I'll admit I'm worried about Trump. I'm worried by his hate. I'm worried by the violence that stalks America right now. I think he's a fascist. I think he's waking up something that we don't want to see awake. Going by Daily Kos comments, some think I'm crazy, that he can't possibly win. Others that its good he's running, it exposes the Republicans for who they are. Others think I'm silly to call him a fascist. I want to see a debate about this on the left. I want to see someone planning for how to confront him if he does win the Republican nomination. I remember being happy in 1980 when the Republicans nominated Reagan. I remember telling a friend it was a good thing – that Reagan couldn't possibly win.
So here's why I'm worried. First its Nazis.
These are real Nazis, Europe style. Like the ones my Daddy fought in WWII. I took the photograph in 2011 when several hundred marched right into the center of Stockholm. (Photo Copyright 2015 by Passage Film, Inc.) Nazis here in Sweden knife people, they beat them up, they shoot them. In Norway,
one of these extremists blew up the center of Oslo a few years back and then murdered scores of children in cold blood.
Nazis and the white nationalists who run with them are not to be played with. They are violent, angry and hateful and they like to hurt people they consider their enemies. Some of them can be deprogrammed by people who know what they're doing, but there aren't many doing that – most don't try.
In the US we have 784 organized hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I've been on one of the Nazi US websites and have noticed that a lot of them love Donald Trump. This is what one of them said:
Trump is attacking the very underpinnings of White genocide which are third world invasion and political correctness. That is why every component of the machine, including the Republican party, wants him gone. Except the people don't want it, and you can't silence the people unless they want to be silenced.
A Trump presidency could very well start a Gorbachev effect where a well meaning reformer tries to "fix" a rotten system and causes the whole damned structure to collapse.
A little freedom can be a dangerous thing.
Don't believe me? Then read Evan Osnos, who has an excellent article on Trump's nationalism in the
August 31st issue of The New Yorker. I highly recommend it.
Trump has succeeded in unleashing an old gene in American politics—the crude tribalism that Richard Hofstadter named “the paranoid style”—and, over the summer, it replicated like a runaway mutation. Whenever Americans have confronted the reshuffling of status and influence—the Great Migration, the end of Jim Crow, the end of a white majority—we succumb to the anti-democratic politics of absolutism, of a “conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” in which, Hofstadter wrote, “the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.” Trump was born to the part. “I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win,” he wrote, in “The Art of the Deal.” . . .
Trump’s candidacy has already left a durable mark, expanding the discourse of hate such that, in the midst of his feuds and provocations, we barely even registered that Senator Ted Cruz had called the sitting President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” or that Senator Marco Rubio had redoubled his opposition to abortion in cases of rape, incest, or a mortal threat to the mother. Trump has bequeathed a concoction of celebrity, wealth, and alienation that is more potent than any we’ve seen before. If, as the Republican establishment hopes, the stargazers eventually defect, Trump will be left with the hardest core—the portion of the electorate that is drifting deeper into unreality, with no reconciliation in sight.
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This stuff is so vividly real to me because I grew up in Mississippi. I remember the summer when the three Civil Rights workers disappeared. I remember the worry of some, the disdain of others who claimed they had skipped back to New York, they just wanted to make Mississippi look bad. I was ten. I still remember the jolt when I read the Memphis paper saying they had been found. Dead and buried under a dam made of Mississippi mud.
I've been trying to make sense of this racism and hate my whole life. There is one thing I know for sure, it is real. And Trump and his damnable campaign is breathing new life into it.
Here's of picture of me looking at a William Christenberry painting of the KKK. It was taken years ago, in 1991. I don't have much hair now. I'm using the picture just to show that I've been studying and thinking about American extremism for a long time.
(Photo Copyright 2015 by Passage Film, Inc.)
Christenberry keeps doing art of the Klan, trying to get a grip of its hatred through his art. There are those of us who grew up in the South when it was volently racist, who understand that you can go back there if you forget what it was. Forget what causes it.
It continues to haunt us and we try to deal with it through our work. Christenberry does it with his art. I do it with film.
And trading in hate causes violence. It always does. Those of us who grew up in hateful, violent places know that.
Whether you accept my label of fascist for Trump or not, he is trading in hate. There can be no quibble about that. And summoning hate is dangerous thing. Again, I lived through it. I was eight and growing up in Oxford, Mississippi when Meredith came there to go to school at the local university. He was met by a mob of thousands and thousands of angry white men with guns. It was an insurrection. Over 150 Federal Marshalls were wounded protecting Meredith – its a miracle none were killed. If the teargas had run out, it would have been a massacre. A French journalist was murdered that night. Kennedy sent in the 101st and 82nd Airborne and a bunch of Military Police. It took over 30,000 soldiers and Guardsmen to bring a tortured peace to Mississippi in 1962.
What Trump is doing is real. It's not a joke, its not to the laughed off. It's not an advertisement for his return to The Apprentice. Whether intended or not, Trump is building a movement.
Democrats need to take him seriously, and plan for ways to take him on and stop him. And deal with the aftermath of his campaign, because the guys he is stirring up aren't going to quietly go home and shut up.
The Bernie folks and the Clinton folks and the folks for the other candidates need to agree to have a good clean, hard fight on the issues and then unite behind whoever wins the Dem nomination.
Another reason to take Trump seriously is that he is building a real campaign. He just isn't doing it the normal way. His national team may be small, but its staffed with capable operatives – some of them are unusual hires for a political campaign, but you can't argue with the success of Trump's campaign so far.
I thought 35% of Republicans would be Trump's absolute top number, but he's already there and looks to still have some room to grow (not unlimited of course, he does have a ceiling, its just no one can be sure anymore what it is).
He started building a respectable operation in NH in July.
The Washington Post noticed in the second week of August that he is actually trying to win.
He has stolen Rick Perry's Iowa campaign head and made some strategic hires in South Carolina. (probably helped that Perry stopped paying his people.)
Trump's Iowa campaign is already starting to organize volunteers and plans to teach them how to caucus.
He's also hiring staff in North Carolina.
Josh Marshall of TPM thinks he's inventing a new type of campaigning.
Trump may be a “doofus warrior” but Marshall thinks we shouldn't discount his strategy.
This is not just a celebrity. This is a new kind of politics for America. Something I've already seen work here in Europe, where I live – its been used to create right-wing fascist parties in Sweden and grow ones in France, Greece and other places. Hungary is now run by a fascist-light party, and works closely with actual fascists.
And it scares the hell out of me.
You can find Part 1 of "Trump, Nixon & American Fascism" on Daily Kos.
The photographs here are © 2015 by Passage Film, Inc. I will be using them in a film I am making about racism in the South, and how it went national in the age of Obama. Working title: The Elephant in the Room.