The_Noble_Cause wrote:Monker wrote:ohsherrie wrote:You're over the top with that Hitler nonsense
I don't think so. His words are classic Fascism...and I recognized it months ago. Nowadays, he's constantly compared to it. Others compare him to Mussolini, which may be more accurate. The bottom line is Trump is using fear, anger, and hatred to gain power.
In other words, a daisy chain of ignoramuses confirming each others' biases somehow makes it so? These historians would beg to differ. Throwing around the word "fascist!" and "Hitler!" is just a cheap way of halting ANY conversation about the non-PC topics Trump has raised.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellede ... 69949795fbhttp://www.the-american-interest.com/20 ... a-fascist/
You couldn't have even read this article since it basically agrees with me. It makes my argument FAR easier, since I don't have to type all of this, just copy/paste:
Fascism and Nazism combined elements of a desire for respectability with hints of violence. Trump recalls that blend. He reminds his audiences that he attended “the Ivy League” Wharton School of Finance, where there were many “smart” people, including himself. Yet he is that Ivy Leaguer who either will not or cannot speak the English language properly. He takes pleasure in using a limited vocabulary, relying on non-descriptive words such as “nice,” “beautiful,” “good,” “great,” “bad,” and “very bad.” At the same time, he assumes a kind of pseudo propriety, feigning horror at the thought of women’s bodily functions, such as Hillary Clinton’s use of a bathroom during a debate, or Megyn Kelly’s putative menstruation. Trump’s insults of the patrician Jeb Bush were a crucial aspect of his campaign’s success.Trump’s insults of the patrician Jeb Bush were a crucial aspect of his campaign’s success. He succeeded in reinterpreting Bush’s decency and civility as “low energy,” a form of “weakness.” His followers took pleasure in his attacks on Bush not primarily because they disagreed with this or that policy, but because Trump gave them a way to dismiss Bush’s obvious strengths. Bush’s style, his intelligence, the size of his vocabulary, his seriousness and ability to speak knowledgably about the details of problems—these were a constant challenge to those like Trump who lack the ability to do any of these things. Such strengths stir resentment and envy, reminding listeners of what they themselves do not understand. Trump’s insults made it possible for his followers to dismiss their discomfort over not understanding policy questions. They could be “big guys” despite their ignorance. This was very liberating. This combination of elite background and unsophisticated airs recalls a feature of fascist orators. Mussolini and Hitler differentiated themselves from traditional European conservatives by their willingness and ability to speak in the idiom of the common man, to speak crudely and profanely in the service of their goals. Where conservative parties had previously feared “the masses,” fascism and Nazism focused on building a “movement” composed of them.
The absurdity of a New York billionaire who claims to be “anti-establishment” is lost on his followers, who instead marvel at his willingness to insult a member of the family that had led the Republican Party for the past quarter century. Trump’s ad hominem attacks on McCain and then Bush signaled that it was now open season on the old elites defined by taste, erudition, and public service. Like the fascists of old, he combined an authoritarian style with a populist bad-boy rebelliousness. In breaking the taboos of civility and civilization, a Trump speech and rally resembles the rallies of fascist leaders who pantomimed the wishes of their followers and let them fill in the text. Trump says what they want to say but are afraid to express. In cheering this leader, his supporters feel free to say what they really believe about Mexicans, Muslims, and women. The bond between leader and follower created by his willingness to fulfill wishes, both conscious and unconscious, constitutes a key element of the whiff of fascism that surrounds the Trump phenomenon.
Italian Fascism and German National Socialism did not only celebrate highly conventional notions of masculinity associated with strength and force. They associated liberal democracy with weakness and weakness with feminine qualities of listening as well as talking. They suggested that link between masculinity and authoritarianism. Their call for a new leader was for a strong man. Yet Hitler and Mussolini presented themselves as men of the people who sought and won respectability. Hitler sought to reassure the German elites that though he was from the people, he really shared some of the values of the old elites. Trump, coming as he does from wealth, disdains respectability. He flaunts his tastelessness, vulgarity and in the Detroit debate, the size of his genitals. That tastelessness is of a piece with an even more important point he made in Detroit. Asked what he would do as President if the military leadership refused to obey orders to engage in torture or to kill the families of terrorists, he insisted they would do as they were told. Here was the strong man dismissing the irritating details of the rule of law and the rules of war.
>clipping out a paragraph to save space<
After seven years of Obama, Trump understands that compassion fatigue is a mass sentiment. Social Darwinism, the idea that the survival of the fittest is and should be the law that governs relations in society and between states, was a key source of fascism and Nazism. Trump’s contempt for “losers” and his self-description as a “winner” stand in this longer Social Darwinist tradition. For the fascists, the Nazis, and for Trump, victory and defeat were and are not merely the result of contingent circumstances. They comprise a moral judgment as well. That is why some of his fiercest criticism of his opponents has nothing to do with their actual policy positions, but focuses instead on their low poll numbers, as if the latter were themselves evidence of the devalued moral worth of “losers.”
Both Mussolini and Hitler were careful to attack those who they believed were weak and vulnerable. Their blunders and downfall were due partly to the fact that their own ideologies blinded them to the true power of their adversaries—the major powers who ultimately won World War II. They rode high so long as they were confident bullies, sure to attack only those who were unable to defend themselves. When Mussolini waged war on the Italian Left, it had already been split between Communists and Socialists and posed no realistic threat of revolution. Hitler also benefited from a German Left that was split into warring democratic versus communist factions and from conservatives who invited him into power. The Jews in Europe lacked a state and a means to defend themselves. Ethiopia in the 1930s was defenseless against the Italian Air Force. Trump’s promise to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants recalls those earlier attacks on vulnerable minorities.
For his followers, Trump’s cruelty is inseparable from the message of freedom from civility and political correctness.For his followers, Trump’s cruelty is inseparable from the message of freedom from civility and political correctness. His cruelty was in plain view in his effort to humiliate the Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly, his nasty sarcasm about the physical handicap of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, in the obvious pleasure he takes in commenting about the real or imagined personal shortcomings of his competitors, and in the outrageous mass deportation plan. Such a step would inflict untold suffering on millions of families, but he talks about carrying out such cruelty with pride. Doing so signifies that he and his followers will no longer be taken for suckers, that the hour of justified revenge has arrived against all the alien murderers and rapists supposedly in our midst. Yet the same cruelty that arouses disgust and anger among those who see it as a clear violation of elementary moral principles excites his followers. To them, the threatened violence and expulsion stands for a return of freedom and a recovery of their country.
Extreme nationalism, along with the temptation toward the transgressive, was central to the appeal of fascism and Nazism. The fascists and Nazis divided the world into Italians and Germans who were wonderful in various ways and the rest of humanity, which existed on a sliding scale of depravity and inferiority. The fascists and Nazis extended humanity and camaraderie to their fellow Italians or in Germany to members of the “people’s community” or the Aryan race, but not to the vast majority of humanity outside the charmed circle of the nation. Trump’s nationalism echoes that mixture of nationalist self-love and disdain for various “others.” While he’s not calling for concentration camps or planning to go abroad in search of foreign enemies to destroy, he claims to intend to build a physical wall on the Mexican border and an economic and cultural wall of protectionism against the rest of the world economy. He and his followers have heard that many people around the world do not like the United States. His followers cheer when he tells them the feeling is mutual; he and his followers don’t much like the rest of the world.
How his disdain for other nations could be compatible with the continued American leadership of the liberal democracies and market economies around the world is a mystery that Trump leaves unsolved. His followers are so filled with rage at other nations that it does not occur to them that the election of Trump as President would mean the collapse of American alliances worldwide. How could Trump make America great again yet display no understanding of the meaning of American political, military, economic, and diplomatic leadership? It’s a question that is not allowed to arise. In their combined anger and fear, Trump and his supporters have lost their common sense and this too accounts for his appeal. It doesn’t even bother his followers that Trump, a man who as President would have the U.S. nuclear arsenal under his control, has not a clue about what the nuclear triad is.
Conspiracy theorizing also links Trump to the fascists and the Nazis. Trump offers no pretensions to intellectual seriousness. He does not offer a conspiracy theory as the explanatory key to modern history. He has repeated stereotypically anti-Semitic remarks about Jews, but he gives no indication of believing in the anti-Semitic canards that were at the core of Nazi appeals. Yet although he does not cite The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or, at least so far, repeat the falsehood that the “Israel lobby” was responsible for the war in Iraq, he does present the United States, the most powerful country on earth, as a hapless victim of China, Mexico, and Japan. A differing cast of nations, a diffuse “they” or “them,” is somehow able to run rings around the “stupid” politicians and trade representatives of the U.S. government, and presumably the CEOs of major American corporations. He presents America’s fall from greatness as a story of an innocent—and “stupid”—victim of dark forces who manipulate its goodwill for their own benefit. This story of the good nation victimized by evil conspirators recalls the pathos of national innocence and victimization that fueled the fascist and Nazi demagogues.
>Snipping out more bits...about Trump's crazy conspiracy theories <
On February 8, 2016 in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush said, “It’s not strong to insult women. It’s not strong to castigate Hispanics. It’s not strong to ridicule the disabled. And it’s not strong to call John McCain…who spent six years in a POW camp in Hanoi a loser because he got caught.” In that one eloquent statement, Bush the patrician captured the whiff of fascism, the false understanding of strength and weakness, and the essential bully that is Donald Trump. None of this seemed to mean anything to many of the Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, however—a fact that ought to send shivers up the spine of any decent American.
Bush, and earlier Senator Lindsay Graham, seemed to stand alone in the Republican Party in their willingness to confront Trump when his campaign was still in its early stages. They were abandoned by their fellow Republicans, who wrongly thought they could ignore him. When fascism and Nazism emerged in Italy and Germany, their rise to power was also accompanied by an astonishing series of political blunders and misjudgments by the elites of the time. Hitler was underestimated by his opponents on the Left, who thought he was merely a tool of the capitalists, and by the industrialists, who thought he would become their pliable tool. In both cases, the political establishments failed to take the danger seriously enough and then descended into cynical opportunism borne of partial agreement and lack of principle, now evident in the stunning decision of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to support Trump.
History does not repeat itself in simple ways. Trump is not a carbon copy of Hitler or Mussolini. Yet he has now threatened the owners and editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post with libel suits if they continue to criticize him. He (absurdly) pretended not to know who David Duke is and appeared to refuse in an interview to disavow him and the KKK, thereby shamelessly pandering to votes from the extreme racist Right. He then “disavowed” them without clarifying why he was doing so. His cynicism was transparent. Whether or not Trump gains the nomination of the Republican Party, he has already done enormous damage to American politics. The poisons he has unleashed and the taboos he has smashed with such glee have created a new, dangerous field of rhetorical violence and insult in American public life. He has revealed that large numbers of our fellow citizens are willing to follow a demagogue who voices contempt for basic principles of liberal democracy, offers simple explanations of complex issues, and draws on racism, religious bigotry, and extreme nationalism to “make America great again.” Trump’s mixture of wealth and authoritarianism, and their underestimation by the establishment, also evokes comparisons to Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the damage he did to Italy while he served as Prime Minister. Berlusconi’s launching pad in private wealth is similar to Trump. Yet Trump is less the buffoon and more of the bully than Berlusconi. Given the role of the United States in world affairs, the damage he could do should he become President would be far greater.
Despite the important differences between the Trump phenomenon and the extreme Right of Europe’s 20th century, his campaign brings to mind dangerous echoes from the past. We know what can happen when politicians who speak and act like Donald Trump gain power, even if they do so by using the instruments of democracy. With fear and anger unloosed in the land, much can happen, nearly all of it very bad. Trump can be stopped, but for that to happen we need to take the threat he poses seriously and to remember the lessons of the not so distant past.
