Fascism

A dictionary definition of fascism: “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

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Sinclair Lewis, the celebrated novelist and playwright, entitled his dystopian 1935 story of American fascism It Can’t Happen Here. But Lewis knew it could happen here.

One suspects Lewis would not be surprised that American fascism is happening in the form of a corrupt charlatan from the outer boroughs of New York.

It makes sense. Donald Trump is not really an original, but a Hollywood-like character who captures the fears and imagination – and bigotry, of course – of many Americans and Trump rode that to political power, and for him that really means grifting his supporters, padding his enormous ego and getting even with anyone in his way.

American history has had its Huey Longs, and Strom Thurmond’s, Pat Buchanan’s and David Duke’s. Only Trump was fortunate to have arrived at a time when American culture and politics were willing to fully embrace a performative clown, a rapist, a racist, a convicted felon, a guy who inherited his wealth and has made his life’s work celebrating himself.

He failed at selling steaks and vodka and casinos. He is a serial philanderer and a world-class liar. Without his inherited wealth he couldn’t qualify to manage the night shift at a 7-11. No one in their right mind would hire this guy who talks only about himself and his grievances. Yet, he’s mastered what other charlatans of an earlier age also mastered.

He’s got the fascism thing down cold, particular the big lies, the illusion of power and the huge grievances.

Most American journalists and many commentators long resisted calling Trumpism what it is – fascism – but not any longer.

“Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp,” writes The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols. “At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home. But … he outdid himself in an interview on Fox News, by saying that ‘the enemy within’ —Americans he described as ‘radical left lunatics,’ including Representative Adam Schiff of California, whom he mentioned by name—are more dangerous than Russia or China, and could be ‘very easily handled’ by the National Guard or the U.S. military.”

Too many Americans – way too many – have become numb to this completely unprecedented language from an American politician, particularly one trying to return to the White House.

Anne Applebaum, a scholar of Stalin’s war against his own people, says: “In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes.”

Say it out loud. Donald Trump is a fascist, a modern-day Mussolini, using the precise phrases of El Duce and Hitler. No politician in American history has described his political opponents as “enemies of the people” or an entire class “as vermin,” or threatened to turn the military on opponents. This is the language of fascism.

In addition to the dictionary definition fascism depends, among other factors, upon:

Discrediting an independent press. Trump has done this repeatedly, most recently saying CBS should “lose a license” and be liquidated for broadcasting an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That attack on the press, only the latest from Trump, drew a sharp and rare rebuke from the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. “While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” the FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel said.

Perpetuating an enormous lie. Trump has many big lies, including the whopper about a stolen election in 2020, and his latest lie attempts to rewrite the history of his insurrection. “His attempt to recast the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” as the New York Times reported, “came on the same day that he compared his supporters who were arrested, convicted and imprisoned for their actions at the Capitol to the victims of the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. And it followed a recent remark in which Mr. Trump declared Jan. 6 a day of ‘love.’”

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984, “It was their final, most essential command.”

This Trump lie is beyond belief. His asking his supporters – indeed all of us – to ignore the riot at the Capitol that he instigated, hoping apparently that an enormous lie will help him avoid his own legal jeopardy as the only president ever to oppose a peaceful transfer of power.

A subservient political and business elite: No sitting Republican member of Congress dares take issue with Trump’s American fascism, and the wealthiest man in the world, South African-born Elon Musk, is spending millions to curry favor with Trump and elect him. He’s not alone. Those who intend to clean up with AI technology or crypto currency are all in. Even those who recognize the folly of Trump’s promise of immense tariffs on imported goods convince themselves it’s just a little fascist rhetoric.

“The Republican officials I talk to are hoping that this is just Trump’s bluster — that he’s not actually serious about imposing tariffs but is rather using tariff threats to bully other nations into becoming more friendly to the U.S.,” Brian Riedl, a former aide to GOP senator Rob Portman of Ohio told the Washington Post. “But they’re in denial about this.” Much like the business elite of Weimar Germany believing a buffoonish Adolf Hitler would be useful to them, but also under their control, were wrong, too.

Fascists depend on perverting the legal system, a tactic Trump has mastered by using the judicial branch’s own rules – and his appointed judges – to stymie any day of reckoning. His hand-picked Supreme Court has, in the most frightening ruling since Dred Scott, given Trump broad immunity for past and future crimes.

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, calls Trump “fascist to the core.” His former chief of staff, John Kelly, a Marine general says, “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Make no mistake. The election on November 5 is not about inflation, housing prices or a migrant crisis, all issues that are international in scope that require hard work and bipartisan cooperation to solve.

The election is about Trump and his fascism. Mark me as an “enemy of the people,” an enemy of the people who would subvert the Constitution, use the American military against political opponents and those who lie about what can be observed with their own eyes.

It’s not as though we haven’t been warned. Trump says he wants to be a dictator, wants to deport 12 million humans – think about the police state that would require – and free the January 6 rioters.

Is this American fascism really the future we want for our country?

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Additional Reading:

A couple of items for your consideration …

Take the Trump-Vance Deportation Policy Seriously

It’s been said – more than once – that we should take the Republican candidate for president seriously, but not literally.

If you read nothing else before the election read this post from Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian and democracy advocate. He takes Trump seriously and literally.

“As an American, and as a historian who writes about forced population movements, I believe that we are not taking the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough. 

“This failure of imagination could allow extreme repression within our country as well as a fundamental change in its society and politics.”

It is a chilling piece of writing. Take it seriously.

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We needed courage. We got cowardice.

There are few people in American journalism I admire more than Margaret Sullivan. She has held a number of high profile positions with important newspapers, including a stint as media columnist for the Washington Post. She has an almost unique perspective on what is happening with Big Media in America,

Sullivan writes about the decision by the Post and the Los Angeles Times to not endorse a candidate for president.

(Stunned silence from me … )

As Sullivan writes:

“Here’s a statement from a group of columnists at the Washington Post — people I really admire, including Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus, Perry Bacon, Catherine Rampell and quite a few others. At the heart of it is the knowledge of what the Post stood for since the Watergate era when — under the great publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee — the paper bravely revealed the corruption of the Nixon administration and had a hand in bringing him down.

“Trump is much worse than Nixon. But the paper is no longer a beacon for democracy.”

I’ve admired the Washington Post for nearly as long as I’ve paid attention to politics. Not always right, but a fierce advocate for facts and accountability. Jeff Bezos, a super-billionaire blew it up on one Friday afternoon.

Read Sullivan’s take here.

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Be concerned. Be active. Do something. Democracy is worth fighting – and voting – for.

“It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

                                                            – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

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American democracy increasingly resembles the frog placed in a pot of tepid water not realizing that as the water temperature slowly rises it’s being boiled to death.

Our temperature is rising. Too few of us are paying attention.

Just in the last two weeks the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has broadly outlined the authoritarian agenda he will implement if he gets another grab at power. The agenda – and don’t buy the nonsense that what Donald Trump says differs from what he does – is profoundly un-American, combining the worst of Know Nothing nativism from before the Civil War with the innuendo laced radicalism of Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

Increasingly the con man who would be president again sounds like a beer hall agitator in Munich. And a vast army of enablers are goose stepping to his commands.

As widely reported and confirmed by Trump advisers in numerous interviews and documents, the former president, and this is a partial list, intends to:

• Dismantle the federal civil service system that has been in place since James Garfield was president
• Conduct wholesale deportations of millions, including people who have been living in the United States for years, or in some cases their entire lives
• Create vast detention camps
• Populate the federal government with thousands of cranks and seditionists who, unlike his first time, will not be dissuaded by the Constitution or law from targeting political opponents through a totally politicized justice system
• Purge the U.S. military of officers unwilling to carry out illegal orders
• Dispatch the National Guard to patrol major American cities and use the power of the federal budget to direct local policing
• Eliminate the federal Department of Education and exert unprecedented control over local schools and colleges
• Enact – again – a ban against Muslims entering the country
• Pardon the guilty of January 6 and lock up any resisters
• Re-evaluate – read withdraw – from NATO, the western alliance that has provided security for much of Europe in the post-World War II era
• End U.S. aid to Ukraine, ensuring that his Russian authoritarian role model, will be able to do to Poland and the Baltic states what he has tried to do to Ukraine

Meanwhile, Trump – a profoundly ignorant man, but at the same time a highly skilled propagandist – is continually conditioning his most ardent followers to their own embrace of his distorted and deeply dangerous approach to American politics. He no longer walks to the edge of inciting violence, but routinely destroys any boundary.

In what the Atlantic called a “dystopian, at times gothic speech” that “droned on for nearly 90 minutes,” Trump told a crowd of his Florida followers recently that he will eliminate the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of America.

Who are these people, these liars and leeches? Mitt Romney? Career prosecutors in several states and the federal government who have investigated Trump’s actions and proven corruption – stands indicted 91 times – and attempt, as the law and our Constitution demand, to hold him accountable? Are the judges charged with administering justice the liars and leeches? Is he talking about former four-star generals who have pronounced him ignorant, unstable and unfit?

Like a Mussolini praising Hitler, he touts as role models the murderous Putin and the strongmen of Hungry, China and North Korea.

This must be called what it is – a fascist government in waiting. The supreme leader’s language no longer hints at the prospect of fascist actions to come, but rather confirms them.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,” Trump said on social media, “we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”

“This is straight-up Nazi talk,” writes New Republic editor Michael Tomasky, “in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.”

That word would be vermin. What decent, Constitution loving American calls other Americans “vermin?”

Whether Trump knows it or not, and one suspects he does and certainly his speechwriters know this language – down to the same words – were often employed in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to justify the wholesale eliminate of European Jews. This is solely the language of division and hatred. The language of a man and a movement willing to jettison any respect or deference to the rule of law and the Constitution. It is the language of fascism.

A singular feature of fascist governments through modern history is to demonize a class of people as “subhuman” – Jews, indigenous people, migrants, LGBTQ individuals, Muslims, on and on. Demagogues must have a target. Anyone “different” from their mass of followers or any critic is fair game. The fascist leaders of history – in Italy, Germany, Spain – required an enemy, even one casually defined, to focus the hatred and channel the grievance and fear of his followers.

During a recent rally in New Hampshire Trump pledged to “root out … the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country … The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

The threat is from within. Really? But who, exactly? Who are these vermin? Career educators trying to teach history? Librarians who reject book banning? Newspaper columnists who deplore the ugliness and historical import of such deranged, unhinged talk from a person in a position of power and influence? Maybe you are the “vermin” – watch yourself – lest you be intimidated and frightened into silence. This is how the authoritarian consolidates his power.

“He’s telling us exactly what he intends to do — like it or loathe it,” write Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen in Axios. “And this time, he’ll have prefabbed institutional muscle to turn pugilistic words into policies and action from the get-go.”

This is not a new story, but it may be history too many Americans have failed to understand or heed.

The pot is boiling. There can be no mystery where this is headed. Recall the past. Fight against un-American words and actions by hateful, ignorant people. Embrace democracy and the Constitution.. Influence the present.

A democracy is too important to lose.

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Additional Reads:

A few suggestions from across the world wide web …

Note-taking Lessons From America’s Greatest Biographer

An exhibit on the biographer Robert Caro is now open at the New York Historical Society.

^{Caro in his New York office}

“We mere mortals can peek behind the scenes of his work by visiting the oldest museum in New York City—the New-York Historical Society. It acquired the rights to Caro’s archives and turned them into a permanent exhibit, with plans to rotate the collection of documents over time. The exhibit displayed different stages of his writing process, from interviewing to outlining, so I picked some highlights to share below.”

If you care about history – and writing it – this is a must read. Link here:

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Basketball Season: Requiem of a Mississippi cheerleader

The novelist Donna Tartt remembers her young life as a cheerleader.

“The gymnasiums were high-ceilinged, barnlike, drafty, usually in the middle of some desolate field. We were always freezing in our skimpy plaid skirts, our legs all goose-pimples as we clapped and stamped on the yellowed wooden floor. (Our legs, being so much exposed, were frequently chapped from cold, yet we were forbidden to put lotion on them, Cindy and the older girls having derived a pathological horror of “grease” from—as best as I could figure—the Clearasil ads in Tiger Beat and Seventeen—this despite the fact that grease was the primary element of all our diets.)”

Excellent piece of writing.

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Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You’ve Never Heard Of

I found this piece both fascinating … and deeply unsettling.

^{A Minuteman missile in South Dakota}

“Since the advent of plutonium production, less than a century ago, some parts of the U.S. have borne more of those costs than others. This past summer I drove to the city that’s still making the weapons it was supposed to eradicate the need for; to the plains where nuclear missiles control local economies; to a mine 2,000 feet underneath the desert floor where much of America’s plutonium waste from weapons production goes to rest. My hope was to hear from people who live in those communities to better understand where that era has left them as we teeter on the edge of a new arms race.”

Makes me want to dust off the plans for the bomb shelter. From Scientific American.

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Thanks for reading. See you again soon.