds of people who, unlike me, are clever enough not to be wasting hours of their days every day following this bullshit. As scary as those guys can be, their gameplan doesn't trend towards the same kind of existential threat that makes an f-word-style regime so brutal and hard to reverse.

That said, I'm completely open to the idea that I just grew up post-Reagan and thus consider the actually-far-more-dangerous religious right to simply be a part of the scenery but am scared by the new shiny bad thing because it's new and shiny (to my personal experience, I mean, obviously this shit ain't new).

xp there's nothing in trump's presentation of history that suggests the kind of mythological cleansing of the other that hitler was obsessed w/. it's not like hitler got into power and then decided to get rid of all the jews. he was talking about jewish conspiracies and the stab-in-the-back myth very early on. it's all over mein kampf.

Indeed, in Mein Kampf, written in the early 1920s, Hitler explicitly linked the imagined deceit of the Jews in the First World War with the need for their destruction, saying that the ‘sacrifice of millions at the front’ would have been prevented if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.’ii

moreover if you take his distinctions seriously he wants to get rid of undocumented immigrants (not American citizens of Mexican extract) and apparently backtracked on not allowing muslim American citizens into the united states. that's def not the totalizing of identity that fascism specializes in. the german people were germans, not jews or gypsies. ditto the italian people. but trump's American people includes Mexicans and Muslims. it's just the non-American Mexicans and Muslims he doesn't want and that isn't a concern exclusive to fascism unless you believe that all anti-immigrant sentiment is inherently fascistic but i see no reason to make that claim.

Nazism is hardly an ideology at all beyond the struggle of races and the anti-semitism at the heart of that, it's not only not incidental to Hitler's politics but his theoretical politics never went very far beyond it

Nazism isn't Fascism tbf

Right but Nazism also /= Fascism either, that's why it's a subset of it. I'd say Trump started demonizing immigrants and Muslims pretty much from the get go too. If your argument is "but he didn't doesn't say he want to kill them all so it's not fascism" then I think basically nothing that's Nazism will ever be Fascism to you.

I'm not saying that he's not a fascist because he didn't say he wants to kill them all. I'm saying that he is distinguishing within Mexican and Muslim groups which suggests a less than totalizing vision of peoplehood and Otherness.

Racial "cleansing" isn't necessarily inherent in fascism. The idea of rebirth is arguably more important. Racial "cleansing" is often the result of that impulse though.

If you wanted to make the case that Trump was a fascist, there's quite a lot of crossover between his movement and the palingenesis that is one of the core building blocks of fascism. There's nothing beyond the surface though.

think people shd draw some lines between "policies Trump really gives a shit about", "things Trump will say because he thinks it might get him elected", "things Trump will say because he enjoys playing the asshole character 'Donald Trump'" and "things Trump would actually be allowed to do by all the other power-holders in the US in the hugely unlikely event he became President?" because i think this stuff all makes a difference to how seriously you dissect his opinions/try to label him

altho to quote JCLC calling assholes fascists is a time-honored tradition

so i'm not sure that "make america great again" is an example of fascistic rebirth. not least because what president has not campaigned on some level under the banner of making american great again? isn't every non-incumbant campaign pretty much a "change" campaign? and he isn't really speaking to a rebirth of a white identity - even tho some supremacists have heard things that resonate for them. has he really talked at all about whiteness and white consciousness (both staples of supremacist movements)?

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

everyone itt probably knows both the strict and loose definitions of the word fascist and understands donald trumps' political views and place vis-a-vis the republican party. there are aspects of his appeal that call back to strongman fascist leaders, but not so long ago we had a cowboy president who had a 90% approval rating and who said stuff like 'you're either with us or against us'. even though that guy was less openly racist I'm not sure the situation was less 'fascist'.

trump appeals to the white-identity nationalist reactionaries who form the base of the republican party. this group existed before donald trump and they'll exist after him, he just found himself w/ a bulworth-esque situation where he can say whatever he wants (so exactly what they want to hear rather than mostly what they want to hear) as he's not tied to any political donors or a political career.

geez I go tot sleep for a few hours

xxp It's not racial identity he's talking about, it's national identity. Pinochet was arguably not much more racist than a lot of other Latin American leaders.

Trump's palingenetic appeal - one great leader will return a faded and corrupt nation to its former glory by sweeping away the old order of both political stripes and giving birth to the new forged in his own image - is outside of the scope of yr standard politician who'll "make x great again" but i don't think he really believes it or would know what to do with the power given the opportunity.

"one great leader will return a faded and corrupt nation to its former glory by sweeping away the old order of both political stripes and giving birth to the new forged in his own image" i'm not going to say it's impossible to squint and see this as trump but i think it's a bit of a stretch. he's running as a republican, he says he likes a lot of the other candidates, he has agreed not to run as an independent, he's deeply indebted to the current system, he talks about america "winning again" but not as a rebirth or awakening. i think he's much closer to a candidate claiming to make america great again than a fascistic leader.

he has agreed not to run as an independent,

oh come on

you're penchant for giving him the benefit of the doubt is truly baffling

your egh it's early for me

i'm not giving him any benefit of the doubt, i'm just looking at what he has said and how he has presented himself. if we're talking about his true motivations i think there's a slam-dunk case that he's a berlusconi-style buffoon who doesn't believe or give a shit about any of this. if we're going to talk about him as a fascist it needs to be on the level of his political presentation and reception.

I'd argue he's not running as a Republican. He's running for the Republican nomination as Donald Trump. Either way, he's not really a fascist though i wouldn't discount the idea that there's a crossover between traditional fascism and some elements of his support base who wouldn't self-identify as such.

in the last debate they asked him (and then after the debate he was asked 2-3 more times in interviews) about whether he'd run as an independent and he said (not exact quote) that he has grown to respect the other candidates and he feels a part of the republican party and so no he has decided he won't run as an independent and he just hopes the republican party treats him fairly at the convention. he also kept emphasizing that in some polls he beats hillary bc i think he has moved onto making the case to the party that he is a bet they should take.

if we're talking about his true motivations i think there's a slam-dunk case that he's a berlusconi-style buffoon who doesn't believe or give a shit about any of this.

otm

he's made it abundantly clear his "commitment" to the Republican Party is conditional on how he's "treated" - he doesn't give a shit about the party.

he's using the party, he has no allegiance to it

i think he's going to try and start his own news network tbh

Actually Donald Trump isn't a fascist, he is a dumb whiny man-baby with freedom fries where his testicles should be

anyway I agree w what Alex in SF and JCLC have said so far and stand by what I said on the og campaign thread: there's enough overlap between the positions and statements Trump has made and traditionally fascist ideologies to merit the use of the term imo. I think it's strange and inaccurate to act like his racism and eagerness to exploit racism in his base are situational responses to particular conditions - there is no "problem" with undocumented immigrants or Muslims in the sense that Trump and his base think it is (that they're "taking American jobs", depressing wages, destroying American culture, pose a security threat, etc.), those are all window-dressing manifestations of deep-seated racism rooted in the sense that the volk (white + Christian) of America feel threatened. That his statements don't mirror or match the extent of Hitler's views is irrelevant, it's the appeal to the violation of "true" Americans, to the sense of aggrieved identity, that is fascist.

xp

since we've got this thread and part of the title is "what is fascism," let me ask a question i asked facebook yesterday:

In 1944 George Orwell wrote in "What is Fascism?":

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make.

Here's the link for full context: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

do we reveal anything new/useful about the world by calling him a fascist, or do we just enjoy having the opportunity to use the word?

back to iatee's point, beyond our potential (ab)use of the term in our little backwater of the internet, to the limited extent that the press/media has any impact on the polity's grasp of the candidates I think it's useful for major media outlets to be comfortable applying the term to Chump, it could be useful in solidifying opposition to him and making the views he espouses less acceptable in the general discourse. I think the degree to which we can limit the general acceptability of hateful demagoguery with potentially violent consequences is an important end-goal in itself.

xp

What do you suppose are the admissions Orwell thinks Fascists, Conservatives and Socialists are unwilling to make?

I would assume he means they don't want to admit how much alike they can be

i don't know why you think in a political context saturated with accusations of fascism applied to all sorts of disparate figures, ideas + parties calling trump a fascist would be anything but another trump in that bucket

guys this is all just pre-opening hype for his DC hotel

https://www.trumphotelcollection.com/washington-dc/

Interesting article. Admit that I know the author and think he is a total piece of shit, but his political writing is actually quite good most of the time. His book on the work of art in the age of deindustrialization is great, and I saw him give an excellent lecture on Sekula and logistics once upon a time

MAGA paranoia found its left-wing other in rumors that rioters were police provocateurs or white nationalist infiltrators, and that the nightly fireworks displays which took overs cities that pandemic summer were not the work of bored kids on lockdown but orchestrated by the FBI to terrorize city dwellers.

Not sure I understand this. These are understandable paranoias. The fireworks were definitely not an op, but outside white supremacists really did try to start shit, Kyle Rittenhouse is not a paranoid fantasy but a real fascist murderer.

Police infiltration of protest movements is real: https://www.opb.org/article/2024/08/21/oregon-aclu-sues-medford-alleging-police-illegally-monitored-political-activists

Yeah, also weird to throw this together with the bipartisan push against Palestine - the ppl protesting for Palestine prob overlap a lot w/ ppl who had concerns about white supremacist infiltration of protests.

"Admit that I know the author and think he is a total piece of shit, but his political writing is actually quite good most of the time."

Just started following this writer about a year ago on twitter, had some interesting posts on mostly literature and communism.

Haven't read his writing until now but learned quite a bit from the piece, even if I understood 60% (these are usually the best ones).

he has always been kind to me, but stories from friends are pretty wild. he also was always one of those “i need to get in front of cameras and give speeches” guys during Occupy and subsequent movements

The lads at CNN weigh in

This is where we are: @TheLeadCNN showing the dictionary definition of fascism on the air pic.twitter.com/8AmOA1d8ZW

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 14, 2024

“Trump has been called a Fascist, but some Fascists disagree”

Trump certainly must be a fat cyst of pus.

prompted by Mark Milley, I assume?

Yeah, they only listen to you if you're a General

A significant portion of the country thinks we’re commienazis it’s probably good to explain fascism like we’re 5

I saw mention of "competitive authoritarianism" on bluesky and found this interview; it's a useful breakdown of where we're at: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/harvard-professor-steven-levitsky-right-now-the-u-s-is-ceasing-to-be-a-democracy-a-d6595df5-68a5-4b74-ab09-1dbf5179ddbd

I'm worried about the United Kingdom right now, because Nigel Farage's so-called Reform Party is leading in the polls there. The UK has a much more centralized, majoritarian political system. If Farage were to win a parliamentary majority, he could cause even more damage than Trump.

DER SPIEGEL: At least the freedom of opinion appears to still be guaranteed in the U.S.

Ya think?

Honestly, and I don’t know if anyone else is feeling similarly, but I am just becoming more defiant and outspoken. I taught a class on book bans last week, then in the next class gave a lecture on free speech, its illusions, Mahmoud Khalil, and fascist creep. I’ve hung a pride flag in our front window next to the Free Palestine poster that’s been up since November 2023. I’m going to more protests and volunteering more where I can. I started a new LGBTQ group for the gyms where I work.

More and more people seem to be seeing the light and being more outspoken. I just hope it continues and these fascist fucks don’t kill us all

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop

I feel very cynical about this person's ideas about what to do about it but then I'm old

"Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Yeah Libs are funny except it's fash in clownface

it reminds me of that IT crowd episode where there's a fire in the office and Moss sends a fucking email to the fire department or something

xps - The difficulty with that one-sentence analysis is that it is completely unclear what rules the democrats could break that would do a better job of obstructing the fascists. For example, which rules should they break to prevent Trump from deporting undocumented immigrants to Sudan? How would that work?

Most of what Trump and the fascists have been doing consists of stretching to the breaking point laws the Congress passed across the past six or seven decades granting the executive wide latitude to make judgments and use 'emergency' powers, or else they have ignored SCOTUS rulings from much more liberal courts, knowing that this court is itching to overturn those precedents and put the stamp of legality on their actions.

iow, the fascists have identified every weakness in the system and exploited them ruthlessly, they've been gaming the rules in dangerous and unorthodox ways, but they occupy all the positions of power and under the rules set out in the constitution, they can rewrite the rules any way they please. The 14th amendment only works when all the branches of government apply it.

It's not up to 'the democrats' to fix this. It is up to 'the people' to demand it and back up their demands with action.

did you read the article? it into detail over which rules they can break and how...

goes into detail

but yes, of course, Aimless, i think everyone here agrees that the government alone won't "save us", especially those of us who work in certain fields and interact with certain government agencies. whatever.

I read the article. It basically agrees with me.

Here's what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

Well, the fascists have won the elections and they are well into rewriting all the laws and legal mechanisms in their favor. They are in control. They aren't breaking the rules. They own them. The final court of appeal is not the SCOTUS, and certainly not 'the democrats', but the people.

The Blue State Coalition gambit is worth trying, but largely as a test of how violent the counterattack will be and how the people would respond to that violence.

okay 👍

RIP big guy. I always liked him.

Donald Trump is not a Fascist, a truth so obvious as to be worth the clusterfuck that's about to ensue

― Coombesbat 18 (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, December 23, 2015 6:42 AM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

fucking lol

I should say that there is something about that article that rings a little bit AI to me, like this guy "researched" by asking ChatGPT if any democratically elected fascists were ever removed from power democratically, and then just decided to go ahead and use a lot of the output, tuned for short paragraphs and that kind of 'brutally honest' blog speak. In general that tone is like kryptonite to me. In a way it almost doesn't matter - this guy could just be doing his own very good job of like, rawdogging that tone, and doing it so well that it seems like AI lol

Actually Donald Trump isn't a fascist, he is a dumb whiny man-baby with freedom fries where his testicles should be

― you're breaking the NAP (DJP), Wednesday, December 23, 2015 11:36 AM bookmarkflaglink

I kind of stand by this with the huge caveat that this is actually the definition of a fascist

That said I posted it because it is thought provoking and gets at something that bugs the hell out of me, specifically when fellow travellers quite understandably get excited about a poll that shows how unpopular Trump is.. I want to be like.. HE ALREADY WON!! it doesn't matter how unpopular he is! Fascists are usually widely disliked! It doesn't matter!

xpost lol

That piece cannot seem to make up its mind about whether history is or is not destiny.

Like, yes, everything that happens for a first time was preceded by infinite instances of it not happening. And the. The time it happens, it does so because circumstances are different.

The article explicitly acknowledges that - you might say it's the entire organising structural element

I think even a fascist regime needs some popular support and at least acquiescence by everyone else.

The Nazis delayed their euthanasia program because of pushback from the populace.

xpost not by everyone else. Just a few key people

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/hitler-warnings-weimar-democracy-daniel-ziblatt

I kind of stand by this with the huge caveat that this is actually the definition of a fascist

― our beloved RIFF LORD (DJP)

yeah honestly that post holds up really well, only thing i'd add is that over the past ten years it's become pretty clear that there are also plenty of whiny entitled women who are fascists :)

No longer hyperbole

idk if it ever was, he merely was an underachiever before

Miller and Ogles (tennessee republican) have pulled out the new line that the US has the right to any territory it wants because of its strength. Ogles even called the US the “dominant predator force” in the hemisphere. This contempt at even the pretense of the rule of law combined with an expansionist agenda, the persecution of immigrants, and the complicity, or partnership, of tech and oil companies — it’s enough.

Fascists.

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

This was clear enough a month before the Iowa caucuses and eleven months before the 2016 general election.

Idk what thread it should be on but it appears that ICE shot and likely murdered a protestor in Minneapolis.

As she was driving away

Put it on main

The thread title seems so quaint now

ya can we lock this thread under the rationale of question definitively answered (with the added benefit of one less trump thread to follow)

agreed we have enough redundant Donald threads

Q: What is Fascism?
A: The Trump administration

Q: Is Trump a Fascist?
A: See above.

think the first half of the question is still worth discussing, agreed that the second half has now been settled comprehensively

I found this a good read:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/american-authoritarianism-levitsky-way-ziblatt