I really do hate the modern left and their obsession with "fascism" (or vocabular in general... labeling things something they aren't.)
Indeed, not even just the left... every political commentator these days. Shit has a very clear, very well-understood meaning. And Orange Man just AIN'T IT
You can't just rename and rebrand everything you dislike by some nasty word and call it analysis.
(Gotta love the mafioso/Godfather-style caption)
Is Donald Trump a fascist? The question is central to attempts to understand him. He has disappeared migrants into camps, sent troops into Democrat-run cities, “spread a message of violence” to try to overturn an election result, according to a Congressional committee, accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”, expressed contempt for courts and, last week, sent US forces to capture the president of Venezuela.
Over 400 academics, including 31 Nobel laureates, signed a letter warning that today’s far-right movements often bear “unmistakably fascist traits”. Trump’s voters (who overwhelmingly aren’t fascists) tend to mock these accusations as liberal hysteria
Damn right.
Kuper compares two decent arguments for and against the charge: one by Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism" and a a new essay (in German) by Thomas Weber. The former, yes, Trump ticks off the fascist checklist; the latter, uh-hu.
Hitler valorised the collective “Volk”, which unites for the highest human purpose: war. This required a strong bureaucratic state. Trump, by contrast, thinks war is stupid. The fascist cult of heroic death leaves him cold. He avoids wars, only attacking countries too weak to respond, like Iran, Venezuela and, later perhaps, Greenland. Weber theorises that Trump believes in neither state nor society, but in an extreme version of American capitalism without rules and that he sees the highest human purpose as self-enrichment.
OK, now it's just getting ridiculous. Insofar as orange man believes in anything, he quite clearly does not believe that.
"His family’s monetisation of the presidency is unabashed, even proud, because he thinks it’s natural. To him, it seems, a government is a family business, not an army support system.""His family’s monetisation of the presidency is unabashed, even proud, because he thinks it’s natural. To him, it seems, a government is a family business, not an army support system."
The nearest modern equivalent to the patrimonial leader is the mafia boss — a point that Weber connects to Trump’s love of mafia movies. Trump represents a version of political authoritarianism that we’ve barely seen for centuries.
Sure, boomer. Next topic, please.
ARchive:
https://archive.md/3Z9Cn
Dude, nobel prize winners said so, they're never wrong ever!!!
That's why I take all of my economic advice from the Nobel prize winning Paul Krugman who notably predicted that the internet would have no more effect on the gdp than the fax machine.
Well, being wrong once isn't thst bad, it's not like he predicted a global recession with no end in sight when Trump got elected his first term, and he definitely didn't agree with Jerome Powell about transient inflation...
This is why appeal to authority is bullshit. If we listend to nobel prize winners as their only merit, we would all call gold a pet rock and claim bitcoin is going to zero.
Krugman is especially egregious.
I think people need to understand that being a Nobel Prize winner (of economics or any other field), doesn't make you a general expert on all things economics / other field.
Usually, the person won a Nobel prize because they made a contribution that significantly advances the particular specialty that they're in. But it doesn't mean that have a better sense of the overall economy than anyone else. In fact, they may have less general wisdom because their expertise is so specialized.
It would be like some guy who made an incredible innovation on the landing gears of a plane, but then expecting that person to know everything about aviation including how airports are organized and labor market issues for pilots and stewardesses.
Fucking love that explanation. 10/10
Where's the line between mafia boss and fascist dictator though?
That one is honest about what he is, and the other usually drowned in democratic veneer/legal infrastructure and justifications to backstop his power.
A mafia boss employs you to do crime, a fascist dictator says you need to do your part for the greater good, whatever he thinks this greater good is.
Is it helpful? When a word is so poorly defined or disputed in its definition as fascist is... I think it has ceased to be useful.
Biden admin was a crime family. So is Trump. So were Clinton and Bush. So is Putin. They all are regimes that attempt to show legitimacy but IMO are basically criminal groups.
I'm not convinced by the negative case, but I've pretty much always thought fascism was the closest description of most American presidents.
Glorification of the military + aligning private capital with political goals = American politics
Fervent nationalism has faded from the left but it used to be the norm for both parties too.
Trump is a Trumpist. He's a self motivated guy who doesn't seem ideological at all to me. For me at least calling him all these names / labels does nothing useful. Actually, it does the opposite and it kinda blows my mind that people are still playing this game. Sure it works on their team but does nothing to persuade people to jump off the Trump train.
Honestly, if I were consulting those trying to unseat him from power I would just track what he has promised to do and how often he has switched course. I would highlight how often he has stabbed those that support him in the back. I would not take cheap shots. They are easy to do and his opponents do it all the time. I think it backfires. I think that strategy has made him who he is. He triggers people and gets them to play into his hand.
I don't really think many elites actually believe what they say about him at all. And, they aren't all that worried about fascism either. Its all theater for the plebs.
oh, the irony in that you just called him such a name (admittedly a new one, but still)
I know. But I just basically said he's a populist which is also just a weird term for people to despise when they love democracy.
Indeed this is absurd. I often wonder what kind of echo chamber people that say things like this live in. On the contrary Trump wants a TON of rules on economics and capitalism. Tariffs are not a free market idea. He wants to do all sorts of things that meddle with free trade. In some ways he's more into that sort of thing than the establishment. Its just that his approach and goals are very different and different is bad.
If there is one takeaway from most of the hatred of Trump it is that change is bad. They mostly hate Trump because he is to them, regressing the US to the past. To a time where tariffs were used to fund the government. When nationalism was not viewed as anything but the norm. When people had pride in their nation (people/culture) and religion was just a given in society.
This might sound like glowing praise of Trump. Not my intention. But I don't think people realize just how much the elite class hates most American's views. The common man has little in common with the academic and ruling classes. We are just stupid peasants to them. I don't think Trump is some savior but if you care to look, he has exposed how deep the divide has become in America. He did not create it. He exposed it.
Totally.
And the massive difference between one tiny thing someone (a bullshitter, alas) says, and what they actually do!
My issue is calling him this is not helpful at all. It's just emotional manipulation. Just as the use of Christian nationalist is in regards to conservative evangelical Christians. Just as the anti-Semite label is.
We are constantly being manipulated emotionally and the few that actually seem to be well informed on history but still use these methods are just vile.
The result is you get people just accepting the label or worse yet just leaning into it more. Slowly I've become numb to it. Especially in the fake online world. In person I ask people to define these terms. That usually kills it.
true. dat.
Academics... so basically the people that have had their world view in place since the end of WW2. The establishment view. Their whole world view is based on preventing fascism, nationalism, or any strong love including religion. In a word. Globalists.
Trump to me has a lot in common with TDR. He's a strong man type with a very realist world view. One based in power and strength. This is one of the reasons he has beat the establishment Republican politicians. I do think he has been co-oped to some extent but it might just be that he doesn't care so he's giving them scraps.
I still say the fascist label is just not helpful here. It is a good boogie man but is quickly losing its power as a term.
'“People are talking in terms like imperialism, neocolonialism, viceroy, terms that they haven’t used in 80 years. There is a new world order and there are spheres of influence in it,” said Sumantra Maitra, founder of Virginia-based Clio Strategic Consulting and a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America think tank. “We are not going to go to war with other great nuclear powers in their own neighborhood, and it is quite understandable that no one is going to come to the Western Hemisphere because we will mess them up.”
In this new setup, raw strength—military and economic—matters more than ever. And the key reason for Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere, his supporters say, is precisely because of the current limits of American power, especially when compared with a rising China.'
https://archive.ph/bIPYm
“The discussion about spheres of influence is distracting from what this is really about. This is about giving priority to what is most important to the U.S. in a world where we are dealing with a record national debt, a depleted stockpile of munitions only recently getting rebuilt, and the fact that the U.S. pursued a foreign policy for the past 30 years that has not made us stronger or more prosperous. In this environment, we have to do things differently lest we risk a major national-security catastrophe,” said Dan Caldwell, senior policy fellow at the American Moment conservative organization who served as senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “If you are an American ally or partner in a place like Europe or East Asia, you should not be surprised at all. This doesn’t mean the U.S. is abandoning them, but it does mean that they should pick up the slack and do more, especially when they have the resources and capabilities to do so.”
Hitler was not even a fascist...
Anyway Trump is less fascist than Bernie Sanders, since fascists were socialists.
The trouble with discussions about whether Trump is a fascist is that most people start with the label rather than the definition. They use “fascist” as shorthand for “very bad authoritarian” and then work backward to justify it. That is not analysis. That is marketing.
If you hold up Trump against historical fascism the match is partial at best. He does not believe in the state as an ideal or in a coherent collective mission. Fascism historically elevates the nation into a kind of spiritual entity. Trump elevates Trump. His orientation is not toward mobilizing a population for war or for ideological purification. It is toward extracting loyalty in exchange for access and favor. This is closer to patronage politics or a personalist strongman model than to classic fascism.
What some call his mafia boss style is really just transactional leadership taken to an extreme. Power is personal currency. That does not mean harmless it means unpredictable because it depends entirely on the leader’s immediate interest rather than on a stable ideology or structure.
The point is this. Precision matters. If every form of authoritarian or corrupt leadership gets labeled fascism the term loses meaning and the ability to warn against its actual historical and political manifestations. Calling Trump a fascist may be rhetorically satisfying to his opponents but it is sloppy thinking. Accuracy is more dangerous to bad leaders than slogans.