(This diary is an expanded version of a comment originally posted in response to the customarily outstanding diary by DKos all-star annieli.)
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Gassing families with children, who were seeking to exercise the Constitutionally guaranteed right to request asylum.
Because holding children in cages isn’t a sufficiently cruel crime against humanity:
“This is a spectacularly cruel policy, where frightened children are being ripped from their parent’s arms and taken to overflowing detention centres, which are effectively cages. This is nothing short of torture. The severe mental suffering that officials have intentionally inflicted on these families for coercive purposes, means that these acts meet the definitions of torture under both US and international law,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas Director.
Illegally deploying the military to patrol the border.
Relentless attacks on the independence of the press, independence of the judiciary, free and fair elections, and seeking to imprison political opponents.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, in an article appearing in Psychology Today, helps clarify what we’ve been witness to since early 2016, just so we’re all using the same terms for discussion:
What we call it is unimportant, but it would be important to note what fascism is not: a political ideology. It would be more precise to call it a society-level mental disorder cloaked in political ideology.
According to American political historian Robert Paxton, fascism is 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 restraints goalsof internal cleansing and external expansion” (Paxton, 2005).
The violence builds gradually, and thus to define it by immediate appearance or ideas would be incorrect—just like any syndrome that looks different at different stages. Disorders of the mind, furthermore, adapt to historical time and culture. Unprecedented spikes in hate crimes, a multiplying of white supremacist killings, widespread schoolyard bullying, the highest gun murder rates in 25 years, and a suicide epidemic, also the highest in decades (different forms of violence are interrelated, and each is an indicator of poor collective mental health) should raise alarms. These, in the context of the above psychological factors, should raise warnings against fascism…
In the U.S., an antidemocratic wave has ushered in Donald Trump, transforming what used to be a battle of ideologies into a battle of sickness versus sanity, falsehoods versus facts, in the same way we observe psychopathology unfold as it takes over the individual. Is this proto-fascism? Whatever we call it, the pattern is distinctly recognizable. (emphasis added)
Dr. Lee makes a fundamentally important observation— it is the GOP as an organization, and its rank and file voters, that gave us Trump; he created nothing, and took them nowhere: he met them where they were patiently waiting for the bigoted autocrat to appear.
None were duped, none voted for ‘other reasons’. They voted for him precisely because of who he showed himself to be, and what he said he would do.
And, as Masha Gessen warned us about just days after his installation in office, he is doing what he said he would.
How far we are down the path to an outright fascist autocracy is chillingly articulated by Anthony DiMaggio in an essay at CounterPunch:
We are living in very dangerous times. After sending up countless trial balloons over the last year-and-a-half, this president has now crossed over from a state of “aspirational fascism” to full-blown fascism. The “creeping” fascist president is no more, as Trump feels empowered to openly call on the federal government to crack down on and suppress his critics.
The existential threat to our democracy is immediate, and failing to name it, and confront it directly as such, only heightens the danger:
Unity in opposition to the president is also hard to achieve when “the left” shows signs of divisions regarding Trump’s politics. Some progressives have stifled opposition to Trump’s fascism by calling for a “brown-red,” left-right political alliance, despite the noxious racism, sexism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism that dominates on the American right. This attempt to normalize fascism from a “progressive” vantage point runs contrary to the most basic principles of justice, equality, and democracy.
Leftists who focus on the propagandistic nature of the corporate media, while shilling for the far right and failing to condemn right-wing fascism, provide comfort to the reactionary right’s efforts to suppress journalistic freedom. Yes, corporate media practice propaganda. But the media propaganda problem is a discussion for another time, as it should go without saying that Trump and the far-right have no interest in promoting greater transparency, integrity, or accuracy in journalism. Trump comes to bury the press, not to save it. This point is recognized by scholars of fascism like Henry Giroux, who presciently warned that Trump’s efforts to depict reporters as treasonous are not only “ominous and alarming,” but “echo previous totalitarian regimes that waged war on both the press and democracy itself.”
Personifying a serious and unfortunate division on the left, progressive-libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald has focused his ire on the individuals in the administration who seek to undermine Trump’s presidency, and his anger at these alleged “deep state” bureaucrats has been echoed by numerous leftists I’ve spoken with in recent days. While admitting that Trump “may be a threat,” Greenwald responds: “but so is this covert coup” within the White House, which represents “an unelected cabal that covertly imposed their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency.”
A stunningly prescient thought experiment by Josh Levin, appearing in Slate in 2009, outlines how this in fact came to pass in the US:
As Hitler and Mussolini prepared to storm Europe, fascism began to generate interest in the United States. In Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, an American president uses an economic crisis as a pretense to take over the media, imprison dissenters, and build his own private army (the Minute Men) into an indomitable force…
There are as many scenarios for a totalitarian America as there are paranoiacs. We could become corporate slaves, cannon fodder for a mercenary army, or the pawns of a tech-savvy surveillance state. In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges argues that today's religious conservatives are akin to the European fascists of the 1920s and 1930s...
Once you acknowledge that the Bush administration didn't end America as we know it, the more-interesting question vis-à-vis the end of America becomes: How might a wannabe dictator go much further than Roosevelt or Bush?
None of the following steps is sufficient on its own to trash our venerable republic. A leader who meets all five requirements, however, would very likely become our authoritarian overlord.
Phase 1: Create a perpetual enemy.After the Twin Towers went down, Toby Keith and almost everyone else in the U.S. was primed to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. The unambiguous evil of the terrorists allowed the president to build broad support for the Patriot Act and for a war on terror of indeterminate duration…
Phase 2: Be savvier than George W. Bush. In It Can't Happen Here, the commander-in-chief is a populist nostalgia-monger''with something of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain." Once elected, President Buzz Windrip rewrites the Constitution and sends citizens to labor camps, morphing from a democratically elected executive to a ruthless tyrant with a wink and a smile. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney never aspired to be dictators. But even if the twosome had wanted to take over the country, they wouldn't have succeeded. For America to go off a cliff, the American people need to be willing to follow their leader…
Phase 3: Come to power as America slips in stature.The Nazis came to the fore in Germany after the country's defeat in World War I and the subsequent economic weakness of the Weimar period. The decline of Russia after the breakup of the USSR has fed the rise of Vladimir Putin's increasingly undemocratic government. This overlap between geopolitical humiliation and moral turpitude is no coincidence. In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin M. Friedman argues that growth "more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity … and dedication to democracy." On the flip side, "when living standards stagnate or decline, most societies make little if any progress toward any of these goals, and in all too many instances they plainly retrogress."
Economic catastrophe isn't always a harbinger of authoritarian doom—see America during the Great Depression. But a sharp fall in relative wealth and power does seem like a necessary step toward trashing American democracy. The unquestioned global kingpin since World War II, modern America isn't used to being second—or third, or 18th—to anyone…
Phase 4: Beef up the military and the secret police.Russia, like all pretend democracies, makes a big show of its faux-democratic elections. In 2008, Vladimir Putin stepped aside as president (or, if you prefer, dictator) because of term limits and took office as prime minister (or, if you prefer, dictator-for-life). A think tank controlled by the ruling United Russia party recently decreed that Putin's continued reign is precisely what the country needs. "In times of war and crisis, a successful political system becomes charismatic, and therefore, inevitably more authoritarian," the think tank's report explained. "A storm requires a captain."
A future, authoritarian U.S. would not look like Putin's Russia. Our old Cold War foe never became a true democracy after the Soviet era, so its backsliding this century is a predictable reversion to forms of governance that go back to the time of the czars. One potential similarity to watch out for, though, is a puffed-up military and surveillance apparatus…
Phase 5: Steamroll a compliant populace.
That's the final ingredient: For a totalitarian takeover to take root here, ordinary people would have to let it happen. At America's totalitarian tipping point, we'll face a fundamental conflict between our freedom-loving past and our patriotic urge to see the United States continue its run as the world's most-powerful nation. The specter of America's death could frighten people into doing what they'd otherwise consider unthinkable. We'd demonize a foe we don't understand. We'd nod solemnly as the president suspended elections on account of national security. We'd sign away our civil liberties, because there are dangerous people in our midst. And we'd lose our country because we cared too much about saving it.
If this doesn’t seem to you to characterize the direction the GOP and its rank and file have taken us, c. 2018, then you’re simply not paying attention.
Timothy Snyder, writing in The Guardian last month, explicates the situation:
The governing principle of the Trump administration is total irresponsibility, a claim of innocence from a position of power, something which happens to be an old fascist trick. As we see in the president’s reactions to American rightwing terrorism, he will always claim victimhood for himself and shift blame to the actual victims. As we see in the motivations of the terrorists themselves, and in the long history of fascism, this maneuver can lead to murder.
The Nazis claimed a monopoly on victimhood. Mein Kampf includes a lengthy pout about how Jews and other non-Germans made Hitler’s life as a young man in the Habsburg monarchy difficult. After stormtroopers attacked others in Germany in the early 1930s, they made a great fuss if one of their own was injured. The Horst Wessel Song, recalling a single Nazi who was killed, was on the lips of Germans who killed millions of people. The second world war was for the Nazis’ self-defense against “global Jewry”.
The idea that the powerful must be coddled arose in a setting that recalls the United States of today…
The attraction of the Nazi conspiracy thinking is that we can feel like victims when we attack. Its vulnerability is that the world is full of facts. Hence Hitler’s hostility to journalism. In the Germany of the early 1930s, the newspaper industry was suffering after a financial crisis. Hitler and other Nazis used the idea of the “Lügenpresse” (“fake news”) to attack remaining journalists who were trying to report the facts. In Germany and Austria today, the far right once more speaks of the Lügenpresse, in part because the American president has made the idea respectable. The extreme right in Germany and Austria knows perfectly well that “fake news” is American English for Lügenpresse.
In the United States today, reporting was already in trouble for similar reasons before Trump, like Hitler, began to claim that the reporters who seek the facts are liars and enemies. Naturally, the president denies responsibility when people take him at his word and draw instead from the conspiracy thinking he himself spreads. Trump blames the press for attempts to murder members of the press. He seizes the occasion, as always, to present himself as the true victim. The facts hurt his feelings.
Trump and some of his supporters mount a strategy of deterrence by narcissism: if you note our debts to fascism, we will up the pitch of the whining. Thus Trump can base his rhetoric on the fascist idea of us and them, lead fascist chants at rallies, encourage his supporters to use violence, praise a politician who attacked a journalist, muse that Hillary Clinton should be assassinated, denigrate the intelligence of African Americans, associate migrants with criminality, run an antisemitic advertisement, spread the Nazi trope of Jews as “globalists”, and endorse the antisemitic idea that the Jewish financier George Soros is responsible for political opposition – but he and his followers will puff chests and swell sinuses if anyone points this out.
If Trump is not a fascist, this is only in the precise sense that he is not even a fascist. He strikes a fascist pose, and then issues generic palliative remarks and denies responsibility for his words and actions. But since total irresponsibility is a central part of the fascist tradition, it is perhaps best to give Trump his due credit as an innovator.
I describe conservatism as a sham ideology, meant to disguise fascism, and the GOP rank and file are proto-fascists, and have ever since Putin’s Tool was installed in the oval office:
Looking at the birth of fascism in Italy, and seeing who Trump’s supporters really are. (Dec. 6, 2016)
‘Friendly Fascism’: The Core of American Conservatism. (Sept. 3, 2017)
It’s past time to call it what it is.