FAKE NEWS EXPOSED: A Service of PoliticalChat.com

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by whell

The left has coopted the word "authoritarian" and found a great way to misapply it to the right, and in particular Trump. This article you posted describes its genesis, and of course, in this forum and other lefty circles, the use of the word multiplied faster than rabbits.

Your article describes how aggressive election-year rhetoric may have appealed to some fraction of 1800 or so registered voters. You and others then spun this into a narrative that Republicans are fascists.

Congratulations. I hope you're proud of your accomplishments.

There are plenty of respected political scientists and researchers (e.g.,Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley) who agree with my assessment of Trump. Indeed, I'm not sure how you can, in good faith, deny what is obvious to a lot of experienced historians and researchers. Might it not be the case that all of these knowledgeable people labeling Trump and his movement as fascist or protofascist be because he exhibits the salient traits of fascism (he and his movement pretty much check all of the boxes of Umberto Eco's 14 defining traits of fascism)?

Consider for a moment how Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism. It defines Trumpism to a T:
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.

I think the crux of your argument is that Trump cannot be a fascist (or more accurately a protofascist IMO (or perhaps "semi-fascist")) because you like him and voted for him. That's not a particularly convincing argument. BTW, I blew up your argument that it was Joe Biden who "gave the left license to use the word 'fascist.'" These historians (and I, for that matter) did not seek (or need) Biden's permission to state the obvious long before Biden himself did.