(02-07-2017, 12:04 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: David Kaiser, with whom many of you are very familiar, was a frequent poster on this forum in the past. He has his own blog now, History Unfolding, which he periodically ties into Fourth Turning theory: http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/
Almost a year ago, he penned a column for Time magazine that is germane to this thread: "Fascism Isn't Our Problem"
It begins this way--
As Donald Trump moves nearer and nearer to the Republican nomination, history is becoming more fashionable. The media are awash with comparisons between Trump and Hitler and Trump and Mussolini, and Google searches for those pairs of names turn up 45 million and 2 million hits, respectively. Detailed analyses of Trump’s relationship to Fascism have appeared in major online publications. An anti-Trump Republican PAC is standing up an ad campaign explicitly comparing the candidate to Hitler. Even Mike Godwin, the inventor of “Godwin’s Law”—that any prolonged argument on the internet will end in a comparison of one’s opponents to Hitler—has encouraged us to go ahead and make such comparisons, provided they are carefully thought out and historically sophisticated.
The comparisons are inevitable, but Trump is not Mussolini or Hitler. And, no matter what you think of him, he is not by any stretch of the imagination a genuine Fascist...
You can read further at this link: http://time.com/4271114/2016-fascism/
So let me pose a rhetorical question to anyone on this forum who deigns to answer: Why, when it comes to Donald Trump, are people reaching as never before for historical analogues? (I'm guilty, too.)
It could be that because Donald Trump fits no obvious analogue in American history, those who try to understand him must look to foreign analogues. If he isn't a fascist, then what is he? He's certainly not a Communist. He may have a few things in common with Baathist leaders of Syria or formerly in Iraq -- but what he shares with the ideology of those Baathist regimes he also shares with fascists. He's not trying to set himself and his family as monarchs. (If we are to have a monarchy, then turn to the House of Windsor or the House of Orange... maybe the House of Bourbon and the Two Sicilies...)
Once he became President he became about as pure a reactionary as he could be, more like a Bircher than like a Nazi or even a Ku Kluxist (the KKK in all current manifestations is fascist, and even the 1915 KKK that existed before Mussolini defined himself as a fascist presaged much that is distinctly fascist outside the USA). Birchites are pieces of work, but they allegedly reject fascism as un-American almost to the extent that they reject Communism and modernism. But Birchites have defined themselves more by what they are against than what they are for.
The fit comparison is to Vladimir Putin, whose friendship he prefers to that of any democratically-elected leader. Trump is a fascist if you call Putin a fascist. But what does Putin really believe? I see an attempt to meld characteristics both of the Soviet system that he once served and the luxurious pomp of the tsarist era. Democracy is always messy to any authoritarian.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.