Trump as a fascist?

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Instagram: “Quick IG Q&A after Tuesday’s Dem Convention program”
then
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Right to Warn of “Fascism in the United States” | The New Republic

“Let’s keep it real,” she said. “We need to win in November.” Then she dropped an f-bomb: The election, she said, was about “stopping fascism in the United States. That is what Donald Trump represents.”

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One reason it remains taboo in the mainstream to label Donald Trump a fascist is that Trump is uniquely American. It’s hard to imagine another culture that could produce the brash New York City mafia don/reality TV celebrity. ...

We, however, see the idea that Trumpism is uniquely American as another version of American exceptionalism. The failure to see Trumpism in a global context of far-right ethnonationalism—indeed, we would say, in the context of the long history of fascism—is a failure to understand that the United States is not special, not immune from global intellectual currents that affect countries from India to Brazil.

There are many forms of American exceptionalism, the belief that the US is fundamentally different from all other nations. In this context:

• American political institutions are strong enough to resist any leader's fascist tendencies.
• Americans have no taste for big political theories.
• Trump can't be a fascist because he isn't very smart.
• Trump is only interested in personal power, and not in anything broader.

If Trump were an American fascist, he would be quintessentially American. All fascisms are extreme forms of nationalist exceptionalism.

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The implicit error behind those opinions is that U.S. history has followed its own path and that a comparison with other societies is irrelevant or misleading.

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Ironically, this stress on the uniqueness of America is not unique at all. Most societies dealing with dictators and fascists resorted to romantic notions of their unique past. In Germany and Italy, conservative historians detached the history of fascism from long-term national histories, explaining fascism with an asterisk, as a freak occurrence, or as a product of external forces in an otherwise healthy nation.

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Some of the Trump government’s most important fascist continuities and similarities are not with the extremely genocidal regimes in 20th century Europe but with more recent dictatorships that repressed their citizenries as if opposition to the leaders was an act of war.

Like Argentina, with its "dirty war" against the Montonero revolutionary terrorists and just about anyone that the nation's leaders disliked.

By inflating the threat of antifa and deploying militarized forces from different government agencies to multiple American cities, the Trump government generates violent images that would justify its use of dictatorial means to control politics.

Something like the Reichstag fire - Nazi leaders howled that the Commies were on the march, and they demanded -- and got -- lots of dictatorial powers.

Trump behaves as one could expect an aspiring fascist dictator to behave. He and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro represent the closest that 21st-century populism has ever been to fascism. There is a strong possibility that we are witnessing a fascist regime in the making, and it depends on us to defend democracy by voting, defending a free press, and protesting unequal policies and the demonization of others.

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The practical alternative to this exceptionalism and the complacency it instills is the one that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered as the Democratic convention closed Tuesday night. “I think everyone understands the vast importance of reclaiming our democracy,” she said. “We can have debates on a whole swing and slew of other issues, but I think it’s extremely important to recognize the fascism, the very real fascism, that this president represents.” To blanch at the dropping of an “f”-bomb–to reserve “fascism” as a museum label for long-extinct foreign curiosities and dismiss the Trump government as too American or too dumb to be fascistic—is to abdicate our responsibilities as thinking citizens. The proper reaction when facing fascism is unity and coalition-building between conservatives, liberals, and leftists to confront the threat.

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It is a daunting prospect, one that requires us to cast a far more critical eye on America’s long political history. But, as Ocasio-Cortez put it, “That is why they call it the struggle: Because it’s not easy.”