Donald Trump supporter rides in his car. (photo: Reuters)
11 February 16
With Trump’s threats to round up Latino immigrants or bar Muslims from entering the United States, Nazi analogies from his critics abound.
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stoked fears of the white working class by appealing to anti-immigrant
sentiment. He mixed that with anger toward the political and economic
establishment by pointing to NAFTA as a reason jobs were vanishing. His
intolerant rhetoric of non-Christian America was considered so dangerous
that in response to one speech a liberal commentator joked that it
“probably sounded better in the original German.”
Donald Trump? No, that’s Patrick Buchanan.
Buchanan hasn’t been a big feature on the right since
the 1990s, and a lot of that has to do with the establishment knowing
then how toxic he was. In 1992, conservative columnist Charles
Krauthammer wrote of his “fascist underpinnings,” insisting that his mix
of “nativism, authoritarianism, ethnic and class resentment” and his
conversion to “protectionism” put him the classic mold of fascism.
Now, we have another politician bringing on those very
ideas, and again it’s rattling the Republican establishment. The
conservative journal National Review forcefully condemned Trump’s rise.
The moderate one-time Republican ex-mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg
vowed to run for president if Trump (among other radicals he doesn’t
like) gets the presidential nod.
With Trump’s threats to round up Latino immigrants or
bar Muslims from entering the United States, Nazi analogies from his
critics abound. In various forums, academics and journalists have warned
us not to use the fascism label, as it would be inaccurate from a
political theory perspective. Many of these people are smart and
perfectly well meaning.
But they’re wrong.
The skepticism comes from a healthy place: Americans,
especially on the left, are too quick to label anything they believe is
too right-wing to be fascist, in the same way right-wingers throw around
the term “socialist” without understanding what that means.
Traditionally, in the United States, our most right-wing pundits and
politicians don’t actually believe in the very specific tenets of
fascism, which calls for an immense amount of state power in economic
affairs. Instead, libertarianism, at least in fiscal affairs, is the
prominent idea.
And that’s where Trump gets interesting. Economically,
he’s quite unlike the other Republican candidates. He doesn’t blast
social security or threaten to take away anyone’s Medicare. In fact, the
state features strongly in his economic vision. For example, he blasts
NAFTA and promises to proactively bring manufacturing jobs back,
traditionally the political domain of the labor left, which is why some
union members are supporting him.
It’s important to remember this when one considers how
much fascism was seen as a reactionary response to the appeal of
socialism and communism to the rebellious working class in Europe. Much
of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric had as much to do with anger at prevailing
economic order as it did with his hatred of communists. The state, he
promised, would provide for the German citizenry, still suffering from
the fallout of the first World War. Many of those programs would be too
state-centered for our modern-day Republicans.
In short, Hilter’s appeal was a strong state, both in
terms of the military and the economy, pinning the blame not on the
ruling class but on minority scapegoats. That’s where we see the fascist
tendencies in the movement Trump has created. The journalist Chris
Hedges told me in an interview in 2006, “Fascist movements are always
indigenous and they look for indigenous symbols. Hitler or Mussolini may
seem exotic and strange to us, but they didn’t to Germans and Italians.
They built on Teutonic myths. In the case of Mussolini, harkening back
to the age of Augustus and imperial Rome.”
So too is the same with Trump’s call to “make America
great again” and his obsession with “American winning,” as if our old
empire came and went, and it’s time to assert ourselves once more. And
while Trump may not look characteristically fascist in the way we’re
conditioned to think they look, he certainly has attracted a
questionable crowd.
The white nationalist website Daily Stormer endorsed him. He has the support of at least one white nationalist PAC. And to make things worse, former Ku Klux Klan chief David Duke
said that, if anything, Trump’s politics were too radical. There was
footage of a Trump supporter shouting “Sieg Heil” at a rally, and
there’s been numerous accounts of non-white and non-Christian people
threatened and harassed at his rallies. The more we look at that, the
more Trump and his supporters look like the Tea Party and look more like
our local version of the far right movements in Europe that rally at
once against austerity and immigration.
The answer, then, is to see Trump and his followers
for what they are, and know now that after the election, even if he’s
not president, he’s created a big enough block of people who are closely
associated with a dark ideology. That means it is necessary to build
strong anti-austerity left movements like the ones in Greece and Spain.
There’s hope for that in the ascendance of Bernie Sanders. But the
movement will have to be bigger than him, and carry own after this
election year.
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