Trump Is No Fascist

[Kinser79]

(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.)

David's article is good.  I actually miss his posts.  I may not have always agreed with him (from the right or the left) but I always found his posts thoughtful and intelligent.

To answer your question:  They aren't.  Lincoln was reviled as a Bonapart, as a Ceaser (I can only imagine that in the 19th century mind that was the worst they could come up with--Hitler and Mussolini hadn't been born yet).  And it wasn't just southerners who reviled Lincoln--many northerners did as well.  Lincoln did not become Saint Lincoln of the Civic Religion until after John W. Booth's bullet had lodged itself into his skull.

Jackson was reviled similarly by the Whigs. 

I could say John Adams was but Bonaparte was a contemporary of his.

But to get to the meat of the matter, I would think it is because he is going to be a major 4T figure.  Obama could have been that figure--I can't speak for Whites here but Blacks voted for Obama because we really wanted him to be "Tyrone from down the block".  We wanted him to tell the people "Now y'all listen up....This is the way its gonna be....<policy>.  Anyone what don't like that can kiss my black ass."  Instead we got Steve Urkle.

Kay and Peele had an "Obama Anger Translator" on their show.  My mother showed it to me and I said to her "The translator should be president."