I've suspected for a while now that Donald Trump has a lot in common with the fascists of the 1930s, not so much in Hitler's Germany as Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain. I'm reminded of something that apparently Huey Long of Louisiana never said but still embodied -- if fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag.
But comparisons with Hitler are considered out of bounds, not always without good reason. And "fascism" has been treated like another "f-word" in our political discourse.
Well, it does begin with "f."
There's even an internet meme for it -- it's called Godwin's law, and the version I've heard says you automatically lose an argument if you call someone a fascist or mention Hitler in a current political context.
Well, with Trump, we're beginning to see Godwin's law broken. I don't know quite what to make of it, but I think it may be significant.
Some unedited notes on the phenomenon, whatever it is, follow:
"Godwin's Law." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies)[1][2] is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"[2][3]—that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.
Promulgated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,[2] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions.[4] It is now applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric.[5][6]
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There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself)[3] than others.[1] For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law.
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Ashley Young, "Ex-Mexican President Fox: Donald Trump reminds me of Hitler" CNN Feb. 27, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/26/politics/vicente-fox-donald-trump-hitler/
(CNN)Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Friday kept up his withering criticism of Donald Trump, saying the GOP front-runner reminds him of Adolf Hitler.
"Today, he's going to take that nation (U.S.) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That's the way he started speaking," Fox told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a phone interview on "Anderson Cooper 360."
"He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He's offended everybody."
Fox's comments come one day after he delivered a scathing response on Trump's plan to make Mexico pay for a wall between the Mexico-U.S. border.
"I'm not going to pay for that f***ing wall," Fox said in an interview with Fusion's Jorge Ramos.
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Roger Cohen, "Trump’s Il Duce Routine" NYT Feb. 29 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/opinion/donald-trumps-il-duce-routine.html?ref=opinion&_r=1
LONDON — Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm. Europe knows that democracies can collapse.
It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.
It’s the echoes, now unmistakable, of times when the skies darkened. Europe knows how democracies collapse, after lost wars, in times of fear and anger and economic hardship, when the pouting demagogue appears with his pageantry and promises. America’s Weimar-lite democratic dysfunction is plain to see. A corrupted polity tends toward collapse.
Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.
He has emerged from a political system corrupted by money, locked in an echo chamber of insults, reduced to the show business of an endless campaign, blocked by a kind of partisanship run amok that leads Republican members of Congress to declare they will not meet with President Obama’s eventual nominee for the Supreme Court, let alone listen to him or her. This is an outrage! The public interest has become less than an afterthought.
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This disoriented America just might want Trump — and that possibility should be taken very seriously, before it is too late, by every believer in American government of the people, by the people, for the people. The power of the Oval Office and the temperament of a bully make for an explosive combination, especially when he has shown contempt for the press, a taste for violence, a consistent inhumanity, a devouring ego and an above-the-law swagger.
As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.
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Adam Gopnik, "The Clothespin Campaign: A French History Lesson for Anti-Trump Republicans Today [March 3] 12:00 a.m. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-clothespin-campaign-a-french-history-lesson-for-anti-trump-republicans
... It was no surprise last week when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of France’s far-right National Front, endorsed Donald Trump. (“If I were an American, I would vote Donald Trump,” Le Pen tweeted.) The shared identity of the two political movements was merely being affirmed: extreme right-wing authoritarians whose core ideology is racist and anti-immigrant, coalescing around anti-Muslim rage (in Le Pen’s case, with the previous addition of anti-Semitism), and both strongly “corporatist,” i.e., not at all liberal but also not at all unfriendly to government welfare programs. It looks like the classic fascist double whammy, in plain English.
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No, this is what one might call a unicameral breakdown: one, and only one, of our major parties has been going crazy for twenty years and is now having a full-fledged gibbering, I’m-The-Emperor-of-Antarctica breakdown. It is hard not to feel just a touch of schadenfreude about this. The Republicans have served up eight years of hatred and nihilism—and now they are surprised to find they have inherited hatred and nihilism as they actually appear in the real world, not neatly blown-dry and smirking but red and orange and heaving, cursing and swearing and contemptuous. Republicans four years ago saw Trump offering the raw sewage of racism called “birtherism” and they giggled timidly and thought that, if diluted sufficiently with moderating water, it would somehow become potable. The chance to drive out Trump for good was Mitt Romney’s when, at no cost to him—and with the additional certainty of getting a disproportionate share of approval for minimal political courage—he could have rejected Trump’s support, instead of going to his hotel in Las Vegas to thank him for his endorsement. That tiny price proved too much to pay. And now they are surprised?
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... The same hysterical urge not to oppose or criticize Obama but to expose and humiliate and render him illegitimate is present in the conservative conversation about Hillary Clinton—she’ll be arrested! She’ll be indicted! She’ll be spanked!—this time with the sexual dimension embarrassingly blatant. It overwhelms rational calculation. Seeing this politicking as a theatre of shame and humiliation is probably smarter than seeing it as an efficient market of interests.
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LATER:
Jacob Weisberg. "An Eclectic Extremist" Slate.com March 4, 2016 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/donald_trump_s_terrifying_and_distinctly_american_authoritarianism.html
Though the novel is in truth not a very good one, Lewis develops it around a key insight: that if fascism came to the US, it would be as a variation on American themes, not European ones. The American man on horseback would be more Huey Long than Benito Mussolini, a folksy opportunist rather than a red-faced ideologue. Lewis was shrewd in guessing that an American fascist leader would likely declare himself an opponent of European fascism. This is a point that some of those accusing Donald Trump of fascism—including many on the right—misunderstand. Sure, Trump may retweet the odd quote from Il Duce and wonder why anyone would object. Admittedly, his rallies teeter on the edge of racial violence. Again this week, black protesters were forcibly ejected from his events with the help of white supremacist thugs. True, the world leaders Mr. Trump admires are the dictators, not the democrats. Certainly, he sounds like a dictator himself.
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This is why those arguing that Trump’s policies are more moderate than those of his rivals Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio miss the point. Trump’s authoritarianism is an amalgam not of left and right but of wacko left and wacko right: He thinks that George Bush was to blame for 9/11 and that Muslims should be barred from the U.S. Believing both of those things does not make Mr. Trump a centrist—it makes him an eclectic extremist. When it comes to policies, he actually has none in the conventional sense.
The conflict in the 2016 campaign is no longer Trump versus his Republican opponents; it is now Trump versus the American political system. That system is on the verge of missing its best opportunity to spit him out. Since Super Tuesday, the GOP’s reaction to Trump has been mildly heartening, with anti-Trump ads on television and principled politicians like Mitt Romney denouncing him amid torrents of personal abuse. Three cheers for Sen. Lindsey Graham, who says Trump is a “nut job” and that the GOP has gone “batshit crazy.” Fellow Republicans have taken to calling Chris Christie, who cravenly endorsed Trump last week, a “Vichy Republican.” But this is all probably too little, too late.
TOP COMMENT: "At least Hitler didn't inherit Germany from his dad."
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