WHITE CHRISTIAN ENABLERS OF FASCISM TODAY AND IN THE PAST
COMPILATION BY LUCY WARNER
NOVEMBER 16, 2017

“EVIL WHEN WE ARE IN ITS POWER IS NOT FELT AS EVIL BUT AS A NECESSITY, OR EVEN A DUTY,” SIMONE WEIL WROTE.

I HAVE PUT VERY LITTLE COMMENTARY OF MY OWN BECAUSE THE SELECTIONS I FOUND AND INCLUDED HERE SAY ELOQUENTLY WHAT I FEEL, BELIEVE, AND FEAR. THE MOST IMPORTANT IS THE DESCRIPTION BY MIGLIO OF HIS WORK “ENABLERS OF FASCISM,” BECAUSE WE ARE IN MY VIEW CLEARLY AT THE POINT AS A NATION AND A PEOPLE WHICH IS DESCRIBED HERE. WE ARE LIKE THE PROVERBIAL FROG (PERHAPS NOT A SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE OBSERVATION) IN HIS COMFORTABLE POT OF COOL WATER. AS THE WATER HEATS TOWARD BOILING, HE CAN’T FIGURE OUT THAT IF HE WOULD USE HIS POWERFUL HIND LEGS TO JUMP OUT, HE WOULDN’T HAVE TO DIE YET. WHEN PEOPLE ACT LIKE FROGS, THAT’S REALLY TOO BAD.

IT IS A SAD STATE. I HAVE NO BELIEF AT ALL THAT DONALD TRUMP WILL “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” AND I DEEPLY FEAR WHAT HE REALLY WANTS TO DO. HE WANTS TO BE “THE BOSS” OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY AT LEAST, AND MAYBE THE WORLD. ONE OF THESE ARTICLES ARGUES THAT HE ISN’T ACTUALLY A “FASCIST,” BUT HE CLEARLY HATES OUR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. HE WANTS IT TO BE HIS AND HIS ALONE. CONSIDER HIS RECENT COMMENT THAT HE HAS ALLOWED THE WHOLE DEPARTMENT OF STATE TO BE DIMINISHED TO THE POINT OF VIRTUAL EXTINCTION BECAUSE, “I’M THE ONLY ONE THAT MATTERS.”

IF YOU DON’T’ BELIEVE THAT, SEE NPR’S STORY ON THE MATTER: HTTPS://WWW.NPR.ORG/SECTIONS/THETWO-WAY/2017/11/03/561797675/IM-THE-ONLY-ONE-THAT-MATTERS-TRUMP-SAYS-OF-STATE-DEPT-JOB-VACANCIES.


WHO ARE THE ENABLERS?

https://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_john_f___070803_enablers_of_fascism_3a.htm
OpEdNews Op Eds 8/7/2007 at 12:24:36
Enablers of Fascism: Fatalists, Corporatists, the Uninformed
By John F. Miglio

Enablers of Fascism: Fatalists,
Corporatists, & the Uninformed

To accept passively an unjust system is to co-operate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.

By J. F. Miglio

There is an old parable about a Zen master who lives on the outskirts of a small village and practices his skill as an archer as part of his daily meditation. When the villagers ask him why he doesn't use his extraordinary archery skills to hunt animals or fight in battles, the Zen master replies, "I do not use my bow and arrows to kill things."

One day marauders attack the village and begin to slaughter the inhabitants. When the Zen master sees what is happening, he grabs his bow and quiver of arrows, and with amazing speed and accuracy, kills one marauder after another until they retreat and leave the village.

The villagers are stunned and ask the Zen master why he chose to break from tradition and use his archery skills for killing. The Zen master looks at them impassively and says, "It wasn't necessary until today."

Americans who have enabled large corporations and corrupt politicians to turn America into a fascist state should take heed of the Zen master's tale. The fascists may not be in their backyards yet, but they are getting closer each year. And there is no Zen master living nearby to stop them.

So who are these enablers, and why are they doing nothing to prevent the Bush/Cheney regime and their fascist friends from taking over our democracy?

As I see it, they fall into three primary categories.

Fatalists: The fatalists are the you-can't- fight-city-hall crowd. They know the system is corrupt. They know things are getting worse. They know one day the forces of fascism may hit them personally. But just like Martin Niemoller, the German minister who stood idly by as the Nazis destroyed his country, they do nothing. They don't vote, they don't speak out, and they don't protest or become politically involved.

How many Americans fall into this category? Quite a few, I would guess. We know, for example, 50 percent of Americans don't bother to vote because they are either too apathetic or too convinced that the Republican and Democratic candidates are equally corrupt. But when asked why they don't vote for a third party candidate like a Ralph Nader or become politically active and protest, they say it wouldn't make any difference, that the rich power brokers would still rig the system for their own benefit. So they are content to sit on their couches, flip to the next channel, and wait for the apocalypse.

Corporatists: These are the "Sunshine Assassins" of our country, the brainwashed, middle-income corporate soldiers who work for large companies and defend corporate America even as they lose their pensions and medical benefits, work longer and harder for the same pay, and watch their jobs get outsourced to other countries.

Nevertheless, they still believe-- with religious fervor, by golly!-- that America is the greatest country in the world. But when asked if they've ever lived in another country to test the validity of their premise, most of them respond that they haven't. And when asked if they are aware that middle-income Americans rank way down on the quality-of-life list (longevity, health care, paid time off from work, etc.) compared to the citizens of most European countries, they seem surprised.

They also seem surprised to learn that the CEOs of the companies they work for make over 500 times their salaries and are awash in tens of millions of dollars of stock options while their own salaries, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they were 30 years ago.

I don't know how many Americans fall into this category, but there are quite a few. In fact, if we add up all the corporate soldiers who work for large companies and the military/industrial complex, we're talking millions. I would also include in this category the millions of right-wing evangelical Christians who still believe that people like George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh are on their side, that Michael Moore is evil incarnate, and that progressive social reform is for commies, even though their lord and master, Jesus Christ, was the quintessential social reformer.

If you add up these two groups, my guess is they make up a lion's share of the 25-30% of the public who still support George W. Bush and his occupation of Iraq. Notice I used the word "occupation" and not "war," and journalists should stop calling our presence in Iraq a war because that's the terminology promoted by the Bush administration to hold onto support from the public. In other words, it's much harder for Americans to swallow the concept of "losing a war" than "ceasing an occupation."

John F. Miglio is the editor of the Online Review of Books & Current Affairs and author of Sunshine Assassins, a futuristic political thriller.



https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Christofascist
TOP DEFINITION

Christofascist

Christian religious extremist. Often a person who believes in forcing a right-wing Christian agenda on the rest of the world. Also known as a 'fundamentalist' or more recently 'evangelical'.

Since many Christofascists bristle at the term 'fundamentalist' there has been a movement to get the media to refer to them as 'evangelicals.' However the term 'evangelical' is a misleading one as many Christian sects are evangelical in nature and not all evangelical Christians have such extremem [sic] views or political agendas. Christofascist is a more descriptive term for these right-wing extremists.

James Dobson's Focus on the Family is a Christofascist hate group bent on banning abortion and opressing homosexuals.

by damncutekitty January 24, 2005


christo fascist

A super nationalistic fundamentalist Christian.
The christo-fascists want to get rid of sex on cable TV.
by NKS May 22, 2005



THIS ARTICLE GOES INTO DETAIL ABOUT FASCISM

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-neiwert/trump-may-not-be-a-fascist-but_b_8973768.html
THE BLOG 01/14/2016 10:29 am ET Updated Jan 14, 2017
Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He Is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path
By David Neiwert

Photograph – Donald Trump -- ROBYN BECK VIA GETTY IMAGES

This post originally appeared on David Neiwert’s blog

People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.

And now, with the arrival of the Donald Trump 2016 phenomenon, that luck may be about to run out.

Nor is this phenomenon just a flash in the pan. Trump is the logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right come home to roost.

Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America’s DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars - particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.

Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own.” And indeed it was.

Despite the long-running presence of these elements, though, America has never yet given way to fascism. No doubt some of this, in the past half-century at least, was primarily fueled by the natural human recoil that occurred when we got to witness the end result of these tendencies when given the chance to rule by someone like Hitler - namely, the Holocaust. We learned to be appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced, and fled in terror.

Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon: in one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s comprised of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind.

That’s where Donald Trump comes in.

In many ways, Trump’s fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterly missing previously in American forms of fascism: the charismatic leader around whom the fascist troops can rally, the one who voices their frustrations and garners followers like flies.

“As we consider the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy.”

Scholars of fascist politics have remarked previously that America has been fortunate for most of its history not to have had such a figure rise out of the ranks of their fascist movements. And in the case of Donald Trump, that remains true - he has no background or history as a white supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.

Rather, what he is doing is mustering the latent fascist tendencies in American politics - some of it overtly white supremacist, while the majority of it is the structural racism and white privilege that springs from the nation’s extensive white-supremacist historical foundations - on his own behalf. He is merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even without being himself an overt fascist.

The reality that Trump is not a bona fide fascist himself does not make him any less dangerous. In some ways, it makes him more so, because it disguises the swastika looming in the shadow of the flamboyant orange hair. It camouflages the throng of ravening wolves he’s riding in upon.

There is little doubt that Trump is tapping into fascistic sentiments, which is why so many observers are now beginning to finally use the word in describing Trump’s campaign. From Rick Perlstein and Digby and Chauncey deVega (as well as a number of other writers at Salon) to Thom Hartmann at AlterNet to the typically staid Seattle Times, “fascism” is the word more and more people are using in relation to the campaign that Trump is running. Even some of his fellow conservatives are beginning to use the word.

And they have a valid point, because Trump fills out so many of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism. And while it’s true that, as Josh Marshall suggests, there really is no single, agreed-upon definition of fascism, there’s also no doubt that we can grasp the idea of fascism not just by studying its history, but also by examining the various attempts at understanding and defining just what comprises fascism. And in doing so, we can recognize exactly what it is that Trump is doing.

What it’s decidedly not, no matter what you might have read, is the simple-minded definition you’ll see in Internet memes attributed to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” As Chip Berlet has explained ad nauseam, not only did Mussolini never say or write such a thing, neither did the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, to whom it is also often attributed.

For one thing, as Berlet explains: “When Mussolini wrote about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.” The Skeptical Libertarian explains that the term “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than it means today:

“Corporations” were not individual businesses. Under fascist corporatism, sectors of the economy were divided into corporate groups, whose activities and interactions were managed and coordinated by the government. The idea was to split the difference between socialism and laissez faire capitalism, letting the state control and direct the economy from the top-down without itself owning the means of production.

... The bottom line is that corporate groups meant classes of people in the economy, which were allegedly represented through appointments to the Council. The system was not about welfare for private companies, but rather about totalitarian central planning of the whole economy through legislation and regulation. Corporatism meant formally “incorporating” divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their differences through regulatory mechanisms.
Moreover, as Berlet explains, this fake definition of fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini himself did in fact write about the nature of fascism. If he or Gentile ever did actually say it, it’s likely it was a bit of propaganda intended to ease and mislead business-minded followers.

Another thing that fascism decidedly is NOT is the grotesque distortion made by Jonah Goldberg, to wit, that fascism is a kind of socialism and therefore “properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This claim, in fact, is such a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning, rendering it, as George Orwell might describe it, a form of Newspeak. Indeed, it was Orwell himself who wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.”

Fascism, in reality, is a much more complex phenomenon than either of these definitions. Let’s look, by way of example, at some of the more recent efforts at defining it:

Stanley Payne, in Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980):

A. The Fascist Negations:
— Antiliberalism
— Anticommunism
— Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly with the right)
B. Ideology and Goals:
— Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models
— Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist
— The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with other powers
— Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture
C. Style and Organization:
— Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects
— Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia
— Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence
— Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing the organic view of society
— Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation
— Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton’s nine “mobilizing passions” of fascism:

— a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
— the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;
— the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group’s enemies, both internal and external;
— dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
— the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
— the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny;
— the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
— the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
— the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess in a Darwinian struggle.
Roger Griffin:

Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.

To these I would add one other important component, taken from Harald Oftstad’s Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values - And Our Own (1989), namely, the logical extension of the Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons deemed “weaker” (be this ethnic, racial, medical, genetic, or otherwise) are held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels.

In Hitler’s own words:

The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.

... [We will try to] “save” even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues. [Mein Kampf]

Taking a careful look at Trump’s campaign, the fascist traits immediately emerge:

1. Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race, poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans - labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease - is classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination.

Trump’s appeal in this regard ultimately is about forming a “purer” community, and it has been relentless and expansive: When an audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” He now also claims that if elected, he will send back all the refugees from Syria who have arrived in the United States: “If I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign crowds. And shortly before he encouraged a crowd that “maybe should have roughed up” a Black Lives Matter protester, he told an interviewer that the movement is “looking for trouble.” Most recently, he tweeted out a graphic taken from a neo-Nazi website purporting to demonstrate (falsely) that black people commit most murders in America (though he later claimed that he hadn’t endorsed the graphic).

2. The palingenetic ultranationalism. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”
[See wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism]

That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis - that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but are the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.

3. Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”

4. Trump constantly proclaims America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world, and proclaims that this has occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians.

5. He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.

6. Trump’s contempt for weakness is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his recent mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability.

This list could probably go on all day. But eventually, as we consider the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy.

“Trump will do and say anything that appeals to the lowest common denominator of the American body politic in order to attract their support.”

Fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of enacting various forms of thuggery on their opponents (as in the Italian Blackshirts, aka the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, and the German Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung). Trump, however, has no such force at his disposal.

What Trump does have is the avid support not only of various white-supremacist organizations, as well as that of very real paramilitary organizations in the form of the Oath Keepers and the “III Percent“ movement, many of whose members are avid Trump backers, but neither of which have explicitly endorsed him. Moreover, Trump has never referenced any desire to form an alliance or to make use of such paramilitary forces.

What Trump has done is wink, nudge, and generally encouraged spontaneous violence as a response to his critics. This includes his winking and nudging at those “enthusiastic supporters” who committed anti-Latino hate crimes, his encouragement of the people at a campaign appearance who assaulted a Latino protester, and most recently, his endorsement of the people who “maybe should have roughed up” the “disgusting” Black Lives Matter protester who interrupted his speech.

That’s a clearly fascistic response. It also helps us understand why Trump is an extraordinarily dangerous right-wing populist demagogue, and not a genuine, in-the-flesh fascist.

A serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that.

That, in a tiny nutshell, is an example of the problem with Trump’s fascism: He is not really an ideologue, acting out of a rigid adherence to a consistent worldview, as all fascists are. Trump’s only real ideology is the Worship of the Donald, and he will do and say anything that appeals to the lowest common denominator of the American body politic in order to attract their support - the nation’s id, the near-feral segment that breathes and lives on fear and paranoia and hatred.

There’s no question these supporters bring a singular, visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know anyone who expects that such a campaign can survive the oxygen and exposure of a general election. Indeed, it is in many signs an indication of the doom that is descending upon a Republican Party in freefall, flailing about in a death spiral, that it is finally resorting to a campaign as nakedly fascistic as Trump’s in its attempts to secure the presidency.

This is why Trump has never called upon the shock troops of a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has always kept an arm’s-length distance from the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some of his most enthusiastic backers. He isn’t really one of them.

What he is, as Berlet has explained elsewhere, is a classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.”

Of course, it’s also important to understand that fascism, in fact, is a subspecies of right-wing populism, very similar to the Klan in nature - that is, its malignant, metastasized version, crazed in its insatiable lust for power, fueled by fear and hatred, and fed by the blood of its vulnerable targets.

Trump is not fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology. What he represents instead is the kind of id-driven feral politics common to the radical right, a sort of gut-level reactionarism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism.

That does not, however, mean he is any less dangerous to American democracy. Indeed, he may be more dangerous than an outright fascist, who would in reality be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in the current milieu. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious - that is, he is creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.

Recall, if you will, the lessons of Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 - namely, the way these changes happen not overnight, but incrementally, like the legendary slow boiling of frogs:

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

... “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ‘43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ‘33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn’t get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

And this is what has been happening to America - in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party - for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of this, the culmination of a very long-growing trend that really began in the 1990s.

That was when we first saw the popular rise of eliminationist hate talk, wielded with thoughtless glee and great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush Limbaugh, and then deeply codified by the talking heads who have subsequently marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It rose to the surface with the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin in 2008, followed immediately, in reaction to the election of Barack Obama, by the birth of the Tea Party, which is perhaps the single most significant manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history.

Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party elements, remarking in 2011 that “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And indeed he does - in particular, with its obeisance to the captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else.

This is a phenomenon known as Producerism, and it is one of the hallmarks of right-wing populism. It’s accurately defined in Wikipedia as:

a syncretic ideology of populist economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of society - the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur, are being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the social structure.

... Producerism sees society’s strength being “drained from both ends”—from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital and the large, politically connected corporations which together conspire to restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern Producerism. Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.

In the United States, Producerists are distrustful of both major political parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).

Berlet has written extensively about the long historical association of producerism with oppressive right-wing movements and regimes:

Producerism begins in the U.S. with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and lower-class Whites’ double-edged resentments. Producerism became a staple of repressive populist ideology. Producerism sought to rally the middle strata together with certain sections of the elite. Specifically, it championed the so-called producing classes (including White farmers, laborers, artisans, slaveowning planters, and “productive” capitalists) against “unproductive” bankers, speculators, and monopolists above—and people of color below. After the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews.

The Producerist narrative is why Henry Ford - who, as the ostensible author of The International Jew, a 1920 conspiracist tome that inspired Hitler’s paranoia, and whose capital later helped build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s, was also (and not coincidentally) perhaps the ultimate American enabler of fascism - is such a seminal figure for American right-wing populists, both as a leader in the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as a figure of reverence today. (Glenn Beck, in fact, on several occasions on his old Fox News show referenced Ford as something of a holy figure for his efforts to resist FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s.) The same narrative is also why, in today’s context, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged - a tendentious novel speculating on the disasters that would befall the world if its great industrial leaders suddenly chose to stop producing - are so important in their mythology.

Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous — because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It’s all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.

The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called “sucker populism.”

Nonetheless, right-wing populists have long been part of the larger conservative movement - though largely relegated to its fringes. Some of the more virulent expressions of this populism, including the Posse Comitatus movement, Willis Carto’s Populist Party, and the “Patriot”/militia movement of the 1990s, have been largely relegated to fringe status. However, there have been periods in America’s past when right-wing populism was not thoroughly mainstream but also politically ascendant. Probably the most exemplary of these was during the wave of Ku Klux Klan revival between 1915 and 1930.

This Klan crumbled in the late 1920s under the weight of internal political warfare and corruption; many of its field organizers later turned up in William Dudley Pelley’s overtly fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s. After World War II, most of these groups - as well as the renowned anti-Semite radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, and lingering American fascist groups like George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party - were fully relegated to fringe status. So, too, were subsequent attempts at reviving right-wing populism, embodied by Willis Carto and his Populist Party, as well as other forms of right-wing populism that cropped up in the latter half of the century, from Robert DePugh’s vigilante/domestic terrorist organization The Minutemen in the 1960s, to the Posse Comitatus and “constitutionalist” tax protesters in the 1970s and ‘80s, to the “militia”/Patriot movement of the 1990s. As it had been since at least the 1920s, this brand of populism was riddled with conspiracist paranoia, xenophobic white tribalism, and a propensity for extreme violence.

Yet beginning in the 1990s, as mainstream conservatives built more and more ideological bridges with this sector - reflected in the increasing adoption of far-right rhetoric within the mainstream - the strands of populism became more and more imbedded in mainstream-conservative dogma, particularly the deep, visceral, and often irrational hatred of the federal government. One of the more popular “mainstream” figures among this bloc in the 1990s was Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. And so when he created something of a sensation with his campaign for the Republican nomination in 2008, it meant that these ideas and agendas started receiving widespread circulation among the mainstream Right — and with it, an increasing number of conservatives who called themselves “libertarians”, when what they really meant was “populists.”

But if Ron Paul opened the door for right-wing populism, though, he scarcely could have anticipated the overnight political star who would, in short order, come waltzing through it to great fanfare - namely, Sarah Palin. Hers is a somewhat different, more mainstream-friendly brand of right-wing populism - and as a result, it was embraced by a significantly greater portion of the American electorate.

Her populism emerged for national view shortly after John McCain announced her as his running mate. It was more than just the aggressive, McCarthyite attacks on Obama as a “radical” who “palled around with terrorists” and the paranoid bashing of “liberal elites” — most of all, there was the incessant suggestion that she and McCain represented “real Americans” and were all about standing up for “the people.”

Populism, yes, but indisputably right-wing, too: socially and fiscally conservative, business-friendly, and hostile to progressive causes. The Producerist narrative was a constant current in Palin’s speeches, particularly when she would get the crowd chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The populism whipped up by Palin’s candidacy became manifest as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. Indeed, not only was the Tea Party overtly a right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival of the 1990s version of this populism, the “Patriot”/militia movement. Many of these Tea Partiers are now the same Oath Keepers and “III Percenters” whose members widely support Trump’s candidacy.

Of course, most of these extremists are only one step removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. And there really is no other good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than “fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism - they are, after all, not just kissing cousins, but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.

All of which underscores the central fact: Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but his vicious brand of right-wing populism is not just empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading a whole nation of followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism.

“America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies”

Consider, if you will, what did occur in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s remarks about “roughing up” Black Lives Matter protesters: Two nights later, a trio of white supremacists in Minneapolis invaded a Black Lives Matter protest there and shot five people, in an act that had been carefully planned and networked through the Internet.

What this powerfully implies is that Trump has achieved that kind of twilight-zone level of influence where he can simply demonize a target with rhetoric suggestive of violent retribution and his admirers will act out that very suggestion. It’s only a step removed from the fascist leader who calls out his paramilitary thugs to engage in violence.

America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies - with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism. For myself, I remain confident that Americans will choose the former and demolish the latter - that Trump’s candidacy will founder, and the tide of right-wing populism will reach its high-water mark under him and then recede with him.

What is most troubling, though, is the momentum that Trump’s candidacy has given that tide. He may not himself lack any real ideological footing, but he has laid the groundwork for a fascist groundswell that could someday be ridden to power by a similarly charismatic successor who is himself more in the mold of an ideological fascist. And it doesn’t take a very long look down the roll of 2016 Republican candidates to find a couple of candidates who might fit that mold.

Trump may not be fascist, but he is empowering their existing elements in American society; even more dangerously, his Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping them grow their ranks, along with their potential to recruit, by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making all this thuggery and ugliness seem normal. And that IS a serious problem.

Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? Here’s how.

David Neiwert
Managing Editor, CrooksandLiars.com



https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trump-and-the-christian-fascists/
JUL 24, 2017 TD ORIGINALS
Trump and the Christian Fascists
By Chris Hedges

Photograph -- Donald Trump with the Rev. Pat Robertson in 2016 at Virginia's Regent University, founded by Robertson. This month Robertson was granted a White House interview with the president for the Christian Broadcasting Network, also founded by the televangelist. (Steve Helber / AP)

Donald Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power for decades. If the nation suffers another economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or a new war, President Trump’s ability to force the Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had 81 percent of white evangelicals behind him.

Trump’s moves to restrict abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, permit discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious liberty” and allow churches to become active in politics by gutting the Johnson Amendment, along with his nominations of judges championed by the Federalist Society and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, have endeared him to the Christian right. He has rolled back civil rights legislation and business and environmental regulations. He has elevated several stalwarts of the Christian right into power—Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Justice Department, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom Price to Health and Human Services and Ben Carson to Housing and Urban Development. He embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger and racism that define the Christian right.

Click here for a 2007 video of Chris Hedges speaking about his book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

More important, Trump’s disdain for facts and his penchant for magical thinking and conspiracy theories mesh well with the worldview of the Christian right, which sees itself as under attack by the satanic forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood and the Democratic Party. In this worldview, climate change is not real, Barack Obama is a Muslim and millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election.

The followers of the Christian right, like Trump and his brain trust, including Stephen Bannon, are Manicheans. They see the world in black and white, good and evil, them and us. Trump’s call in his speech in Poland for a crusade against the godless hoards of Muslims fleeing from the wars and chaos we created replicates the view of the Christian right. Christian right leaders in a sign of support went to the White House on July 10 to pray over Trump. Two days later Pat Robertson showed up there to interview the president for his Christian Broadcasting Network.

If the alliance between these zealots and the government succeeds, it will snuff out the last vestiges of American democracy.

On the surface it appears to be incongruous that the Christian right would rally behind a slick New York real estate developer who is a very public serial philanderer and adulterer, has no regard for the truth, is consumed by greed, does not appear to read or know the Bible, routinely defrauds and cheats his investors and contractors, expresses a crude misogyny and an even cruder narcissism and appears to yearn for despotism. In fact, these are the very characteristics that define most of the leaders of the Christian right. Trump has preyed on desperate people through the thousands of slot machines in his casinos, his sham university and his real estate deals. Megachurch pastors prey on their followers by extracting “seed offerings,” “love gifts,” tithes and donations and by selling miracle healings along with “prayer clothes,” self-help books, audio and video recordings and even protein shakes. Pastors have established within their megachurches, as Trump did in his businesses, despotic fiefdoms. They cannot be challenged or questioned any more than an omnipotent Trump could be challenged on the reality television show “The Apprentice.” And they seek to replicate their little tyrannies on a national scale, with white men in charge.

The personal piety of most of the ministers who lead the Christian right is a facade. Their private lives are usually marked by hedonistic squalor that includes mansions, private jets, limousines, retinues of bodyguards, personal assistants and servants, shopping sprees, lavish vacations and sexual escapades that rival those carried out by Trump. And because they run “churches,” in many cases church funds pay for their tax-free empires, including their extravagant lifestyles. They also engage in the nepotism found in the Trump organization, elevating family members to prominent or highly paid positions and passing on the businesses to their children.

The Christian right’s scandals, which give a glimpse into the sordid lives of these multimillionaire pastors, are legion. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Praise the Lord Club, for example, raked in as much as $1 million a week before Jim Bakker went to prison for nearly five years. He was convicted of fraud and other charges in 1989 because of a $158 million scheme in which followers paid for vacations that never materialized. As the Bakker empire came apart, there also were accusations of drug use and rape. Tammy Faye died in 2007, and now Jim Bakker is back, peddling survival food for the end days and telling his significantly reduced television audience that anyone who opposes Trump is the Antichrist. Paul and Jan Crouch, who gave the Bakkers their start, founded Trinity Broadcasting, the world’s largest televangelist network, now run by their son Matt and his wife, Laurie. Viewers were encouraged to call prayer counselors at the toll-free number shown at the bottom of the TV screen. It was a short step from talking with a prayer counselor to making a “love gift” and becoming a “partner” in Trinity Broadcasting and then sending in more money during one of the frequent Praise-a-Thons.

The Crouches reveled in tasteless kitsch, as does Trump. They sat during their popular nightly program in front of stained glass windows that overlooked Louis XVI-inspired sets awash in gold rococo and red velvet, glittering chandeliers and a gold-painted piano. The network emblem, which Paul Crouch wore on the pocket of his blue double-breasted blazer, featured a crown, a lion, a horse, a white dove, a cross and Latin phrases among other elements. The Crouches would have been at home in Trump Tower, where the president has a faux “Trump crest”—allegedly plagiarized—and has decorated his penthouse as if it was part of Versailles.

The Crouches were masters of manipulation. They exhorted viewers to send in checks for $1,000, even if they could not afford it. Write the check anyway, Paul Crouch, who died in 2013, told them, as a “step of faith” and the Lord would repay them many times over. “Do you think God would have any trouble getting $1,000 extra to you somehow?” he asked during one Praise-a-Thon broadcast. Viewers, many of whom struggled with deep despair and believed that miracles and magic alone held them back from the abyss, often found it impossible to resist this emotional pressure.

Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is home to many of the worst charlatans in the Christian right, including the popular healer Benny Hinn, who says that Adam was a superhero who could fly to the moon and claims that one day the dead will be raised by watching TBN from inside their coffins. Hinn claims his “anointings” have cured cancer, AIDS, deafness, blindness and numerous other ailments and physical injuries. Those who have not been cured, he says, did not send in enough money.

These religious hucksters are some of the most accomplished con artists in the country, a trait they share with the current occupant of the Oval Office.

I wrote a book on the Christian right in 2007 called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I did not use the word “fascist” lightly. I spent several hours, at the end of two years of reporting, with two of the country’s foremost scholars on fascism—Fritz Stern and Robert O. Paxton. Did this ideology fit the parameters of classical fascism? Was it virulent enough and organized enough to seize power? Would it go to the ruthless extremes of previous fascist movements to persecute and silence dissent? Has our deindustrialized society replicated the crippling despair, alienation and rage that always feed fascist movements?

The evangelicalism promoted by the Christian right is very different from the evangelicalism and fundamentalism of a century ago. The emphasis on personal piety that defined the old movement, the call to avoid the contamination of politics, has been replaced by Christian Reconstructionism, called Dominionism by some. This new ideology is about taking control of all institutions, including the government, to build a “Christian” nation. Rousas John Rushdoony in his 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” first articulated it. Rushdoony argued that God gives the elect, just as he gave Adam and Noah, dominion over the earth to build a Christian society. Their state will come about with the physical eradication of the forces of Satan. It is the duty of the church and the elect to “rescue” the world so Christ can return.

This is an ideology of death. It promises that the secular, humanist society will be physically destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of our legal system. Creationism or “Intelligent Design” will be taught in public schools. People who are considered social deviants, including homosexuals, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace the Christian right’s perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible—will be silenced, imprisoned or killed. The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. Church organizations will be funded and empowered by the government to run social-welfare agencies. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and sinfulness, will be denied government assistance. The death penalty will be expanded to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. Women will be subordinate to men. Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens and eventually outcasts. The wars in the Middle East will be defined as religious crusades against Muslims. There will be no separation of church and state. The only legitimate voices will be “Christian.” America will become an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities will be branded as agents of Satan.

Tens of millions of Americans are already hermetically sealed within this bizarre worldview. They are given a steady diet of conspiracy theories and lies on the internet, in their churches, in Christian schools and colleges and on Christian television and radio. Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote “The Red Network” and was a Nazi sympathizer, is required reading. Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of church and state, is ignored. This Christian propaganda hails the “significant contributions” of the Confederacy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, is rehabilitated as an American hero. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, is defined as part of the worldwide battle against satanic Islamic terror. Presently, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. public believes in Creationism or “Intelligent Design.” And nearly a third of the population, 94 million people, consider themselves evangelical. Those who remain in a reality-based universe often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons. They do not take seriously the huge segment of the public, mostly white and working class, who because of economic distress have primal yearnings for vengeance, new glory and moral renewal and are easily seduced by magical thinking. These are the yearnings and emotions Trump has exploited politically.

Those who embrace this movement need to feel, even if they are not, that they are victims surrounded by dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They need to elevate themselves to the role of holy warriors, infused with a noble calling and purpose. They need to sanctify the rage and hypermasculinity that are the core of fascism. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief, which includes being anointed for a special purpose in life by God, are potent weapons in the fight against their own demons and desire for meaning.

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,” Simone Weil wrote.

These believers, like all fascists, detest the reality-based world. They condemn it as contaminated, decayed and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they suddenly discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to be rich, powerful and happy.

The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and evidence, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem. They need to live in a society that is not predatory but instead provides well-funded public schools, free university education and universal health care, a society in which they and their families can prosper.

Let us not stand at the open gates of the city waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching towards Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for economic reparations for the poor and the working class. Let us give all Americans a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance, united behind the ludicrous figure of Donald Trump, will ride this rage to power.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-gop-enablers-borrow-a-page-from-the-fascist-era-vatican/2017/02/27/f7316210-fd1a-11e6-99b4-9e613afeb09f_story.html
Opinions
Trump’s GOP enablers take a page from the fascist-era Vatican
By Richard Cohen Opinion writer
February 27, 2017

Photograph -- White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, left, and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. (Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency)

Despite his jutting jaw and comical bravado, President Trump is not another Benito Mussolini. The Italian dictator had six children, one wife and several mistresses, the most loyal of whom, Claretta Petacci, chose to die with him and was hanged upside down in a Milan gas station. Most of Trump’s women have fared better.

On the other hand, the similarities between Trump and Mussolini are so obvious that it would amount to journalistic malpractice not to mention some of them. Mussolini was vain, bombastic, vulgar and, while the creator of fascism, he believed in nothing aside from himself. A former Italian prime minister, quoted in David Kertzer’s book “The Pope and Mussolini,” thought that Mussolini’s chief attribute “was his devotion to the cult of his own personality.” Is this our guy or what?

Kertzer’s book was published in 2014 at a time when Trump’s presidency seemed likely only to Jared Kushner. So clearly no analogy was intended, although one is certainly there. The most cogent parallel is contained in the book’s very title: the pope. Strip him of his vestments, and Pius XI becomes a politician much like Reince Priebus, Mike Pence or any other member of the Republican establishment for whom, in exchange for something of value — lower taxes, less regulation or, in the case of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a comforting certainty in the loo — a deal can be made. These Republicans and others would accept Trump and gamble on American democracy and world peace.

In Mussolini’s day, the Catholic Church, too, had its demands and grievances. The Italian state had seized church lands, reducing the pope’s realm to itsy-bitsy Vatican City. The state had taken over the schools. It was no longer financially supporting the church. It had permitted divorce. Pius XI wanted to return to the status quo ante. In exchange for recognition of Mussolini’s fascist government, by 1929 Il Duce was willing to oblige.

Mussolini was hardly religious. On the contrary, as a one-time doctrinaire socialist, he reviled the church, considering it an anachronistic picker of the average man’s pocket. Still, he was willing to do business with the Vatican. Mussolini’s only principle was his own self-interest.

As for Pius XI, he had many principles — but none of them stood in the way of making a deal with a fascist whose goons routinely beat up priests, attacked Catholic social centers and murdered the occasional dissident. Violence displeased the pope. What displeased him more, however, were current church-state relations. What the pope feared most of all was the threat of communism and, of course, the entirely hallucinatory power he attributed to the Jews. Mussolini was willing to destroy them both.

Pius XI did not like Mussolini — not his swagger, not his use of violence, not his libidinous ramblings and not his vanity. Bit by bit, however, he came to terms with what he loathed and instead concentrated on what was good for the church. This amorality is often called pragmatism.

In today’s Republican Party, a similar process is under way. The princes of the GOP have elevated business concerns to the level of national interest. This accounts for the procession of Wall Street types who have backed Trump almost from the start — Wilbur Ross, Carl Icahn and Steve Schwarzman, who once said of a possible tax increase on private-equity firms: “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

It’s not that these billionaires live in a world totally of their own. They all are philanthropists. But when it comes to Trump, they have managed to overlook his mocking of the disabled, his insults regarding Mexicans, his attacks on the press, his cooing at Russian President Vladimir Putin, his name-calling, his spectacular lying and his daunting ignorance.

In a recent speech at UCLA, Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal and an unquestioned conservative, likened the way “the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master” to those pathetic souls who once found virtue, if not inevitability, in Stalinism. But the billionaires and politicians who sit around Trump’s table and chortle cravenly at the boss’s jokes do not fear for their lives or their jobs. No Siberia awaits them.

It is instructive to read how the Vatican, a moral institution, once put its own self-interest above its moral duty and embraced Mussolini. It is just plain depressing to note how history repeats itself. The Vatican, at least, sold out for church privileges. The GOP business and political class has sold out for greed.

Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive.

Read more on this issue:

Barton Swaim: Trump’s populism isn’t fascism. So what is it?




https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/3/14154300/fascist-populist-trump-democracy
Donald Trump isn’t a fascist
A leading expert on 1930s-era politics explains that Trump is a right-wing populist, not a fascist — and the distinction matters.
Updated by Sheri Berman Jan 3, 2017, 1:00pm EST

Photograph -- Protesters in New York City, November 9, 2016. Pacific Press / Getty

The debate over whether it makes sense to call Donald Trump a fascist began during the Republican primary and continues after his election to the presidency. More than a year ago, the conservative writer Robert Kagan offered one of the strongest votes in favor of the proposition: “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster … and with an entire national political party … falling into line behind him.”

One of the strongest “no” votes came from Vox’s Dylan Matthews, who arrived at that conclusion after interviewing several scholars of fascism. Trump, Matthews wrote, “is not a fascist. … Rather, he's a right-wing populist.”

At the New Republic, just before the election, Jeet Heer suggested that such a definitive answer was inappropriate: “Fascism,” he wrote, “has never been a fixed creed; it’s a syndrome, a series of intertwined tendencies.”

This debate over labels may seem merely semantic. But definitions matter. The point of labels is to identify, clarify, understand, and, if relevant, figure out ways of coping with the phenomenon at hand. Labeling Trump or other new-right parties and politicians “fascist” implies something not just about what these people and movements stand for but how the opposition should deal with them.

As a student of fascism and National Socialism, particularly in the 1930s, I side with those who say that Trump still falls on the “populist” side of the spectrum. That hardly means that he or the people who claim to be part of his movement do not pose a threat to democracy, but the type of threat differs from that posed by “classical” fascists.

Still, given how prevalent the term fascism has become in American and European political debates — and there is a parallel discussion across the Atlantic over whether France’s Front National, led by Marie Le Pen, or Germany’s Pegida party, or Austria’s Freedom Party ought to be described as fascist or populist — it is worth carefully considering what made fascism distinct and so politically powerful. Doing so will allow us to gain a better handle on whether we face similar dangers today to those of the ’30s.

Four key characteristics of fascism (not in evidence in Trumpism)
Academics have fought passionately over how to define fascism, but scholars generally focus on four crucial characteristics. First fascists were nationalists: They believed the nation, rather than individuals (like liberals) or classes (like Marxists), was the key actor in political life; that it existed above or separate from the citizens composing it; and that it had a special mission or “soul” that needed to be nurtured and protected from internal and external enemies.


Membership in the nation was determined on a religious, ethnic, or racial basis. Alfredo Rocco, for example, one of fascism’s chief “intellectuals,” once wrote: “For Liberalism, society has no purposes other than those of the members living at a given moment. For Fascism, [the nation] has … ends … quite distinct from those of the individuals which at a given moment compose it. … For Liberalism, the individual is the end and the [nation] the means. … For Fascism, [the nation] is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.”

Second, fascists shared a deep suspicion of capitalism, because it disrupted and divided national communities and destroyed national traditions. They therefore advocated a level of state intervention in the economy surpassed only by the contemporary Soviet Union. At the first Labor Day celebration held under Nazi rule in May 1933, Joseph Goebbels proclaimed:

the German people [were now] assembled in unanimous, unswerving loyalty to the state, the race (Volk), and the German nation to which we all belong. Every difference is wiped away. The barriers of class hatred and the arrogance of social status that for over 50 years divided the nation from itself have been torn down. Germans of all classes, tribes (Stämme), professions, and denominations have joined hands across the barriers that separated them and have vowed henceforth to live as a community, to work and fight for the fatherland that unites us all. … The class struggle is at an end. The idea of the national community rises above the ruins of the bankrupt liberal-capitalist state. … Thus the German people marches into the future.
Third, fascists were deeply anti-liberal and anti-democratic. Liberalism was rejected for its promotion of individualism and individual rights, its emphasis on reason and rationality, its acceptance of pluralism, and its cosmopolitanism. As Mussolini once argued, “The man of fascism is [not merely] an individual, he is nation and fatherland.” The good life, he suggested, is one “in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realized that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.” (Self-denial and the sacrifice of self-interests are not qualities that Trump is especially known for.)

Democracy was anathema because it did not recognize a “higher” or “national” good that transcended the interest of particular individuals, social groups, or electoral majorities. Fascists were also convinced that “the people” were best off, and politics most efficacious, when led by a strong ruler or a committed minority. As Hitler infamously put it, there must be “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one empire, one leader”).

Fourth, fascists embraced violence as a means and an end. Fascism was revolutionary: It aimed not to reform but to destroy the modern world — and for this, a constant and probably violent struggle would be necessary. Violence was not merely the method through which revolution would be accomplished; it was valuable in and of itself, providing supporters with powerful “bonding” experiences and “cleansing” the nation of its weaknesses and decadence. Mussolini, for example, argued that “[w]ar alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death.”

Historically, fascism arose in a political environment of unremitting tumult and hopelessness
These characteristics made fascism distinctive; they did not alone make it powerful. Although we associate fascism with the collapse of democracy in interwar Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, its origins lie decades earlier, in the period of rapid and disorienting change that hit Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During these decades, capitalism dramatically reshaped Western societies, destroying traditional communities, professions, and cultural norms. This was also, of course, a period of immense immigration, as peasants flocked from rural areas decimated by the inflow of cheap agricultural products from the “new” world to cities and the citizens of poorer countries flocked to richer ones in search of better lives and opportunities.

Then as now, these changes frightened people and led to the rise of new political movements that aimed to capture and channel these fears. Right-wing nationalist movements — the predecessors of fascism — were among these, promising to protect citizens from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets. Although these types of movements appeared across the West, they did not fundamentally threaten existing political orders before 1914. The characteristics of these movements alone, in other words, were not enough to make them powerful; it took certain conditions to give them the mass support they needed to overthrow existing political regimes. The First World War and its aftermath along with the failures and miscalculations of existing democratic institutions and elites provided these conditions.


As the war ended, dictatorships collapsed and were replaced by democracies, but most of them arose in countries with no previous experience with that form of government — and therefore none of the institutions, habits, and norms necessary for making democracy work. These new democratic governments then faced immense problems. The war had killed, maimed, and traumatized millions of Europeans and left the continent physically and economically devastated. Governments had to reintegrate millions of soldiers back into society and rebuild their economies. Austria and Germany had to deal with the humiliation of defeat and a punitive peace, and were quickly hit by hyperinflation.

In addition, across the continent lawlessness and violence became endemic after 1918. In Italy, for example, left- and right-wing militias fought battles in the urban and rural areas, workers occupied factories, and peasants seized land. Germany’s Weimar Republic was hit by assassinations and violent left- and right-wing uprisings. Despite all this, fascists remained marginal — initially. In Italy’s first postwar election, fascists received almost no votes. In Germany, Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch flopped. Mussolini and Hitler might well have remained the marginal cranks many of their contemporaries took them for had not democracies and other political actors continued to stumble.

But stumble they did. As time passed, problems mounted, democratic governments failed to deal with them, and other political parties — on both the right and left — failed to offer convincing responses to citizens’ fears and concerns.

Mainstream political parties fled the field
The Great Depression, of course, was particularly important — but it wasn’t merely the economic downturn that boosted fascism, but rather the way democratic governments and non-fascist political parties responded to it. Too many democratic governments responded passively or ineffectively to the Depression, leaving Europeans to suffer its horrible effects on their own. (Tellingly, in places where governments responded actively, like the United States and Sweden, democracy survived the interwar years.)

Other political parties also failed to offer convincing alternatives to the status quo. By the early 1930s, liberal parties had been discredited, as citizens found their faith in markets, their unwillingness to respond forcefully to capitalism’s downsides, and their indifference or hostility to nationalism and cultural concerns completely out of sync with interwar realities.

With the exception of Scandinavian social democrats, meanwhile, most socialist parties were also flummoxed by the Depression, telling citizens that their lives would only improve once capitalism had collapsed and that they could, therefore, do little to help them in the interim. (Socialists were also, of course, like most of their successors today, indifferent or hostile to concerns about national identity and the evisceration of traditional norms and communities, which was also an unwise political stance during a period of immense social upheaval.)

Nuremberg Rally, circa 1934
Trump rallies were problematic, but they weren’t... Imagno / Hulton Archive / Getty
One group that did offer a strong criticism of the status quo as well as a powerful alternative to it was the communists, and during the Great Depression their vote share soared in many European countries. Communism’s appeal was, however, limited by an almost exclusive focus on the working class and hostility to nationalism. And so in all too many European countries, it was fascists who offered the most powerful critique of the status quo as well as the most powerful alternative to it.


Fascists criticized democracy as inefficient, unresponsive, and weak, and promised to replace it with a regime that would respond actively to the Depression, use the state to protect citizens from capitalism’s most destructive effects, and end the divisions and conflicts that had weakened their nations — often, of course, by ridding them of those viewed as outside of or a threat to it. Fascists also promised to restore a sense of pride and purpose to societies that for too long had felt battered by forces outside their control. Such appeals enabled fascist parties in Germany and elsewhere to attract an extremely broad, cross-class constituency.

But even with the failures of democratic governments and other political parties, fascists could not come to power alone. And so another condition necessary for fascism’s rise was the connivance of traditional conservatives. In both Italy and Germany, for example, conservatives, obsessed with thwarting the left, fooled themselves into believing they could use fascists for their own purposes, maneuvering them into political power. Once in power, however, Hitler and Mussolini repaid this debt by eliminating their erstwhile conservative allies as well as much of the rest of the old order, viewing them, correctly, as a hindrance to their revolutionary projects.

Today’s right-wing populists have made peace with capitalism, and don’t overtly embrace war
As this brief discussion should make clear, there are some similarities between fascists and today’s populists, including Donald Trump, but also some crucial differences.

First, while contemporary populists often extol things like “national sovereignty” (see Brexit) and the importance of national values and communities, they rarely present the nation as an “organic entity” existing above or beyond the people. And “the people” tend to be defined on the basis of shared customs, traditions, and behaviors, rather than on purely racial or ethnic grounds. Populists are thus more often xenophobic than racist.

Second, while populists are often critical of free market, globalized capitalism, their disapproval is more muted and selective than that of true fascists, and they advocate nowhere near the type of state intervention in the economy that Mussolini or Hitler, for example, did. Trump’s intervention to save a few hundred jobs in an air conditioning factory in Indiana may run afoul of free market principles, but it hardly amounts to the type of wholesale rethinking of the relationship between states and capitalism offered by interwar fascists and National Socialists.

Third, populists claim to speak in the name of the “the people,” and often demonize those disagreeing with them. They are thus inherently anti-pluralist, dismissive of the rights of minorities and the legitimacy of alternative viewpoints. Populism is therefore illiberal, but not necessarily anti-democratic. Indeed, populists claim to want to improve democracy, at least as they define it — to rid it of corruption and inefficiency and make it more responsive to “the people.” For this reason, unlike fascists, they offer no alternative to democracy, other than moving it from its liberal version to an illiberal or majoritarian one.

Fourth, populists do not openly embrace violence as either a means or an end: They neither claim to advocate the sort of revolutionary transformation of politics, economy, and society for which violence would almost certainly be necessary nor do they explicitly encourage their supporters to engage in it.

Populists thus share some characteristics with fascists, but their profiles also diverge in critical ways. This divergence reflects the different contexts within which they arose and point to different ways of dealing with them.

What turned the cranky nationalist movements of Europe’s late 19th century into the powerful fascist parties of the interwar period was primarily the changing conditions they faced: namely the immense problems created by the First World War and its aftermath combined with the failures and miscalculations of democratic institutions and elites in responding to them.


While Western democracies surely face serious problems today, including poverty, rising inequality, diminishing social mobility, and communities eviscerated by a decline in local civil society organizations, the departure of local businesses, deteriorating infrastructure, and so on, we are simply not in the 1920s or ’30s. Levels of economic and social dislocation are not remotely as high — in the US, unemployment is around 5 percent, a healthy figure — and democratic norms are stronger than in early to mid-20th-century Europe. This is not, however, reason for complacency. Many commentators have recently sounded alarms about the dangers of democratic “backsliding.”

The weakening of some democratic norms is one thing; fascist revolution is another
In a recent excellent essay in the New York Times, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that Trump “tested positive” as a threat to democracy, given “a failure to reject violence unambiguously, a readiness to curtail rivals’ civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of elected governments.”

They also described Trump as a “serial norm breaker” — abetted by a Republican Party that has been willing to violate longstanding informal rules that constrained political ill will (including, for example, simply declining to consider President Obama’s most recent nominee for the Supreme Court). Their point of comparison was less Germany in the 1930s than Latin American countries that adopted US-style constitutions and then drifted toward strongman-style government.

The setbacks to democracy and the populism that Levitsky and Ziblatt warn of are definitely possible. But the word “backsliding” itself hints at a crucial difference between populism and fascism: In the former, the danger is a gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions; in the latter, democracy ends through a revolutionary, often violent, conquest of power, which historically occurred only because democracy had already essentially ceased to function at all.

Whether populism brings enough democratic erosion to actually threaten the continued existence of democracy — as it has done, for example, in places like Turkey and Hungary and is threatening to do in Poland — is thus a very open question in the US and Western Europe, where democratic norms and institutions have deep historical roots and, despite current hysteria, are still very much in place. The ultimate consequences, in other words, of contemporary populism depend as much on how democratic institutions, parties, and elites respond to contemporary problems and populists as they will on populists themselves. If problems go unaddressed and mainstream parties can’t convince electorates that they, rather than populists, have the best responses to them, then the appeal and radicalism of populism will grow.

In Europe, where populists are not (yet) in power, governments need to find ways to deal with rising inequality, wage stagnation, high unemployment, immigration and integration, and terrorism. In the US, after Trump’s victory, other democratic institutions and actors will need to be vigilant policing attacks on the Constitution, the rule of law, and minority rights.

In both Europe and the US, the response of mainstream parties of the right and left to contemporary problems and populists will also be crucial. Will traditional parties of the right — Republicans in the US, Christian Democrats and conservatives in Europe — push back against populism’s radical tendencies, or will they fall in line like their interwar counterparts?

In the US, there are already signs that many Republicans, even NeverTrumpers, are lining up behind Trump, unwilling to take a stance against Trump’s continued flouting of democratic norms (for example, his insistence on massive electoral fraud and denigration of CIA findings about Russian hacks); the myriad conflicts of interests inherent in his own businesses; and his choice of Cabinet appointees, who not only lack anything resembling traditional qualifications for the jobs for which they have been chosen but who have also often openly questioned the validity of the very departments they are being tasked with leading.

Will traditional parties of the left — the Democratic Party in the US, Social Democratic and Labor parties in Europe — be able to reform their organizational infrastructures and appeals so as to be able to recapture the working- and middle-class voters they lost to the populist right? In the US, those worrying signs that a significant number of Republicans will not band together to check Trump leaves the Democratic Party as the most important watchdog or conservator of democracy. Successfully carrying out that role will require a degree of efficacy and cohesion the party has hitherto not exhibited.

In order to be able to check Trump, the Democrats will need to overcome or reconcile their internal divisions over both cultural and economic issues; only then can they hope to build the type of broad, cross-class coalition that would enable them to win elections at the national, state, and local levels and prevent Trump and his Republican enablers from playing different groups of Americans against one another, as they did so successfully in our most recent election as well as in many of the ones proceeding it.

Populism, in short, should not be blithely equated to fascism, nor does 2016 look like 1933. But in politics, as in much of the rest of life, nothing lasts forever, and for democracy to not just survive but thrive, democrats — including Democrats — will need to start doing better.

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of a forthcoming book, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancient Regime to the Collapse of Communism.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.