I think what held a lot of us back from using the F-word was Trump’s sheer buffoonery. We thought fascism, if it came to America, would be a well thought out, well-executed, and complicated scheme by evil but intelligent idealogues. Of course Project 2025 shows that it is, if only behind the scenes. But the Project 2025 brainiacs were pretty late to the scene themselves. Turns out all you need to bring fascism to America is a lot of resentful white people who see an opportunity to turn the schoolyard bully against the kids they don’t like.
Exactly. We didn't, or at least I didn't, quite connect the dots between know-nothingism and fascism until a few years into the Trump years. The connective tissue became visible when I started to recognize that the idiotic assertions and false claims weren't said to persuade, they were a flex -- we can blatantly lie and get away with it.
To be fair, everyone from Sinclair Lewis to Robert Heinlein taught us thant an American fascist had to be a backwoods fundamentalist preacher, not a snake oil brand manager. It took the enthusiastic embrace of the Big Lie by the entire Republican party to give up the old dream of religion killing its arch-enemy democracy.
I think this is what "Face In The Crowd" got wrong, the idea that working-class Americans would want one of their own as a fascist leader. It underestimated the depth of worship for the rich, as better and smarter than the rest of us.
Remember, Lonesome Rhodes started out as a Celebrity, a mashup off Arthur Godfrey and Will Rogers, both Men of the People. Rhodes was as much one of their own as the millionaire Godfrey. Being "rich" was Trump's talent, not his core appeal.
I don't think we need to score their competence like it's some fascist gymnastics meet. The millions of dead bodies they created demonstrate that they were more than competent-enough. I doubt the current fascist threat would prove as "competent" in their body count, but again, that's really not the point, is it?
I think that's misrepresenting what we're talking about here: the problem is that buffoonery is used as an excuse to ignore encroaching fascism. The main media laughs at Trump, which enables his defenders to pass things off as hyperbole or satire, statements that go unchallenged and still go unchallenged.
The NYT & WaPo et al. made the exact same mistakes in during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini that they did during the 2016 presidential campaign — that they still made in 2020 and 2024.
Efficacy or toxicity is another matter, & rings louder & truer once the bodies pile up... :(
One bright person—I wish I could remember who; TPM? Brian Beutler? The American Prospect?—recently made the observation that buffoonery is often an element of fascism. The fascist mobs aren’t embarrassed by Trump’s buffoonery; they *enjoy* it like teevee or pro wrestling, while it leaves the respectable pundits flummoxed about Whether Any Of This Is Serious.
‘He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless’--Van Jones, of all people. Another instance of "Rules for thee but not for me." *He* is all the more powerful because he doesn't have to look or act normal.
There are only two political parties in this country. They are fairly evenly split among the citizenry that votes. To not take the leader of one of those two parties seriously shows dereliction of duty to those citizens.
"2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances."—Michael Anton
Between the mushiness of defining fascism and that it just wasn't cool to label anyone as fascist, well, yeah, sure, there was much avoidance of using the term.
But a few points...
Does it help electorally to label Trump a fascist? Since the masses don't what it means, I dunno, maybe it's harmless to use re Donnie. OTOH, it excites libs to hear Kamala drop the F bomb there do maybe it excites the GOTV thing a little.
Meanwhile, the problem isn't so much Trump being a fascist but that the GOP is, if not quite a fascist party, certainly fascism-supporting. Certainly their special interests are, at the least cool with fascism and pretty much buying same from their puppets in both parties.
What I occasionally wonder: but for tweedledee/tweedledum kind-of-sham elections, are we already a fascist state? Can't say the Party of Clinton is anti-fasc other than (obviously) lip service.
What we are, if we have to reduce it to one word, is an oligarchy. But of course, no member of the Party of Clinton can ever criticize that. Hurts party revenue.
I think it's important to retain the distinction between oligarchy/plutocracy (which is what we have now) and outright fascism (which is where certain plutocrats want to go).
I get confused with the whole definition of fascism thing and the question of to what extent we really have free elections. Between gerrymandering, Democrats’ failure to contest all elections and run let’s say better, less Republican-like candidates, and a disengaged, poorly informed electorate, I don’t know where we are on the free contested election/sham election spectrum.
I believe the UN standard is "free and fair" elections. One thing to remember is that all US elections are run by the states, so you need to differentiate between elections in California and elections in Georgia or North Carolina. If you want Democrats to start gaming the system as Republicans do, your're not gonna be happy with what the Democratic party turns into, because hustling begats hustlers. One thing fascism teaches us is that brute force works great, for a while.
One distinction I see is the open celebration of violence. Oligarchs rule you through the law, which they have written for their convenience, and there's violence inherent in that because the cops are violent. But the violence isn't an end in itself, and it's a thing that's played down. With fascists, fantasies of violence - and then actual violence - are a big part of their appeal, offering angry, frustrated men the possibility of getting away with murder without even having to put on a badge.
About two decades ago I caught a discussion on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” and in the call-in segment the question of “are we already a fascist state?” was raised. This was, recall, a couple of years into the “Homeland Security” era. The guest, an English historian whose specialty the real thing was, scoffed. “No,” he said, “what you have here isn’t fascism. I call it an ‘oligarchic authoritarian system,’ which is not really the same thing.”
Oligarchic Authoritarian System! It rolls off the tongue. For a while I took to thinking of this country as an OASis of stability in a troubled world. And of course, even taking into account its many black sins, the Cheney Shogunate now looks, measured against the MAGA crowd, like a model of enlightened administration, Periclean statesmanship and Cromwellian rectitude, and I say this as one who has long believed that the forty-third president and his veep ought to have been packed in salt and transported via shipping container to The Hague.
Like Victorian virtue, like internet anonymity, this country’s international standing will prove to have been an element more easily forfeited than retrieved. Even if the Restoration is thwarted in the coming months, the rest of the world will know that the USA has demonstrated a potential, a likelihood, even an eventual all but-certainty of turning violently feral. They, and we, will be obliged to live with that awareness.
Tactical politics? James Carville may be correct more than wrong, but he's still a jerk and I wouldn't trust him with a lunch order, let alone a campaign in 2024. When dealing with an electorate in the state this one is in, you need a sledgehammer to get their attention, let alone influence them.
Trump is an immediate threat because of his stunning incompetence. He will crash the economy, destabilize Europe, and quite possibly start a shooting war with Mexico, and that's just the first 100 days. But yes, the Republican party is the real long-term threat because their committment to doubling down on gaming the system has led them to supporting insurrection and violence, and like a T-1000 they will not stop there.
And yeah, oligarchy. We're not quite in the Promised Land of Guilded Age 2.0, but that is exactly where the Republican party has committed its lives, fortune, and whatever passes for their scared honor to. The last time it took a global depression and world war to break its back, and that only lasted 30 years. Hello, President Nixon.
I've known about the Hitler speeches in the nightstand for a long time, certainly since the first time he ran.
I doubt Trump really made a decision to become a fascist. I think his ignorant, asshole personality just happens to be really compatible with fascism. Trump's not very deep.
I'm confident we win. Harris is a great candidate and the machine is impressive. If we do win I hope we're not stupid enough to dismantle it after the election.
I'm relatively sanguine about this. I Imagine I'm just burned out on worry. I can't think of anything I've worried about this long. If he wins, the palace intrigue will be epic. They'll do what they always do, spend all their time figuring out how much they can steal. This time it'll have the added spice of multiple factions who would profit more from a dead Trump than a live one. I can see JD and his butt buddy billionaires pulling off an assassination. I can't see anyway he would consolidate power after that happened.
It's the assholes deliberately pushing my worry button that piss me off. I've already got plenty of organic, free-range worry, I don't need the high-fructose-corn syrup version, thanks.
I've since blocked them in my Google News, but Politico had a story, "The Angry Men Who Support Trump." Because sure, that's worth a few thousand words, we haven't given these assholes sufficient attention, have we? And then I wonder who's voting for Harris? Will she get ANY votes? Has Politico EVER run a story, "Here's why these people are voting for Harris"?
I mean, "angry reactionary white guys driving politics" goes at least back to 1994, when they brought us the (until then) stupidest assembly of Congressfolks and Newt Gingrich declared war on the English language. c.f. Backlash, by Susan Faludi.
He's an arrogant, wealthy (?), privileged white guy who was never told "no" and made his first celebrity status as an asshole landlord and his second as the guy who yelled "YOU'RE FIRED!" at people. He just fits the position.
It was pretty much game over when conservatives started yapping about how taxes are worse than slavery, but were also yipping about how actual slavery wasn't so bad. Arbeit macht frie.
Some right-winger recently suggested that after we deport all the 𝘜𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘯 who presently toil in the fields, the resultant labor shortage can easily be addressed by requiring all able-bodied Real Americans (presumably with exemptions for the scions of privilege) to spend a year of “National Service,” or 𝘞𝘦𝘩𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘵, harvesting the crops. This flickered briefly across the screen sometime the past month or six weeks, and I recall comments expressing surprise that the loons were now looking to Maoist models of governance.
I imagine that for our sins the definition of “able-bodied” for this purpose might be extended to cover most of REBID’s commentariat when it came time to meet the enlistment quotas for these agricultural re-education camps.
They'll make me hang my laptop around my neck as they parade me through the village. Plus I commit the sin of wearing glasses, I must be made to shovel shit until I die from exhaustion.
I still think the prestige media won’t use the term fascist to describe the MAGAts until they get a logo formed out of the actual F word, uniforms and a party called the Fascist Party. Maybe not even then.
The first time I remember hearing of Donald Trump was during the 1980s, and he was such a clown even back then, being pushy and obnoxious and flaunting his privilege, that I never really took him seriously. Until he pushed himself into the Central Park jogger case and advocated for the five young men who were arrested to be put to death.
I'll admit that the death penalty is the one issue that this wild-eyed liberal goes along with. I think there are some people who are so awful they don't deserve to live among the rest of us, and I know that sounds awful and makes me no different than a fascist. But I have lost people I loved to someone who was later put to death for his crimes, and I feel no remorse over my attitude.
I would like Trump to have been relegated to the midst of obscurity. By being elevated to the office of president, I'm not going to get my wish, but as a human being, he's a dismal failure. I suppose I'll have to be comforted by that.
I’ve gone back and forth on the death penalty over the past half century and change that I’ve paid attention to civic affairs, veering from absolute opposition to favoring it for people loitering near my car with malign intent. I agree with Elaine that some human beings are wastes of what could otherwise be usefully employed as compostable organic material, but under the capricious fashion in which the “justice” system is administered, capital punishment is meted out arbitrarily, and must inevitably result in the occasional execution of innocent men. I am accordingly, reluctantly, agin it.
Incidentally, I am curious about some of the horror stories I’ve seen regarding current methods of “chemical” execution, because in a few days I will be present when a person close to me exercises her rights under California’s “End of Life Option Act,” and the attending physician, who has overseen scores of these, assures us that the end (a quick downing of a bitter pharmaceutical cocktail followed by a sorbet chaser so that the aftertaste does not follow the patient into the afterlife) will be peaceful. I suppose not being shackled to a gurney in a “chamber”—fresh air and clear skies will figure into the venue—might be one element conducing toward this.
The question is, "Who makes the call on whose life isn't worth it?" It sure isn't going to be you or me, and even then I wouldn't trust myself to get it right every time. Thus, I am against the death penalty as I do not believe it will ever be applied fairly/correctly
I've a different take (possibly previously shared). Consider a cop, taking down a bad guy. Really bad guy. Murderously bad. But the cop, after a harrowing moment or two, captures him. From that moment on, no matter the immediate circumstances, as long as the bad guy can't inflict mayhem right then and there, the cop is responsible for delivering that guy in reasonable shape to the nearest jail. All subsequent legal/constabulary processes take place in well-protected courts and solidly secure prisons, wherein the main responsibility is to keep the guy alive.
Years go by in that manner, then somebody says that yeah, the cop was in grave danger during the arrest and coulda killed the guy and saved us all a lotta money and time, but he didn't because that's the law. Now we kill the guy altho he's no danger to anyone, being locked up alla time? Where's the logic in that? Sure it's a punishment determined by judges and juries, but it does not fit the conditions at hand.
There are definitely more of the former (libs or non-fascist identifying non-libs) but with the electoral college....who knows what'll happen.
I'm a proud early-adapter when it comes to having used the f-word in relation to trump and his shitlings, though I was often attacked for using it ("you can't throw a word like that around lightly" - which I wasn't). I'm not happy to have been proved correct.
The Nazis had socialism in their name, therefore Hitler was left wing, though he didn't even know it. Stalin was also a fascist because he was a communist, which is a fascistic movement. Wouldn't you have loved to grade Jonah Goldberg's papers in a Europe 1914-45 class? That dumb son of a bitch probably thought the Kaiser liberated Belgium.
The Nazi's had socialism in their name because capitalism had failed so badly even rich people knew their names were mud if they tried to bring back capitalism
Kamala, for one, didn’t mince words at the CNN Townhall last night with Anderson Cooper. Asked by Cooper if she thought Tubby is a fascist, she andwered in the affirmative. Whether she thinks the rest of the MAGAts are, she didn’t say.
Trump didn't start as a fascist. He had to fat into it. He is sui generis not fascist because he lacks self-consciousness.
Someone coaxed and coached him into the openly full-fledged fascist we now see today.
He fell into the goose step rants rather than woke one morning and wondered if a little more Mussolini in his mug was a hood look.
His time in office showed an erratic flirting with despotism. He couldn't make up his mind. Others saw the potential and emerged from under rocks and out of the closet to hold the mirror up for him and the whole world.
Et viola! Let there be no doubt, these guys are weak now and mostly bluffing, but let them get a handle on government again and it's off to the racism, domestic persecutions, and eventually a foreign war to end all.
I think he's more like Cartman in that early South Park episode being forced to watch "Hitler Was a Very Bad Man" and coming away thinking Hitler was awesome.
I am slightly optimistic, too. I will be spending the next ten days in London, England (for fun!) and stupidly have it planned to return the day before election day. Maybe I'll be too jet lagged to even read the news or open my laptop.
I plan to power down Big Cheese here and sleep through the entire goddamn election night. It will be what it will be, and I’d rather face the (tentative?) outcome, good or ill, well-rested and with a cuppa joe before me.
When Reagan took office I predicted that the next wave of American politics would be fascist. I was off by 40 years, but I'm still counting it as a win.
As I've written elsewhere, however, the F-word, even if it's now common in the discourse, will have no effect. Trump's supporters want fascism, and for those on the fence (if there are any), fascism will still seem too remote an idea to matter. The democratic process has been so degraded that the number of people who care--I mean really care--about democracy, as opposed to fascism, is very small.
No. You were correct then. Adolph had his years in prison before ramping it up. Reagan was Friendly Fascism from the get. Takes time to get from breaking unions and giving back oligarchs' tax money to demonizing every non-alabaster-skinned person, condoning mass murders of same, and celebrating sedition...but here we are. Reich, on schedule.
The F-word will have no effect on Trump supporters because they neither understand nor care what it is called, it is the Natural Order, restored at last. As long as they are recognized and acknowledged as the default, they don't care about side-effects.
Yes, respected figures are finally saying Trump is a fascist, which means his supporters, public and private, are too. No doubt this will engender a MAGA embrace of fascism, just as they embraced being deplorable and flying the flag of the slave-owning traitors. The merch is probably being produced right now and by the weekend there’ll be flags and t-shirts at Trump rallies announcing, “Proud Patriotic American Fascist for Trump!” and “Make America Fascist Again!” Trump will start his Madison Square Garden rally with an extended peon to Charles Lindbergh’s ginormous schlong and claim the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped by a Costa Rican immigrant that FDR let in. In light of all this, there’s naught to do but switch to calling Trump a Nazi. I’ve heard that Mike Godwin has admitted Godwin’s Law does not apply to discussions of Trump so, until the Fascist Supreme Court makes it illegal to call anyone a Nazi, let ‘er rip: “Fascist? Fuck no, that asshole is Nazi through and through!”
Ever since the Ride Down The Golden Escalator and subsequent rush of stupefying events, who can keep track of time? But the language and behavior was all there in 2016 (Mexican rapists, jeering at a disabled reporter, etc.) If you knew the least about Trump, you saw a cradle bigot sired by a KKK member and, through the Roy Cohn connection, mentored by someone who knew from fascist tactics and gangsterism. There was all that background, and a lifelong conviction in his own Greatness.
The fascism could be blurred by the clownishness (first Inaugration Day action: ordering the NPS to change the crowd numbers), but then: Muslim Ban. The fact that the Emoluments Clause somehow did not apply to running the money laundering hotel--right away, that showed how meaningless laws and Constitution were.
We've always had home-grown models. Jim Crow states were absolutely fascist regimes. The Business Plot against Roosevelt failed, but the modern successors have seized control of enough institutions to be as close as they are to achieving their coup against democracy. But this time around, the cartoon villainy of Project 2025 has been blatant enough to break through to a number of normies, especially after Dobbs.
I don't think it was actually Sinclair Lewis, but the quote ended up being totally fucking accurate: Fascism came to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Fucking nailed it.
The association of Lewis with that quote is striking. He apparently didn't say it, and the quote itself doesn't have a confirmed source, though Father Coughlin's prominence was obvious at the time Lewis was writing. If the thought sinks in that it *can* happen here, it's pretty easy to figure out what Americanized trappings will aim to make fascism happen.
It would seem Thompson or Lewis could have written it, but apparently not. It says something that we know the quote, but lit scholars can't find a source for it. For ex., the end of this page suggests some less pithy 1930s sources that expressed the idea. https://about.illinoisstate.edu/sinclairlewis/faq/
Its really, really important to remember that none of this (Trump) works without the enthusiastic support of the Republican party. The Emoluments Clause was a dead issue because the Republican party made it so, not because of Trump superpower. And if the Republican party will support Trump to cling to power, they will support anything. This does not get better if Trump loses, it just pauses getting even worse.
For sure, and it's implicit in a conversation about applying the F-word. Trump had the backing of the party, he made it acceptable for the party to be open about fascism, and anyone who objected was purged. Everything about Trump is so egregious that it's worn down a good bit of resistance to recognizing him as a fascist. The question is the degree to which our fellow citizens can notice the same thing about the party and its minions at all levels, from wing-nut school boards to the Scofflaw Court.
There's a genre of movie comedies where a Manic Pixie Dream Girl encounters an uptight guy and overwhelms/seduces/forces him to loosen up, baby, take a walk on the wild side. That's close to what Trump did to the party. Like the uptight guy who used to party back in college, the Republican party had a lean into fascism since the nutzo plot to overthrow Roosevelt in the 30's, through the Birchers and Pat Buchannan. Trump's superpower of commanding manic loyalty from their voter base made them fall in line, and the vast majority learned to let their fascism flag fly or get drummed out of the party.
As far as our fellow citizens go, I remain convinced a majority of them neither like not understand politics, and at least a plurality consider the Presidency a show they watch on television. I further believe some Trump supporters do so for entertainment purposes only, and almost all of them include pissing off the right people as an important motivation. This comes from talking to Trump supporters, including my entire family. The threat of a fascist government is an entertaining story arc for the committed, and an abstract theory they don't quite understand to our "independent" voters. Both committed sides are committed, and all this hammering is on that "independent" vote in hopes of influencing some of them. Until the ratfucking begins on Election Day, there's no other field on which to fight.
I have not found any response to those folks other than "My dad and his brother went to war in Europe and the South Pacific to kill as many as possible of the sort of folks you now revere (and hang out with). Maybe your kin did too. Why are you switching sides now? Why are you dishonoring the memory of your parents?"
I was going to say "Jonah Goldberg " and have appropriate farty sound effects:but you got there.
Like a lot of term, it's been bandied about so much as to have the edges worn off.
Someone and I'm not seeing exactly who now said that "they're not really classical fascist because they don't have an ideology".
Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck: "vy not a chicken?"
Hot with the shart,
And you feel shame
<can't finish the verse tho...>
Hot with the shart,
Trump knows no shame.
Soiling his drawers
Is part of his game.
He'll shit on you
If you give him a chance,
Along with his buddy,
J.D. Vance.
*applauding wildly*
Derelict takes to the net, Miss GM with the assist...
I think i cries out for a Nashville country, nay, Chase Adkins treatment...
That right there...yeah, that, right there...
2 marks.
Well done!
Hot with the shart
and you feel shame
you give fash a bad name
"they're not really classical fascist..."
Oh, not CLASSICAL fascist, well that makes all the difference, then.
“Classical Fash,” a lesser-known Mason Williams single from the sixties.
Pop Fash: no classicists need apply.
"This expression of all the worst things humans can be does not EXACTLY match that OTHER expression of all the worst things humans can be."
[adjusts glasses] Technically, the CLASSICAL fascist period lasted from 1730-1820, and before that it was BAROQUE fascism.
Not REAL fascism, but just sparkling jingo.
If you only know Classical Fash, then YOU'RE AN ELITIST.
I think what held a lot of us back from using the F-word was Trump’s sheer buffoonery. We thought fascism, if it came to America, would be a well thought out, well-executed, and complicated scheme by evil but intelligent idealogues. Of course Project 2025 shows that it is, if only behind the scenes. But the Project 2025 brainiacs were pretty late to the scene themselves. Turns out all you need to bring fascism to America is a lot of resentful white people who see an opportunity to turn the schoolyard bully against the kids they don’t like.
History has made both Mussolini and Hitler look far more competent than they actually were
Exactly. We didn't, or at least I didn't, quite connect the dots between know-nothingism and fascism until a few years into the Trump years. The connective tissue became visible when I started to recognize that the idiotic assertions and false claims weren't said to persuade, they were a flex -- we can blatantly lie and get away with it.
To be fair, everyone from Sinclair Lewis to Robert Heinlein taught us thant an American fascist had to be a backwoods fundamentalist preacher, not a snake oil brand manager. It took the enthusiastic embrace of the Big Lie by the entire Republican party to give up the old dream of religion killing its arch-enemy democracy.
I think this is what "Face In The Crowd" got wrong, the idea that working-class Americans would want one of their own as a fascist leader. It underestimated the depth of worship for the rich, as better and smarter than the rest of us.
Remember, Lonesome Rhodes started out as a Celebrity, a mashup off Arthur Godfrey and Will Rogers, both Men of the People. Rhodes was as much one of their own as the millionaire Godfrey. Being "rich" was Trump's talent, not his core appeal.
I don't think we need to score their competence like it's some fascist gymnastics meet. The millions of dead bodies they created demonstrate that they were more than competent-enough. I doubt the current fascist threat would prove as "competent" in their body count, but again, that's really not the point, is it?
I think that's misrepresenting what we're talking about here: the problem is that buffoonery is used as an excuse to ignore encroaching fascism. The main media laughs at Trump, which enables his defenders to pass things off as hyperbole or satire, statements that go unchallenged and still go unchallenged.
The NYT & WaPo et al. made the exact same mistakes in during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini that they did during the 2016 presidential campaign — that they still made in 2020 and 2024.
Efficacy or toxicity is another matter, & rings louder & truer once the bodies pile up... :(
One bright person—I wish I could remember who; TPM? Brian Beutler? The American Prospect?—recently made the observation that buffoonery is often an element of fascism. The fascist mobs aren’t embarrassed by Trump’s buffoonery; they *enjoy* it like teevee or pro wrestling, while it leaves the respectable pundits flummoxed about Whether Any Of This Is Serious.
"Stupid libs, don't you know that was a JOKE?" goes way, way back.
‘He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless’--Van Jones, of all people. Another instance of "Rules for thee but not for me." *He* is all the more powerful because he doesn't have to look or act normal.
See also Johnson, Boris.
There are only two political parties in this country. They are fairly evenly split among the citizenry that votes. To not take the leader of one of those two parties seriously shows dereliction of duty to those citizens.
We must treat our rural diner-patrons with the utmost respect, except that we must never take a single thing they say seriously.
Bread (for the bitter soul) AND circuses (for the cameras).
obligatory Sartre quote https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity
Wow, and he wrote that before Internet comments were a thing.
"2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances."—Michael Anton
https://tinyurl.com/5yc6sn44
"... when they suffered not only voter rejection but also humiliation at the hands of a non-white person"
Probably not but coincidence but the porn phenomenon known as "Cuckoldry" skyrocketed in 2009 after Obama's first election.
Between the mushiness of defining fascism and that it just wasn't cool to label anyone as fascist, well, yeah, sure, there was much avoidance of using the term.
But a few points...
Does it help electorally to label Trump a fascist? Since the masses don't what it means, I dunno, maybe it's harmless to use re Donnie. OTOH, it excites libs to hear Kamala drop the F bomb there do maybe it excites the GOTV thing a little.
Meanwhile, the problem isn't so much Trump being a fascist but that the GOP is, if not quite a fascist party, certainly fascism-supporting. Certainly their special interests are, at the least cool with fascism and pretty much buying same from their puppets in both parties.
What I occasionally wonder: but for tweedledee/tweedledum kind-of-sham elections, are we already a fascist state? Can't say the Party of Clinton is anti-fasc other than (obviously) lip service.
What we are, if we have to reduce it to one word, is an oligarchy. But of course, no member of the Party of Clinton can ever criticize that. Hurts party revenue.
I think it's important to retain the distinction between oligarchy/plutocracy (which is what we have now) and outright fascism (which is where certain plutocrats want to go).
I get confused with the whole definition of fascism thing and the question of to what extent we really have free elections. Between gerrymandering, Democrats’ failure to contest all elections and run let’s say better, less Republican-like candidates, and a disengaged, poorly informed electorate, I don’t know where we are on the free contested election/sham election spectrum.
I believe the UN standard is "free and fair" elections. One thing to remember is that all US elections are run by the states, so you need to differentiate between elections in California and elections in Georgia or North Carolina. If you want Democrats to start gaming the system as Republicans do, your're not gonna be happy with what the Democratic party turns into, because hustling begats hustlers. One thing fascism teaches us is that brute force works great, for a while.
I had the next level down where both parties overwhelmingly aligned so that choice is arguably meaningless.
And then there’s the highest court in land tossing the works of what we do elect without any meaningful legal basis, that is, decisions based on fiat.
Lower down you get fuckery such as gerrymandering and, of late, intimidation of election officials.
So I’m not sure how well that “free and fair” applies as a practical matter.
One distinction I see is the open celebration of violence. Oligarchs rule you through the law, which they have written for their convenience, and there's violence inherent in that because the cops are violent. But the violence isn't an end in itself, and it's a thing that's played down. With fascists, fantasies of violence - and then actual violence - are a big part of their appeal, offering angry, frustrated men the possibility of getting away with murder without even having to put on a badge.
The streetlights shining brightly were so romanticly and beautifully reflected thru and upon the broken glass...Kristallnacht was lovely!
A day of love, one might say.
Only problem is eventually there ain't no mo glass to break...
"Bouncing the rubble" comes to mind.
Which is why Kristallnacht was not followed by Kristalltag.
About two decades ago I caught a discussion on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” and in the call-in segment the question of “are we already a fascist state?” was raised. This was, recall, a couple of years into the “Homeland Security” era. The guest, an English historian whose specialty the real thing was, scoffed. “No,” he said, “what you have here isn’t fascism. I call it an ‘oligarchic authoritarian system,’ which is not really the same thing.”
Oligarchic Authoritarian System! It rolls off the tongue. For a while I took to thinking of this country as an OASis of stability in a troubled world. And of course, even taking into account its many black sins, the Cheney Shogunate now looks, measured against the MAGA crowd, like a model of enlightened administration, Periclean statesmanship and Cromwellian rectitude, and I say this as one who has long believed that the forty-third president and his veep ought to have been packed in salt and transported via shipping container to The Hague.
Like Victorian virtue, like internet anonymity, this country’s international standing will prove to have been an element more easily forfeited than retrieved. Even if the Restoration is thwarted in the coming months, the rest of the world will know that the USA has demonstrated a potential, a likelihood, even an eventual all but-certainty of turning violently feral. They, and we, will be obliged to live with that awareness.
Ben Franklin: “Reputation and china are easily broken, and seldom well mended.”
. . . and the Yanks (and Soviets) are not coming to rescue you.
Tactical politics? James Carville may be correct more than wrong, but he's still a jerk and I wouldn't trust him with a lunch order, let alone a campaign in 2024. When dealing with an electorate in the state this one is in, you need a sledgehammer to get their attention, let alone influence them.
Trump is an immediate threat because of his stunning incompetence. He will crash the economy, destabilize Europe, and quite possibly start a shooting war with Mexico, and that's just the first 100 days. But yes, the Republican party is the real long-term threat because their committment to doubling down on gaming the system has led them to supporting insurrection and violence, and like a T-1000 they will not stop there.
And yeah, oligarchy. We're not quite in the Promised Land of Guilded Age 2.0, but that is exactly where the Republican party has committed its lives, fortune, and whatever passes for their scared honor to. The last time it took a global depression and world war to break its back, and that only lasted 30 years. Hello, President Nixon.
I've known about the Hitler speeches in the nightstand for a long time, certainly since the first time he ran.
I doubt Trump really made a decision to become a fascist. I think his ignorant, asshole personality just happens to be really compatible with fascism. Trump's not very deep.
I'm confident we win. Harris is a great candidate and the machine is impressive. If we do win I hope we're not stupid enough to dismantle it after the election.
I'm relatively sanguine about this. I Imagine I'm just burned out on worry. I can't think of anything I've worried about this long. If he wins, the palace intrigue will be epic. They'll do what they always do, spend all their time figuring out how much they can steal. This time it'll have the added spice of multiple factions who would profit more from a dead Trump than a live one. I can see JD and his butt buddy billionaires pulling off an assassination. I can't see anyway he would consolidate power after that happened.
Nice essay. I appreciate these in troubled times.
"I'm just burned out on worry." Brother I hear that.
It's the assholes deliberately pushing my worry button that piss me off. I've already got plenty of organic, free-range worry, I don't need the high-fructose-corn syrup version, thanks.
I've since blocked them in my Google News, but Politico had a story, "The Angry Men Who Support Trump." Because sure, that's worth a few thousand words, we haven't given these assholes sufficient attention, have we? And then I wonder who's voting for Harris? Will she get ANY votes? Has Politico EVER run a story, "Here's why these people are voting for Harris"?
This made my morning - highly recommended!
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/how-kamala-harris-wins
Thanks, that did help!
I mean, "angry reactionary white guys driving politics" goes at least back to 1994, when they brought us the (until then) stupidest assembly of Congressfolks and Newt Gingrich declared war on the English language. c.f. Backlash, by Susan Faludi.
Yes, this is why I don't understand the need to keep turning the rock over and noting that there are bugs under it.
*Looking through the wrong end of a telescope that's pointed into a toilet bowl*
Yes, I think there might be some shit...
are you sure you didn't mean the US Civil War?
We are at CW 1.5 now; CW2 beckons...
"The Meek, Mild-mannered and Frankly Wimpy Men Who Support Trump"
"He was the mildest mannered man/that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat." Byron, Don Juan
"Don Juan, ship scuttler" is how he'll always be remembered – of that I am certain.
I'm a Don Juan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiEIToOWr64
He's an arrogant, wealthy (?), privileged white guy who was never told "no" and made his first celebrity status as an asshole landlord and his second as the guy who yelled "YOU'RE FIRED!" at people. He just fits the position.
It was pretty much game over when conservatives started yapping about how taxes are worse than slavery, but were also yipping about how actual slavery wasn't so bad. Arbeit macht frie.
And that was WAY before Trump, or Goldberg. The old outliers are now the inliars.
Some right-winger recently suggested that after we deport all the 𝘜𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘯 who presently toil in the fields, the resultant labor shortage can easily be addressed by requiring all able-bodied Real Americans (presumably with exemptions for the scions of privilege) to spend a year of “National Service,” or 𝘞𝘦𝘩𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘵, harvesting the crops. This flickered briefly across the screen sometime the past month or six weeks, and I recall comments expressing surprise that the loons were now looking to Maoist models of governance.
I imagine that for our sins the definition of “able-bodied” for this purpose might be extended to cover most of REBID’s commentariat when it came time to meet the enlistment quotas for these agricultural re-education camps.
2025: Trump's Year Zero
They'll make me hang my laptop around my neck as they parade me through the village. Plus I commit the sin of wearing glasses, I must be made to shovel shit until I die from exhaustion.
Pedant: "frei"; in German "ie" is pronounced as "e" and "ei" pronounced as "I".
And now in my deranged bulldadaist mind I'm imagining a fascist fast food chain called Arbeit Mach Fries.
If I get to be one of the peons dispensing Freedom Chocolate Cake to the booboisie at least I can practice raising my expectoratons.
"Arbeit Macht Fries" is brilliant, but just a coupla days too late for Trump's McDonald's appearance. Please do try to keep up.
I think we can call DJT's little McD stunt "Fuhrer Macht Fries".
Fuhrer McCheese
"New at McDonalds--the 300 Pounder!"
HamFuhrerburglar
With Fuhrerprinzip Sauce
And all of a sudden, people are getting e. coli.
I still think the prestige media won’t use the term fascist to describe the MAGAts until they get a logo formed out of the actual F word, uniforms and a party called the Fascist Party. Maybe not even then.
The polo shirts and tiki torches were not enough?
C'mon, could just be a Best Buy employee who wandered into the Home Depot next door.
Future NYT: What some are calling the Fascist Party...
Future me: Oh, by "some", you mean the people in it, who had uniforms made for themselves that say "Fascist" on them?
FUNYT: Yes, we said "some", was that not clear enough?
Don't be silly, be a smarty!
The first time I remember hearing of Donald Trump was during the 1980s, and he was such a clown even back then, being pushy and obnoxious and flaunting his privilege, that I never really took him seriously. Until he pushed himself into the Central Park jogger case and advocated for the five young men who were arrested to be put to death.
I'll admit that the death penalty is the one issue that this wild-eyed liberal goes along with. I think there are some people who are so awful they don't deserve to live among the rest of us, and I know that sounds awful and makes me no different than a fascist. But I have lost people I loved to someone who was later put to death for his crimes, and I feel no remorse over my attitude.
I would like Trump to have been relegated to the midst of obscurity. By being elevated to the office of president, I'm not going to get my wish, but as a human being, he's a dismal failure. I suppose I'll have to be comforted by that.
LAAHB
Loser As A Human Being
"Nah, I didn't lose, I didn't even enter the competition."
Entry is free, and automatic at birth. If'n ya didn't get the memo I blame...well, you know who I blame...
I’ve gone back and forth on the death penalty over the past half century and change that I’ve paid attention to civic affairs, veering from absolute opposition to favoring it for people loitering near my car with malign intent. I agree with Elaine that some human beings are wastes of what could otherwise be usefully employed as compostable organic material, but under the capricious fashion in which the “justice” system is administered, capital punishment is meted out arbitrarily, and must inevitably result in the occasional execution of innocent men. I am accordingly, reluctantly, agin it.
Incidentally, I am curious about some of the horror stories I’ve seen regarding current methods of “chemical” execution, because in a few days I will be present when a person close to me exercises her rights under California’s “End of Life Option Act,” and the attending physician, who has overseen scores of these, assures us that the end (a quick downing of a bitter pharmaceutical cocktail followed by a sorbet chaser so that the aftertaste does not follow the patient into the afterlife) will be peaceful. I suppose not being shackled to a gurney in a “chamber”—fresh air and clear skies will figure into the venue—might be one element conducing toward this.
Vengance is a helluva drug. It's one of the few things the Old and New Testaments agree on.
And Soylent Green made EOL look kinda pleasant. Leave it to Hollywood.
Rand, I hope that you and your significant other find the peace you desire
The question is, "Who makes the call on whose life isn't worth it?" It sure isn't going to be you or me, and even then I wouldn't trust myself to get it right every time. Thus, I am against the death penalty as I do not believe it will ever be applied fairly/correctly
I've a different take (possibly previously shared). Consider a cop, taking down a bad guy. Really bad guy. Murderously bad. But the cop, after a harrowing moment or two, captures him. From that moment on, no matter the immediate circumstances, as long as the bad guy can't inflict mayhem right then and there, the cop is responsible for delivering that guy in reasonable shape to the nearest jail. All subsequent legal/constabulary processes take place in well-protected courts and solidly secure prisons, wherein the main responsibility is to keep the guy alive.
Years go by in that manner, then somebody says that yeah, the cop was in grave danger during the arrest and coulda killed the guy and saved us all a lotta money and time, but he didn't because that's the law. Now we kill the guy altho he's no danger to anyone, being locked up alla time? Where's the logic in that? Sure it's a punishment determined by judges and juries, but it does not fit the conditions at hand.
There are definitely more of the former (libs or non-fascist identifying non-libs) but with the electoral college....who knows what'll happen.
I'm a proud early-adapter when it comes to having used the f-word in relation to trump and his shitlings, though I was often attacked for using it ("you can't throw a word like that around lightly" - which I wasn't). I'm not happy to have been proved correct.
The Nazis had socialism in their name, therefore Hitler was left wing, though he didn't even know it. Stalin was also a fascist because he was a communist, which is a fascistic movement. Wouldn't you have loved to grade Jonah Goldberg's papers in a Europe 1914-45 class? That dumb son of a bitch probably thought the Kaiser liberated Belgium.
I could fill a Chevy van with hanging chads representing each time I've had to disentangle this nutzo logic from multiple moran-brains in my lifetime.
Hearted for the specificity of the vehicle.
Well, RB made love in his Chevy Van and that's all right with him
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiEIToOWr64
The Nazi's had socialism in their name because capitalism had failed so badly even rich people knew their names were mud if they tried to bring back capitalism
The Socialist party funded by industrialists who wanted to smash the unions.
but they did quite a bit of what Republicans would consider socialism for at least the good Germans
Kamala, for one, didn’t mince words at the CNN Townhall last night with Anderson Cooper. Asked by Cooper if she thought Tubby is a fascist, she andwered in the affirmative. Whether she thinks the rest of the MAGAts are, she didn’t say.
My God, and the sky didn't fall down? The sun rose the next morning?
Trump didn't start as a fascist. He had to fat into it. He is sui generis not fascist because he lacks self-consciousness.
Someone coaxed and coached him into the openly full-fledged fascist we now see today.
He fell into the goose step rants rather than woke one morning and wondered if a little more Mussolini in his mug was a hood look.
His time in office showed an erratic flirting with despotism. He couldn't make up his mind. Others saw the potential and emerged from under rocks and out of the closet to hold the mirror up for him and the whole world.
Et viola! Let there be no doubt, these guys are weak now and mostly bluffing, but let them get a handle on government again and it's off to the racism, domestic persecutions, and eventually a foreign war to end all.
They have no other playback at this point.
I think he's more like Cartman in that early South Park episode being forced to watch "Hitler Was a Very Bad Man" and coming away thinking Hitler was awesome.
The State is the Fueher and the Fueher is the State is a perfect fit for Trump.
"L' etat, c'est moi."
The Fancy French Fash that pairs well with a bottle of "Après moi, le déluge"
Ce n'est pas un de´luge, c'est seulement la pluie...
"it's off to the racism"
2 marks.
I am slightly optimistic, too. I will be spending the next ten days in London, England (for fun!) and stupidly have it planned to return the day before election day. Maybe I'll be too jet lagged to even read the news or open my laptop.
I plan to power down Big Cheese here and sleep through the entire goddamn election night. It will be what it will be, and I’d rather face the (tentative?) outcome, good or ill, well-rested and with a cuppa joe before me.
Yes, my wife and I call this a "disconnect the router night."
When Reagan took office I predicted that the next wave of American politics would be fascist. I was off by 40 years, but I'm still counting it as a win.
As I've written elsewhere, however, the F-word, even if it's now common in the discourse, will have no effect. Trump's supporters want fascism, and for those on the fence (if there are any), fascism will still seem too remote an idea to matter. The democratic process has been so degraded that the number of people who care--I mean really care--about democracy, as opposed to fascism, is very small.
No. You were correct then. Adolph had his years in prison before ramping it up. Reagan was Friendly Fascism from the get. Takes time to get from breaking unions and giving back oligarchs' tax money to demonizing every non-alabaster-skinned person, condoning mass murders of same, and celebrating sedition...but here we are. Reich, on schedule.
"Reich, on schedule."
Two marks right back atcha, buddy.
You are 2 kind.
The F-word will have no effect on Trump supporters because they neither understand nor care what it is called, it is the Natural Order, restored at last. As long as they are recognized and acknowledged as the default, they don't care about side-effects.
Good to know it wasn't just me, then. Well, in a way...
Calling Trump fascists isn't to change his supporters minds, but to get the "I want my tax cut" centrists to reconsider
If that is true, please forgive me for being cynical. By my calculation, "I want my tax cut" will win out roughly 99.9% of the time.
Yes. I did not say it would work. Also, if the election is close, 0.1% of idiot centrists may sway the balance
Here's hoping.
Also Nikki-Haley voting Republican women, who are THIIIIS close to voting Harris, and just need a lil' nudge.
Yes, respected figures are finally saying Trump is a fascist, which means his supporters, public and private, are too. No doubt this will engender a MAGA embrace of fascism, just as they embraced being deplorable and flying the flag of the slave-owning traitors. The merch is probably being produced right now and by the weekend there’ll be flags and t-shirts at Trump rallies announcing, “Proud Patriotic American Fascist for Trump!” and “Make America Fascist Again!” Trump will start his Madison Square Garden rally with an extended peon to Charles Lindbergh’s ginormous schlong and claim the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped by a Costa Rican immigrant that FDR let in. In light of all this, there’s naught to do but switch to calling Trump a Nazi. I’ve heard that Mike Godwin has admitted Godwin’s Law does not apply to discussions of Trump so, until the Fascist Supreme Court makes it illegal to call anyone a Nazi, let ‘er rip: “Fascist? Fuck no, that asshole is Nazi through and through!”
Swastika NFT in 3...2...1.
"No doubt this will engender a MAGA embrace of fascism, just as they embraced being deplorable..."
I didn't think of this until you said it, but now I think this will definitely happen.
Yeah, they heard that "deplorable" statement, and ran with it. "You think I'm deplorable *now*? Just you wait."
Godwin's Law would still apply to discussions of Trump. They just start at the probability of Nazis being mentioned starts at 1
Ever since the Ride Down The Golden Escalator and subsequent rush of stupefying events, who can keep track of time? But the language and behavior was all there in 2016 (Mexican rapists, jeering at a disabled reporter, etc.) If you knew the least about Trump, you saw a cradle bigot sired by a KKK member and, through the Roy Cohn connection, mentored by someone who knew from fascist tactics and gangsterism. There was all that background, and a lifelong conviction in his own Greatness.
The fascism could be blurred by the clownishness (first Inaugration Day action: ordering the NPS to change the crowd numbers), but then: Muslim Ban. The fact that the Emoluments Clause somehow did not apply to running the money laundering hotel--right away, that showed how meaningless laws and Constitution were.
We've always had home-grown models. Jim Crow states were absolutely fascist regimes. The Business Plot against Roosevelt failed, but the modern successors have seized control of enough institutions to be as close as they are to achieving their coup against democracy. But this time around, the cartoon villainy of Project 2025 has been blatant enough to break through to a number of normies, especially after Dobbs.
I don't think it was actually Sinclair Lewis, but the quote ended up being totally fucking accurate: Fascism came to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Fucking nailed it.
The association of Lewis with that quote is striking. He apparently didn't say it, and the quote itself doesn't have a confirmed source, though Father Coughlin's prominence was obvious at the time Lewis was writing. If the thought sinks in that it *can* happen here, it's pretty easy to figure out what Americanized trappings will aim to make fascism happen.
The whole goddamn point of It Can't Happen Here is that it WOULDN'T look like Germany. Or Italy. Or Spain.
It could have been Lewis' wife Dorothy Thompson who wrote "Who goes Nazi?"
It would seem Thompson or Lewis could have written it, but apparently not. It says something that we know the quote, but lit scholars can't find a source for it. For ex., the end of this page suggests some less pithy 1930s sources that expressed the idea. https://about.illinoisstate.edu/sinclairlewis/faq/
Its really, really important to remember that none of this (Trump) works without the enthusiastic support of the Republican party. The Emoluments Clause was a dead issue because the Republican party made it so, not because of Trump superpower. And if the Republican party will support Trump to cling to power, they will support anything. This does not get better if Trump loses, it just pauses getting even worse.
For sure, and it's implicit in a conversation about applying the F-word. Trump had the backing of the party, he made it acceptable for the party to be open about fascism, and anyone who objected was purged. Everything about Trump is so egregious that it's worn down a good bit of resistance to recognizing him as a fascist. The question is the degree to which our fellow citizens can notice the same thing about the party and its minions at all levels, from wing-nut school boards to the Scofflaw Court.
There's a genre of movie comedies where a Manic Pixie Dream Girl encounters an uptight guy and overwhelms/seduces/forces him to loosen up, baby, take a walk on the wild side. That's close to what Trump did to the party. Like the uptight guy who used to party back in college, the Republican party had a lean into fascism since the nutzo plot to overthrow Roosevelt in the 30's, through the Birchers and Pat Buchannan. Trump's superpower of commanding manic loyalty from their voter base made them fall in line, and the vast majority learned to let their fascism flag fly or get drummed out of the party.
As far as our fellow citizens go, I remain convinced a majority of them neither like not understand politics, and at least a plurality consider the Presidency a show they watch on television. I further believe some Trump supporters do so for entertainment purposes only, and almost all of them include pissing off the right people as an important motivation. This comes from talking to Trump supporters, including my entire family. The threat of a fascist government is an entertaining story arc for the committed, and an abstract theory they don't quite understand to our "independent" voters. Both committed sides are committed, and all this hammering is on that "independent" vote in hopes of influencing some of them. Until the ratfucking begins on Election Day, there's no other field on which to fight.
I have not found any response to those folks other than "My dad and his brother went to war in Europe and the South Pacific to kill as many as possible of the sort of folks you now revere (and hang out with). Maybe your kin did too. Why are you switching sides now? Why are you dishonoring the memory of your parents?"
The same is true of the Confederatization of the GOP, too
"it just pauses getting even worse."
The pause that refreshes, then.