Robert Paxton (Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University), in his 2005 book
The Anatomy of Fascism, sums up fascism as follows:
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 goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Similarly, Dr. Lawrence Britt, in his oft-cited 2003 article in Free Inquiry entitled "Fascism Anyone" revealed the
14 characteristic of fascism based upon his study of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet.
From these pieces by acknowledged experts written a decade before Trump's escalator ride into the American political consciousness, one would be hard-pressed to state that Trump's GOP is not fascist, or at least very close to fascist and wanting to go further down that road.
Recently Biden called out the GOP for its embrace of fascism ("semi-fascism" in his garbled syntax) and many in the
GOP got all butt-hurt with this obvious statement of fact. Is it time to start labeling today's GOP "fascist?" After all, the
GOP has been (falsely) labeling the Democratic Party as "soci@list" or "communist" for years now. I would argue (with ample historical basis) that the "fascist" label fits the GOP far better than "communist" fits the Democrats. What say y'all?