As a resident of the greater DC area who bikes into the capital once or twice a week, I can speak with strong anecdotal evidence in support of the data collected more systematically in the form of statistics. Crime is down to historical lows and DC is a relatively placid place to be these days, with obvious exceptions like any big city in the world.
Coincidentally, I did a long meandering bike ride into the city this weekend, pedaling slowly past the Capitol building a mile or so east to Lincoln Park and the Emancipation Memorial, taking my time to take it all in. People enjoying themselves in the temperate August afternoon. Walking their dogs. Talking. Lovely. On my way back toward the White House and Georgetown and the Capital Crescent trail, I stopped off briefly to listen to music at the Caribbean culture festival. People enjoying themselves, dancing, having a wonderful late afternoon.
Knowing of our President’s plan to declare a state of emergency based on transparently false information, I thought that maybe the kind of placid, carefree fun being had was part of the problem. If there was no real emergency, it was time to invent one, perhaps even to gin one up.
I wonder when we Americans will wake up to what’s happening.
I lived in DC for ten years. Yes there is a homeless problem because capitalism has failed many in our society, but its a very safe city overall. The biggest criminal in that city is the President and all of his fascist enablers.
A goodly number of citizens have been awake FOR YEARS to the danger represented by Trump and more particularly, by the people riding his coattails into power. Stephen Miller, Ka$h Patel, Kenny Martin, Elon, JD and ALL the rest of The Deplorables represent a greater danger to our country than the tirades and erratic whims of the old man in the Oval. But grant you, that one old man could get our asses fried.
Indeed. I’m talking about that critical mass that causes the house of cards to collapse. Every time I see a poll with the president’s numbers “softening” a bit, I freak out. How can even one person support? The collapse of consensus reality, deliberately induced as it has been, is the freakiest thing of all. Those who are asleep actually believe that they’re the ones who are awake.
Trump's support is about what you would expect if the only info you had was his failure to reduce inflation. His fascist policies have cost him nothing and have the full support of Republican voters, including Republican-voting "independents". That includes an overwhelming majority of white men, the dominant group in the US.
On the evidence, the US is a fascist country, not a free country in which a fascist has somehow gained power.
My late German-born father, confronting the popular view that his country of birth was uniquely prone to fascism, sometimes suggested it was a matter of circumstances rather than culture, including political culture. As in, yes, if the “right” (meaning wrong) circumstances came together, it could easily happen here too. In the land of the (formerly) free and the home of the (not very, it turns out) brave. I’m puzzled by what our political representatives (mainly Republicans in Congress) are so afraid of. My guess: they’re afraid of the people.
Having just watched the press conference regarding DC, it seems this term is beginning to mean the opposite of its original meaning. There is some sort of strange reality there as exhibited in that press conference that is deeply troubling precisely because of how inclusive it is
This is why the Right has been using the boiling frog strategy. The conditioning of an apathetic and ill-informed population to accept incremental abuses has been fascinating to watch.
Viewing the situation from Australia, I can't see any realistic way back for the US. Despite everything he has done. I'm working on a fiction in a which a catastrophic economic crash (sparked off by a literal robotaxi crash) brings him down, but I don't really believe it. Good luck, guys.
If you take the ICE policing happening in LA, and what was just announced in DC, then think of the push for "enhanced" or REAL ID's, something like 21st century pass laws used for urban pacification don't seem too unrealistic at this point. Especially with the financial input from guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
You can opine how this is an increase in presidential authority that violates norms (albeit not the law). But fascism? Really?
This is obviously the same impotent theatrics that Trump always does. What do you think is going to happen with 30 days of federalized police? They're going to halfheartedly make a show of pushing homeless people around and maybe go after some suspected criminals. Fine, you can have a problem with that. But do you think he'a going to march the police into the capital and declare the galactic empire? Where is this headed?
Please elaborate. I just fail to see how this stunt, or most of trump's stunts, meaningfully affect the balance of power within the federal government, between the feds and the states, or between the feds and citizens. Anything approaching fascism, or whatever techno-feudal blade-runner version of it might exist in the 21st century, is going to make profound changes to those power dynamics.
You "fail to see" how the President seizing control of the capital's police force and deploying military units to forcibly relocate citizens affects the balance of power?
Allow me to assist your vision, good sir:
Marines currently guard detention centers where human beings drink from toilets. Federal agents on horseback patrol American cities declaring they'll 'go anywhere, anytime.' Legal immigrants are being shipped to Salvadoran prisons. Foreign students are deported for their political views. The Supreme Court has invented presidential immunity from whole cloth. Media companies pay millions in protection money to avoid regulatory destruction. The president hawks cryptocurrency from the Oval Office while accepting luxury jets from foreign governments.
But sure, this is all impotent theatrics.
You want to know where this is headed? It's headed where it's already arrived—a place where the President can declare an emergency where none exists, seize control of law enforcement, deploy military forces against citizens, and people like you will explain why this isn't really fascism because he hasn't declared himself Galactic Emperor.
The profound change you're waiting for? It already happened. You just normalized it so thoroughly that you can't see it. The techno-feudal Blade Runner dystopia you're imagining? You're living in it. It just looks boring because you're watching it on CNBC instead of Netflix.
Fascism doesn't need to "march police into the capital." it just needs to control them. Which he now does. It doesn't need to declare empire. It just needs to eliminate constraints on power. Which he's systematically doing. It doesn't need you to recognize it. It just needs you to explain why it isn't quite fascist enough to worry about. Which you're helpfully providing.
The balance of power hasn't just shifted. It's being obliterated in real time. And your primary concern? I'm being impolite about naming it.
When they clear the homeless today with military force, remember you said it was theatrics. When they use the same infrastructure tomorrow for the next "emergency," remember you couldn't see where it was headed. When the 30-day emergency becomes permanent through congressional capitulation or judicial invention, remember you thought it was impotent.
But most of all, remember that when fascism arrived in America, you couldn't see it because it filed the proper paperwork.
Every word stands. History will judge which of us saw clearly.
The slow erosion of norms and violation of the law step by step is how fascism works. They depend upon folks like you downplaying it and letting them normalize the police state until its too fucking late. Once the modern gestapo is on every street corner, you won't be able to protest anymore. You don't understand fascists and how they work if you can't see how dangerous this all is and where we are headed. They are going to suspend elections and declare martial law nationwide based on lies. If you let them do it against the law in DC, they can do it ANYWHERE.
I've spent a significant amount of time studying fascism and how it manifests. I'm very familiar with the process. I think most people don't appreciate the amount of work and organization went into the old fascist parties of the 20's and 30's, how willing people (ww1 vets) were to use political violence, how high the stakes felt to people involved in those clashes. Where is the american fascist party? Where is the organization? Who are the black/brownshirts?
Is it true that any violation of a norm constitutes an intent to bring about fascism?
They are building the concentration camps. Ice just had their funding increased massively beyond all reason. They are hiring tons of idiot enforcers right now whose only qualifications requirements are they are racists who love Trump. They are building the modern Gestapo right now and ensuring they will only be loyal to Trump, MAGAs are the fascists. Republicans dont exist anymore, only the Maga cultists remain. We either stop them now or the Billionaires and white nationalists destroy the government completely and oppress the shit out of the rest of us until we have another civil war.
Imagine what 2016 you would say if you dropped into 2025 with no knowledge of all that has happened. Would you change your opinion of all the infractions if you weren't subject to them incrementally? They win by making you think meh, as they take another step, and then another, and another. We aren't going full Blade Runner overnight.
I'd look around and I'd ask, "what institutions are intact, which are broken?"
The media space has undergone a lot of change in the past decade. Cable news is going under and the DC network is losing influence to semi-independent/anti-establishment figures like Rogan and Carlson, but mainstream discourse is still largely under DC's control. Covid broke a significant portion of the populations trust in traditional knowledge-creation institutions, but there's no viable (organized) alternative.
The parties have morphed into globalism vs nationalism, which I could've predicted in 2016. But, the parties are restructuring and aren't going anywhere. MAGA isn't a 3rd party.
There's been a lot more lawfare and shady court dealings, but the courts are still independent. There've been plenty of rulings in the past 10 years that have royally pissed off each side. I don't think you can argue that anyone owns the courts.
Most concerning to me is how freedom of speech and information have been attacked by both sides, including intel services. Both sides have also lost a significant degree of faith in elections and routinely accuse each other of organized fraud. And yet, no one's ready to man barricades over it. So i'm gonna chalk elections and the electoral college as intact as well.
The past 10 years have been a wild ride, yes, but they've also been sensationalized by the media that we experienced them through. Basically all the important institutions are intact, albeit struggling. Nothing shocking has changed on paper, in terms of power distribution.
What would it take for you to say we are in the throws of a fascist take over? I am reading a lot of both sides and excuses, but our institutions are basically standing in name only. The court routinely makes up rules as they go, changing their theories of law to suit their ends, Departments have been gutted to non-functioning, the Congress has completely abdicated their power and we have man who would be king running amok while throwing himself birthday parades with the military. If we keep saying it's not that bad yet, how long until yet has passed and we are too far gone to save?
A fascist takeover would probably involve a fascist party, for starters. MAGA is not fascism, not even close. And it doesn't even control the republican party, it's a fairly blind and leaderless movement. Trump has very little vision and seems to go through his career day by day, and he seems to me that he's the glue holding this coalition together. Most importantly, all of MAGA's goals are completely achievable within a liberal framework.
I'd agree than many of our institutions are failing, but I think that's more due to rot than outside takeover. No one owns them - they are just weak and ineffective. This has been the case for a LONG time, and has little to do with Trump.
Specifically, the gutting of departments strikes me as overtly counter to fascist aims. Wouldn't a fascist seek to centralize power around the federal government, not destroy it? Education in particular! If Trump were a fascist worth his salt, he'd be pouring money into ideological education and enforcing centralized control over it, not relegating it to the states.
Look, I think there's a lot of bad stuff happening. But it's not true that bad = fascism. Institutional rot is not fascism. Autocracy is not fascism. Cronyism and plutocracy are not fascism. Confederalism is not fascism. Oligarchy is not fascism. Even nationalism is not fascism, at least not in and of itself.
Fascism is a powerful word, and we have rendered it useless by utilizing it to describe everything that we don't like.
What we have is a liberal state. Liberalism can take all sorts of shapes and forms, but as long as there's a relatively free capital market, individual rights are near-guaranteed for citizens, society prioritizes the individual over the collective, and a democratically elected government presides over legislation and execution, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that we live under something other than a liberal state.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think we actually agree on quite a bit here - our fundamental disagreements are:
1. Is this administration a significant deviation from the course that American politics has been on for decades? and
2. What, if any, is Trump's endgame? Is this systemic?
The vast majority of the gripes you listed in the first paragraph are either nothing new or nothing significant. We can go through these in detail if you'd like, but we probably are going to disagree on the facts of the matter themselves. Suffice to say, the federal government and the rogue agencies can generally violate your rights with impunity and have been doing so for some time; Trump's manner of doing so is just more brazen (though not necessarily greater in scope).
I agree with your general sentiment that the forces that seek to undermine our rights and welfare as citizens do not need to declare themselves in order to be very real and dangerous, but that's precisely why I don't call it fascism.
I don't agree that there's been a significant shift in the the power dynamics of Washington; if anything meaningful has occurred, it's that the domestic elite (rich people who own assets in the US that are difficult to move) have reasserted themselves and are pushing back against the international elite (rich people who's assets are fluid and move from country to country), who have had the run of both parties since the end of the cold war. But that does't mean very much for the average citizen who can't afford to lobby congress or fund campaigns. Politics has been a rich man's game for a long time, and our rights have been under siege at least since 9-11.
I call all this stuff impotent because Trump is obviously a bit of an idiot. I'm sorry, but radically reforming an entire government is not something that a single person, much less someone whose talents lie in real estate and television, can pull off in a matter of months. Trump has no end game; I strongly disagree that there's anything systemic about what he's doing. He doesn't like homeless people and one of his staffers got beat up, so he's making a big show of beating his chest. It's good TV. You give him way too much credit. He does what he does because it generates publicity, which he is pathologically addicted to.
The fact that intel services and the global rich hate his guts should make you feel safe.
I'm not sure what you meant about my primary concern, but the reason that I'm being critical here is that I think that fascism is a very specific thing and that we're nowhere close to it. I think over-invoking it, even if done for noble reasons, undermines the ability of left and right to hear each other and ultimately lowers the quality of public discourse, which by the way, is too big to be controlled by any one person, as with most of american society and our institutions.
If congress approves a perpetual state of emergency in DC, i'll eat my hat.
Have you ever read "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco? It reads like a trump administration roadmap. Go take a look. Wikipedia has a good simplified bullet-point version.
Yep, I read it for the first time back in 2015. The issue of defining fascism has fascinated me since. I think Eco's account is full of insight, but it's not comprehensive by a long shot. He doesn't really provide a meaningful definition, he provides a list of symptoms and manifestations, many of which are perfectly consistent with liberalism and even socialism. More importantly, I don't think there's much meaningful going on in the Trump admin that correlates to Eco's 14. There are a few, but only the most generic.
2. "rejection of modernism." Canceling billions in research funding; rampant science denial
3. "cult of action for action's sake." Bombing Iran, mobilizing the military in LA and DC, pretty much every action this administration takes
4. "Disagreement is treason." How many people has trump personally accused of treason?
5. "Fear of difference." "they're eating the pets!" "They're sending rapists and murderers." "They're poisoning the blood of our country."
6. "Appeal to frustrated middle class." Does this one need elaboration?
7. "Obsession with a plot of enemies within destroying the country." DEI, "woke," kids getting sex changes at school, the aforementioned poisoned blood, "democrats hate our country," etc etc
8. "The enemy is both strong and weak." Biden is both a doddering old fool and a criminal mastermind, for one example. Also doesn't need elaboration.
9. "Permanent warfare, pacifism is for losers." pretty much trump's personality, now an administration trait: deny everything, ignore contradictory evidence, attack anyone pointing out the truth
10. "Contempt for the weak." Cutting Medicaid, attacking LGBTQ kids' rights, demonizing immigrants, not having disabled soldiers at photo ops, etc
11. "Cult of death." Response to Covid
12. "Machismo." trump's misogyny, hegseth's misogyny, for God's sake, trump as Rambo on a freaking flag
13. "Selective populism." trump is an idiot savant of faux populism, so much that the entire GOP is scared to death of crossing him.
14. "Newspeak." Woke, Russia hoax, witch hunt, Dems are Marxists, etc. There's an entire sub dialect of MAGA-speakers who have shorthand names for everything that bewilder an outsider.
This is why I don't care for Eco's theory. Anyone above a room temp IQ can twist and contort basically any government into being guilty of fascism, because the traits he identifies are both ill-defined and, insofar as the are defined, present in every single nation-state (some of them by definition!). I read it 10 years ago, but if I recall correctly, he acknowledges that flaw.
I could easily spit back a color swapped version of the list that you just sent and use it to claim that the DNC are fascists, but it would be equally full of vague straw-grasping and be ultimately meaningless. I'm sorry, but the SS death cult and blackshirt assault battalions have ZERO in common with people during covid that had different risk management than you.
Fascism is a political ideology. It has core beliefs and first principles, not just behavior patterns.
Here’s the problem: you think fascism is an ideology. It’s not. It’s a toolbox for gaining and maintaining political power. It co-opts ideologies as needed, but is ideology-agnostic. Compare Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler and there are few ideological throughlines.
Th trump regime exhibits so many fascist tendencies that it’s undeniable. You’re arguing about semantics but the evidence is clear.
I consider this conversation over—we have nothing left to discuss.
Yup, agreed, we probably won't get far. I do think fascism is an ideology and that Eco and the like are mistaken. In my book, national socialism, italian fascism, francoism/falangism, etc are all different ideologies that differ on core tenets, despite resembling quite similar and sharing tendencies. In any case, thanks for being respectful.
As a resident of the greater DC area who bikes into the capital once or twice a week, I can speak with strong anecdotal evidence in support of the data collected more systematically in the form of statistics. Crime is down to historical lows and DC is a relatively placid place to be these days, with obvious exceptions like any big city in the world.
Coincidentally, I did a long meandering bike ride into the city this weekend, pedaling slowly past the Capitol building a mile or so east to Lincoln Park and the Emancipation Memorial, taking my time to take it all in. People enjoying themselves in the temperate August afternoon. Walking their dogs. Talking. Lovely. On my way back toward the White House and Georgetown and the Capital Crescent trail, I stopped off briefly to listen to music at the Caribbean culture festival. People enjoying themselves, dancing, having a wonderful late afternoon.
Knowing of our President’s plan to declare a state of emergency based on transparently false information, I thought that maybe the kind of placid, carefree fun being had was part of the problem. If there was no real emergency, it was time to invent one, perhaps even to gin one up.
I wonder when we Americans will wake up to what’s happening.
I lived in DC for ten years. Yes there is a homeless problem because capitalism has failed many in our society, but its a very safe city overall. The biggest criminal in that city is the President and all of his fascist enablers.
A goodly number of citizens have been awake FOR YEARS to the danger represented by Trump and more particularly, by the people riding his coattails into power. Stephen Miller, Ka$h Patel, Kenny Martin, Elon, JD and ALL the rest of The Deplorables represent a greater danger to our country than the tirades and erratic whims of the old man in the Oval. But grant you, that one old man could get our asses fried.
Indeed. I’m talking about that critical mass that causes the house of cards to collapse. Every time I see a poll with the president’s numbers “softening” a bit, I freak out. How can even one person support? The collapse of consensus reality, deliberately induced as it has been, is the freakiest thing of all. Those who are asleep actually believe that they’re the ones who are awake.
Trump's support is about what you would expect if the only info you had was his failure to reduce inflation. His fascist policies have cost him nothing and have the full support of Republican voters, including Republican-voting "independents". That includes an overwhelming majority of white men, the dominant group in the US.
On the evidence, the US is a fascist country, not a free country in which a fascist has somehow gained power.
My late German-born father, confronting the popular view that his country of birth was uniquely prone to fascism, sometimes suggested it was a matter of circumstances rather than culture, including political culture. As in, yes, if the “right” (meaning wrong) circumstances came together, it could easily happen here too. In the land of the (formerly) free and the home of the (not very, it turns out) brave. I’m puzzled by what our political representatives (mainly Republicans in Congress) are so afraid of. My guess: they’re afraid of the people.
Having just watched the press conference regarding DC, it seems this term is beginning to mean the opposite of its original meaning. There is some sort of strange reality there as exhibited in that press conference that is deeply troubling precisely because of how inclusive it is
This is why the Right has been using the boiling frog strategy. The conditioning of an apathetic and ill-informed population to accept incremental abuses has been fascinating to watch.
the double whammy of tarrifs and private equity may likely bring this hallucinated bubble economy to its knees
then what
at the point of nearly praying for a reasonably benevolent junta to end these charades and start arresting the perps
Viewing the situation from Australia, I can't see any realistic way back for the US. Despite everything he has done. I'm working on a fiction in a which a catastrophic economic crash (sparked off by a literal robotaxi crash) brings him down, but I don't really believe it. Good luck, guys.
Trump derangement syndrome is suffered by him and his minions. Just another projection.
The most annoying voices are the contrarian ones saying we’re being sensational in our rhetoric. A spade is a spade at this point!
They did not care
If you take the ICE policing happening in LA, and what was just announced in DC, then think of the push for "enhanced" or REAL ID's, something like 21st century pass laws used for urban pacification don't seem too unrealistic at this point. Especially with the financial input from guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
You can opine how this is an increase in presidential authority that violates norms (albeit not the law). But fascism? Really?
This is obviously the same impotent theatrics that Trump always does. What do you think is going to happen with 30 days of federalized police? They're going to halfheartedly make a show of pushing homeless people around and maybe go after some suspected criminals. Fine, you can have a problem with that. But do you think he'a going to march the police into the capital and declare the galactic empire? Where is this headed?
I stand by every word.
Please elaborate. I just fail to see how this stunt, or most of trump's stunts, meaningfully affect the balance of power within the federal government, between the feds and the states, or between the feds and citizens. Anything approaching fascism, or whatever techno-feudal blade-runner version of it might exist in the 21st century, is going to make profound changes to those power dynamics.
You "fail to see" how the President seizing control of the capital's police force and deploying military units to forcibly relocate citizens affects the balance of power?
Allow me to assist your vision, good sir:
Marines currently guard detention centers where human beings drink from toilets. Federal agents on horseback patrol American cities declaring they'll 'go anywhere, anytime.' Legal immigrants are being shipped to Salvadoran prisons. Foreign students are deported for their political views. The Supreme Court has invented presidential immunity from whole cloth. Media companies pay millions in protection money to avoid regulatory destruction. The president hawks cryptocurrency from the Oval Office while accepting luxury jets from foreign governments.
But sure, this is all impotent theatrics.
You want to know where this is headed? It's headed where it's already arrived—a place where the President can declare an emergency where none exists, seize control of law enforcement, deploy military forces against citizens, and people like you will explain why this isn't really fascism because he hasn't declared himself Galactic Emperor.
The profound change you're waiting for? It already happened. You just normalized it so thoroughly that you can't see it. The techno-feudal Blade Runner dystopia you're imagining? You're living in it. It just looks boring because you're watching it on CNBC instead of Netflix.
Fascism doesn't need to "march police into the capital." it just needs to control them. Which he now does. It doesn't need to declare empire. It just needs to eliminate constraints on power. Which he's systematically doing. It doesn't need you to recognize it. It just needs you to explain why it isn't quite fascist enough to worry about. Which you're helpfully providing.
The balance of power hasn't just shifted. It's being obliterated in real time. And your primary concern? I'm being impolite about naming it.
When they clear the homeless today with military force, remember you said it was theatrics. When they use the same infrastructure tomorrow for the next "emergency," remember you couldn't see where it was headed. When the 30-day emergency becomes permanent through congressional capitulation or judicial invention, remember you thought it was impotent.
But most of all, remember that when fascism arrived in America, you couldn't see it because it filed the proper paperwork.
Every word stands. History will judge which of us saw clearly.
The slow erosion of norms and violation of the law step by step is how fascism works. They depend upon folks like you downplaying it and letting them normalize the police state until its too fucking late. Once the modern gestapo is on every street corner, you won't be able to protest anymore. You don't understand fascists and how they work if you can't see how dangerous this all is and where we are headed. They are going to suspend elections and declare martial law nationwide based on lies. If you let them do it against the law in DC, they can do it ANYWHERE.
I've spent a significant amount of time studying fascism and how it manifests. I'm very familiar with the process. I think most people don't appreciate the amount of work and organization went into the old fascist parties of the 20's and 30's, how willing people (ww1 vets) were to use political violence, how high the stakes felt to people involved in those clashes. Where is the american fascist party? Where is the organization? Who are the black/brownshirts?
Is it true that any violation of a norm constitutes an intent to bring about fascism?
They are building the concentration camps. Ice just had their funding increased massively beyond all reason. They are hiring tons of idiot enforcers right now whose only qualifications requirements are they are racists who love Trump. They are building the modern Gestapo right now and ensuring they will only be loyal to Trump, MAGAs are the fascists. Republicans dont exist anymore, only the Maga cultists remain. We either stop them now or the Billionaires and white nationalists destroy the government completely and oppress the shit out of the rest of us until we have another civil war.
Imagine what 2016 you would say if you dropped into 2025 with no knowledge of all that has happened. Would you change your opinion of all the infractions if you weren't subject to them incrementally? They win by making you think meh, as they take another step, and then another, and another. We aren't going full Blade Runner overnight.
I'd look around and I'd ask, "what institutions are intact, which are broken?"
The media space has undergone a lot of change in the past decade. Cable news is going under and the DC network is losing influence to semi-independent/anti-establishment figures like Rogan and Carlson, but mainstream discourse is still largely under DC's control. Covid broke a significant portion of the populations trust in traditional knowledge-creation institutions, but there's no viable (organized) alternative.
The parties have morphed into globalism vs nationalism, which I could've predicted in 2016. But, the parties are restructuring and aren't going anywhere. MAGA isn't a 3rd party.
There's been a lot more lawfare and shady court dealings, but the courts are still independent. There've been plenty of rulings in the past 10 years that have royally pissed off each side. I don't think you can argue that anyone owns the courts.
Most concerning to me is how freedom of speech and information have been attacked by both sides, including intel services. Both sides have also lost a significant degree of faith in elections and routinely accuse each other of organized fraud. And yet, no one's ready to man barricades over it. So i'm gonna chalk elections and the electoral college as intact as well.
The past 10 years have been a wild ride, yes, but they've also been sensationalized by the media that we experienced them through. Basically all the important institutions are intact, albeit struggling. Nothing shocking has changed on paper, in terms of power distribution.
What would it take for you to say we are in the throws of a fascist take over? I am reading a lot of both sides and excuses, but our institutions are basically standing in name only. The court routinely makes up rules as they go, changing their theories of law to suit their ends, Departments have been gutted to non-functioning, the Congress has completely abdicated their power and we have man who would be king running amok while throwing himself birthday parades with the military. If we keep saying it's not that bad yet, how long until yet has passed and we are too far gone to save?
A fascist takeover would probably involve a fascist party, for starters. MAGA is not fascism, not even close. And it doesn't even control the republican party, it's a fairly blind and leaderless movement. Trump has very little vision and seems to go through his career day by day, and he seems to me that he's the glue holding this coalition together. Most importantly, all of MAGA's goals are completely achievable within a liberal framework.
I'd agree than many of our institutions are failing, but I think that's more due to rot than outside takeover. No one owns them - they are just weak and ineffective. This has been the case for a LONG time, and has little to do with Trump.
Specifically, the gutting of departments strikes me as overtly counter to fascist aims. Wouldn't a fascist seek to centralize power around the federal government, not destroy it? Education in particular! If Trump were a fascist worth his salt, he'd be pouring money into ideological education and enforcing centralized control over it, not relegating it to the states.
Look, I think there's a lot of bad stuff happening. But it's not true that bad = fascism. Institutional rot is not fascism. Autocracy is not fascism. Cronyism and plutocracy are not fascism. Confederalism is not fascism. Oligarchy is not fascism. Even nationalism is not fascism, at least not in and of itself.
Fascism is a powerful word, and we have rendered it useless by utilizing it to describe everything that we don't like.
What we have is a liberal state. Liberalism can take all sorts of shapes and forms, but as long as there's a relatively free capital market, individual rights are near-guaranteed for citizens, society prioritizes the individual over the collective, and a democratically elected government presides over legislation and execution, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that we live under something other than a liberal state.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think we actually agree on quite a bit here - our fundamental disagreements are:
1. Is this administration a significant deviation from the course that American politics has been on for decades? and
2. What, if any, is Trump's endgame? Is this systemic?
The vast majority of the gripes you listed in the first paragraph are either nothing new or nothing significant. We can go through these in detail if you'd like, but we probably are going to disagree on the facts of the matter themselves. Suffice to say, the federal government and the rogue agencies can generally violate your rights with impunity and have been doing so for some time; Trump's manner of doing so is just more brazen (though not necessarily greater in scope).
I agree with your general sentiment that the forces that seek to undermine our rights and welfare as citizens do not need to declare themselves in order to be very real and dangerous, but that's precisely why I don't call it fascism.
I don't agree that there's been a significant shift in the the power dynamics of Washington; if anything meaningful has occurred, it's that the domestic elite (rich people who own assets in the US that are difficult to move) have reasserted themselves and are pushing back against the international elite (rich people who's assets are fluid and move from country to country), who have had the run of both parties since the end of the cold war. But that does't mean very much for the average citizen who can't afford to lobby congress or fund campaigns. Politics has been a rich man's game for a long time, and our rights have been under siege at least since 9-11.
I call all this stuff impotent because Trump is obviously a bit of an idiot. I'm sorry, but radically reforming an entire government is not something that a single person, much less someone whose talents lie in real estate and television, can pull off in a matter of months. Trump has no end game; I strongly disagree that there's anything systemic about what he's doing. He doesn't like homeless people and one of his staffers got beat up, so he's making a big show of beating his chest. It's good TV. You give him way too much credit. He does what he does because it generates publicity, which he is pathologically addicted to.
The fact that intel services and the global rich hate his guts should make you feel safe.
I'm not sure what you meant about my primary concern, but the reason that I'm being critical here is that I think that fascism is a very specific thing and that we're nowhere close to it. I think over-invoking it, even if done for noble reasons, undermines the ability of left and right to hear each other and ultimately lowers the quality of public discourse, which by the way, is too big to be controlled by any one person, as with most of american society and our institutions.
If congress approves a perpetual state of emergency in DC, i'll eat my hat.
Have you ever read "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco? It reads like a trump administration roadmap. Go take a look. Wikipedia has a good simplified bullet-point version.
Yep, I read it for the first time back in 2015. The issue of defining fascism has fascinated me since. I think Eco's account is full of insight, but it's not comprehensive by a long shot. He doesn't really provide a meaningful definition, he provides a list of symptoms and manifestations, many of which are perfectly consistent with liberalism and even socialism. More importantly, I don't think there's much meaningful going on in the Trump admin that correlates to Eco's 14. There are a few, but only the most generic.
1. "cult of tradition." MAGA
2. "rejection of modernism." Canceling billions in research funding; rampant science denial
3. "cult of action for action's sake." Bombing Iran, mobilizing the military in LA and DC, pretty much every action this administration takes
4. "Disagreement is treason." How many people has trump personally accused of treason?
5. "Fear of difference." "they're eating the pets!" "They're sending rapists and murderers." "They're poisoning the blood of our country."
6. "Appeal to frustrated middle class." Does this one need elaboration?
7. "Obsession with a plot of enemies within destroying the country." DEI, "woke," kids getting sex changes at school, the aforementioned poisoned blood, "democrats hate our country," etc etc
8. "The enemy is both strong and weak." Biden is both a doddering old fool and a criminal mastermind, for one example. Also doesn't need elaboration.
9. "Permanent warfare, pacifism is for losers." pretty much trump's personality, now an administration trait: deny everything, ignore contradictory evidence, attack anyone pointing out the truth
10. "Contempt for the weak." Cutting Medicaid, attacking LGBTQ kids' rights, demonizing immigrants, not having disabled soldiers at photo ops, etc
11. "Cult of death." Response to Covid
12. "Machismo." trump's misogyny, hegseth's misogyny, for God's sake, trump as Rambo on a freaking flag
13. "Selective populism." trump is an idiot savant of faux populism, so much that the entire GOP is scared to death of crossing him.
14. "Newspeak." Woke, Russia hoax, witch hunt, Dems are Marxists, etc. There's an entire sub dialect of MAGA-speakers who have shorthand names for everything that bewilder an outsider.
This is why I don't care for Eco's theory. Anyone above a room temp IQ can twist and contort basically any government into being guilty of fascism, because the traits he identifies are both ill-defined and, insofar as the are defined, present in every single nation-state (some of them by definition!). I read it 10 years ago, but if I recall correctly, he acknowledges that flaw.
I could easily spit back a color swapped version of the list that you just sent and use it to claim that the DNC are fascists, but it would be equally full of vague straw-grasping and be ultimately meaningless. I'm sorry, but the SS death cult and blackshirt assault battalions have ZERO in common with people during covid that had different risk management than you.
Fascism is a political ideology. It has core beliefs and first principles, not just behavior patterns.
Here’s the problem: you think fascism is an ideology. It’s not. It’s a toolbox for gaining and maintaining political power. It co-opts ideologies as needed, but is ideology-agnostic. Compare Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler and there are few ideological throughlines.
Th trump regime exhibits so many fascist tendencies that it’s undeniable. You’re arguing about semantics but the evidence is clear.
I consider this conversation over—we have nothing left to discuss.
Yup, agreed, we probably won't get far. I do think fascism is an ideology and that Eco and the like are mistaken. In my book, national socialism, italian fascism, francoism/falangism, etc are all different ideologies that differ on core tenets, despite resembling quite similar and sharing tendencies. In any case, thanks for being respectful.
OK, guys, now that we're agreed that we face a serious threat, what's our best move? Just kidding, heh-heh-heh.