Trump Is No Fascist

[pbrower2a]

Quote:Most of us are reluctant to draw comparisons to what’s happening now and what happened in the 1930’s: “Donald Trump isn’t Adolf Hitler.” And no; no, he isn’t. Nor is this the 1930’s. Nor is the United States Germany.

But since Trump’s campaign first began to gain a toehold, the similarities between his style of campaigning and the behavior of fascists have been so strong that it’s been hard not to at least raise an eyebrow. And the analyses by journalists and historians I’ve been reading over the past year haven’t made me feel any better.

I’ve been amazed at how many well-respected commentators (respected by me, anyway) – conservatives, moderates, and liberals – have drawn comparisons between Donald Trump’s growing popularity and that of fascists. Drawing comparisons, and, as the months passed, adding warnings.

In an interview published in Slate last February, Robert Paxton, history professor emeritus at Columbia University and an expert on fascism, spelled out what he saw as both the “echoes” and the “profound differences” between what the current presidential campaign and the rise of fascism in 1920’s-1930’s Germany and Italy.

One difference: Both Hitler and Mussolini, Paxton noted, railed against “aggressive individualism,” which they believed was the source of their country’s problems. Trump – and many Republicans – “have celebrated individualism to the absolute total extreme,” Paxton wrote.

Another major difference: Germany had just lost a devastating war and was hit by a severe depression. Italy “was on the brink of civil war.”

“We have serious problems,” Paxton wrote, “but there’s no objective conditions that come anywhere near the seriousness of what those countries were facing.”

Paxton was finding plenty of echoes, though. First: Trump’s campaign themes. “The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book,” Paxton wrote. “‘Making the country great again’ sounds exactly like the fascist movements.”

Also similar: Trump’s focus on national decline, “one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse,” Paxton said. While that decline was real in Germany and Italy and isn’t in the US, many of Trump’s followers believe that it is.

Another echo: Trump’s “style and technique.” “He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out,” Paxton wrote, “and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media.”

Another: Neither Hitler nor Mussolini had real platforms, real programs that they stuck to when they got in power. Both men were inconsistent, Paxton wrote, “totally opportunistic.”

Then there’s this, from a Washington Post column in May by Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan, titled “This Is How Fascism Comes to America”: “As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France – that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.”

http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/ro...id=2948348

Yes, Donald Trump shows how fragile democracy can be even in the USA. He has found seams in our democratic heritage: disdain for foreigners, contempt for the intelligentsia, offer of a mythological past of 'greatness' even if such is terribly flawed, and the belief that a strongman (whether a general or a businessman) can uniquely solve his country's problems. His opportunistic contempt for process and precedent characterizes an extremist.

If the support of aggressive individualism is uncharacteristic of the communitarian pretensions of German and Japanese fascism as exemplified in such terms as Volksgemeinschaft and Kokutai that refute the individualism weaker in Germany and Japan, aggressive individualism is very much a part of American culture. American reactionaries have long expressed aggressive individualism as an American virtue. Fascists of all kinds exploit the cultural identity of the countries that they infest, and typically reject 'foreign' ways.

I am tempted to believe that aggressive individualism, so long as it is confined to an elite, is compatible with fascism because it is consistent with Gilded-Age plutocrats and reactionary Planters who as much as they could tried to keep others cowed into subjection. But let it become part of the way of the resistance to President Trump's authoritarianism and it can make a right-wing consolidation of power precarious.