Lawd hah merci.
I expect this kind of drivel from posters like Squiz and that guy on steroids. From a mod though?
Salon
I still love your contributions in the music threads.
If you are mocking the Hillbots and it went over my head forgive me, I've been locked up in the joint for 3 months and my sarcasm meter is a little rusty.
Was their something specific in the article you disagreed with, or did you not read it because it was in Salon?
It is somewhat ironic that you are questioning the superficiality of the article based purely on source and via a dismissive emoji critique/rebuttal. Point taken that not too many policy wonks like Jurgen Habermas* use Salon as a vehicle to disseminate their more high brow ideas.
Thanks for the music thread nod. No, the post was intended un-ironically. For a while, I have become increasingly disturbed by some of the seeming parallels that the article alluded to. It can't have completely escaped your attention that NUMEROUS publications other than Salon have noted some of these parallels, and have been for quite some time (other articles including from The Washington Post and New York Times appended below). Personally, when I think of Fascism, I think of (among many other things) a strong anti-intellectual bent. Maybe his actual cognitive skills are different than what he reveals in debates, and that is just for show and a performance, as it were. But on the surface, let's just say all the myriad kindergarten level attacks on other candidates (that guy is a dum dum head!) which made the President in Idiocracy look like Abraham Lincoln in comparison were less than reassuring to me that he has what it takes to run the country and be the commander in chief. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Clinton apologist, my stance is more coming from a lesser of two evils position. More than anything else, I'm deeply concerned that someone with the seeming attention span of a gnat and so monstrously self-absorbed is going to have control of the nuclear football codes. Literally the instant Trump looked like his campaign might have some legs and staying power, the first thing I thought of was Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone. Again, just to be clear, because I have made jokes about Trump (the coherence, cohesiveness, lucidity and intelligibility of his constellation of jumbled sound bytes and talking points is about as thin as the fake tan orange paint on his face), this is intended un-ironically.
Serious question - were you in the least bit alarmed, did it give you even a moment's pause, that Trump was slow to distance himself from, let alone denounce (if he even ever did?) public, vocal support from a high profile white supremacist with ties to the KKK? Was he just being cute or coy, or is he really that ignorant ("I don't know who that person is.")? Either way, it is a pretty harsh self-inflicted indictment of his gross incompetence and absolute, complete and utter dereliction of duty to fail to disavow even a hint of those kinds of reprehensible racist associations/overtures.
The Salon article seemed to be citing another in Slate interviewing a historian of fascism, Robert Paxton. This may be it:
1) Is Donald Trump a Fascist?
Yes and no. 2/10/16
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/is_donald_trump_a_fascist_an_expert_on_fascism_weighs_in.html
"Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory in Tuesday night’s New Hampshire primary makes him, according to both betting markets and many analysts, the favorite to win the Republican nomination. Trump has been written off as an entertainer and circus clown, but he has been tagged with another, much more serious label: fascist. Trump’s campaign has stirred bigoted feelings in the electorate and played to voters’ worst fears and prejudices. And so far, it’s working. Two-thirds of New Hampshire Republicans, according to
exit polls, favored Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration.
To discuss Trump’s rise and its historical echoes, I called Robert Paxton, a leading authority on the history of fascism. A regular contributor to the
New York Review of Books and an expert on Vichy France, Paxton has written
numerous books on European history. We discussed the ways in which Trump is and is not a fascist, whether Trump believes what he says, and why now, of all times, so many Americans seem to be embracing him. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Isaac Chotiner: As a historian of fascism, what do you make of Trump’s rise?
Robert Paxton: Well, it’s astonishing and depressing because he’s totally foreign to any of the skills that are wanted in a president of the United States. What we call him is another matter. There are certainly some echoes of fascism, but there are also very profound differences.
Start with the echoes.
First of all, let me preface it by saying that I’m very, very reluctant to use the word
fascism loosely, because it’s almost the most powerful epithet you can use. I guess
child molester might be a little more powerful but not much.
Nazi maybe, but that’s just a version of fascism.
It’s the same thing. It’s enormously tempting. Anyway, the echoes you can deal with on two levels. First of all, there are the kinds of themes Trump uses. The use of ethnic stereotypes and exploitation of fear of foreigners is directly out of a fascist’s recipe book. “Making the country great again” sounds exactly like the fascist movements. Concern about national decline, that was one of the most prominent emotional states evoked in fascist discourse, and Trump is using that full-blast, quite illegitimately, because the country isn’t in serious decline, but he’s able to persuade them that it is. That is a fascist stroke. An aggressive foreign policy to arrest the supposed decline. That’s another one. Then, there’s a second level, which is a level of style and technique. He even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out, and also the bluster, the skill at sensing the mood of the crowd, the skillful use of media.
I read an absolutely astonishing account of Trump arriving for a political speech, somewhere out West I think, and his audience was gathered in an airplane hangar, and he landed his plane at the field and taxied up to the hangar and got out. That is exactly what they did in 1932 for Hitler’s first election victory. No one had ever seen a candidate arrive by plane before; it was absolutely dazzling, the impression given, the decisiveness of power, of authority, of modernity. I suppose it was accidental, but wow, that is an almost letter-perfect replay of a Hitler election tactic. And the capacity of Trump to enlist working-class voters against the left is exactly what Hitler and Mussolini were able to do. There are definitely echoes.
Do you think that Trump is consciously using fascist tropes, or do you think that he’s just sort of stumbled into this?
I doubt it’s conscious. I don’t think he’s a bookish man. I’m sure he’s never read a book about Hitler or Mussolini.
He’ll read your books after this interview.
Perhaps.
When people like you and me watch Trump, I think we tend to assume he is a bull####ter who doesn’t have deeply held positions and is acting to a degree.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people would say, Well, Hitler and Mussolini, they believed what they were doing. Fascists generally believe what they’re doing. In fascism, do you think that there was more bull#### and politicking than people assume?
Totally. One of the reasons I wrote
my book was that I was so tired of people interpreting fascism as the application of a program. When you read Hitler’s program, his 21 points, when the party was founded in 1920, and when you read Mussolini’s first program in 1919, it had very little to do with what they eventually did. Mussolini, particularly, came from the left, and his first program included things like the vote for women, the abolition of a monarchy. It was more his style than the details of the program. The details of the program were constantly changing. They say whatever seems to suit the mood of the moment.
Mein Kampf is taken as a model that [Hitler] carried out—well, in
Mein Kampf, he wants to make peace with the British. They are full of inconsistencies, they were very opportunistic, totally opportunistic, and there was a high degree of change in their programs.
Tell me the ways in which you think Trump is not fascist.
I think there are some powerful differences. To start with, in the area of programs, the fascists offer themselves as a remedy for aggressive individualism, which they believed was the source of the defeat of Germany in World War I, and the decline of Italy, the failure of Italy. World War I, the perceived national decline, they blamed on individualism and their solution was to subject the individual to the interests of the community. Trump, and the Republicans generally, and indeed a great swath of American society have celebrated individualism to the absolute total extreme. Trump’s idea and the Republican plan is to lift the burden of regulation from businesses.
That’s fascinating. Anything else?
The other differences are the circumstances in which we live. Germany had been defeated catastrophically in war. Following which was the depression, which was almost as bad in Germany as it was here. Italy was on the brink of civil war in 1919. There were massive occupations of land by frustrated peasants. The actual problems those countries addressed have no parallel to today. We have serious problems, but there’s no objective conditions that come anywhere near the seriousness of what those countries were facing. There was a groundswell of reaction against the existing constitutions and existing regimes. That’s trumped up here; accidental pun, sorry.
Do you think there’s something about this moment in America that makes the country vulnerable to someone like Trump? Because as you noted, it’s hard to say that America is really in a horrible place.
No, this country has the strongest economy in the world and is still the strongest military power in the world without any close rival. The trends The trends are not downward unless you were offended by the presence of a black man in the White House.
There are only millions of Americans that fit into that category.
I’m afraid so. The argument is very clear. Like the argument of Hitler and Mussolini that the existing government is weak, and therefore, we must have a government that is appropriate to the grandeur of America. The portrayal of Obama as weak, which is astonishing considering the degree to which Obama has used military power.
Nevertheless, a lot of people are left behind in the recovery. Poorly educated white males are left behind, and the country is not better for them, and there are enough of those people to make a huge difference. I don’t think there are enough of those people to elect a president, but they can make a powerful movement.
Again, I’m obviously not comparing Trump to Hitler as a person, but watching the “moderate” Republicans tear each other apart over the last few weeks and then split the vote five ways in New Hampshire last night, I thought of the 1932 election in Germany, with everyone kind of thinking, depending on their interests, that there were bigger threats than Hitler and not focusing on him until it was too late.
Yes, absolutely. It was a conscious choice in both countries to consider the socialists and the communists a much greater threat than the Nazis and fascists, and there was a conscious decision by the conservatives who were still holding the machinery of power to bring the fascists and the Nazis into the system in order to better fight the left. That particular dynamic is of course completely absent now. There was a conscious choice in Germany at the end of 1932 to use Hitler’s mass following to smash social democracy in Germany. The same strategic [choice] was made in Italy. I don’t see any of that dynamic. The old guard is against Trump. They’re not trying to use him, although, they may shift, they may decide that if Trump continues to be successful that he could be useful."
2) This is how fascism comes to America The Washington Post 5/18/16
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html
"What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up."
"Republican politicians marvel at how he has “tapped into” a hitherto unknown swath of the voting public. But what he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy.” Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic."
3) Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism The New York Times 5/28/16 (many quotes, examples and instances other than what I have highlighted from the below article take pains to make distinctions between the Trump juggernaut/phenomenon and how historians commonly define fascism - I would at least characterize it as suggestive of more nuance than Trump's typical, "He's a dummy head." refrains.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/world/europe/rise-of-donald-trump-tracks-growing-debate-over-global-fascism.html?_r=0
"Fascist comparisons are not new in American politics. A Google search of “
Barack Obama and Nazi” or “
George W. Bush and Nazi” produces many images of the last two presidents as swastika-waving fascists. But with Mr. Trump, such comparisons have gone beyond the fringe and entered mainstream conversation
both in the United States and
abroad.
President
Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico criticized Mr. Trump’s plans to build a wall on the border and to bar Muslims from entering the United States. “
That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived,” he said. The actor George Clooney called Mr. Trump
“a xenophobic fascist.” Louis C. K., the comic, said,
“The guy is Hitler.” Eva Schloss, the 87-year-old stepsister of Anne Frank, said Trump “is
acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.” It got to the point that his wife, Melania Trump, was prompted to say,
“He’s not Hitler.”
Mr. Trump has provided plenty of ammunition for critics. He was
slow to denounce the white supremacist David Duke and talked approvingly of beating up protesters. He has praised Mr. Putin and promised to be friends. He
would not condemn supporters who launched
anti-Semitic blasts at
journalists. At one point, Mr. Trump retweeted a Mussolini quote:
“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”
Asked by Chuck Todd on the NBC program “Meet the Press” about the retweet, Mr. Trump brushed off the quote’s origin.
“I know who said it,” he said. “But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?”
“Do you want to be associated with a fascist?” Mr. Todd asked.
“No,” Mr. Trump answered, “I want to be associated with interesting quotes.” He added: “And certainly, hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?”
4) Germany confronts it's history 5/11/15, quotes the last work of Ernst Cassirer (a towering intellectual figure in the first half of the 20th century, best exemplified by the three volumes of The Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms and the one volume popularization Essay On Man, which reveals how man's increasingly sophisticated use of symbol systems to better understand himself and his place in the universe [[from the cave paintings of Lascaux through Socrates/Plato to Einstein]] is somewhat akin to the characters in a relief by the modern sculptor Rodin of "The Thinker" fame struggling to emerge from their underlying statuary matrix and material substratum) before his death, The Myth of the State, written in the wake of the then-recent Nazi abomination and tragedy, about how the State, as much as we would like to think so in a given generation, is never a given for perpetuity, and the protection of it's principles must constantly be renewed by a COLLECTIVE appreciation and understanding of how delicate and precarious it's stability is, and how easily the powerful forces of unleashed irrationality can dismantle it.
http://blog.camera.org/archives/2015/05/germany_confronts_its_history_1.html
The past week witnessed commemorations of the defeat of Nazi Germany 70 years ago. The German legislature, the Bundestag, featured an
address by eminent historian, professor doctor Heinrich August Winkler, Chairman of the Department of History at Humboldt University in Berlin. Winkler pulled no punches in his sweeping assessment of German responsibility for the cataclysmic war. But equally important his measured words are a warning to all generations.
Quoting philosopher Ernst Cassirer, Winkler describes Hitler's political ascendance as the "triumph of myth over reason." Viewing the xenophobia and outbreak of anti-Semitism in the world today, Winkler concludes, "Cassirer's words still have relevance today." He warns,
"In politics we are always living on volcanic soil. You must be prepared for abrupt convulsions and eruptions. In those critical moments of man's social life, the directions of forces that resist the rise of old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myths has come again. The myth never really disappeared... lurking in the dark, waiting for its hour... this hour comes as soon as the other binding forces of man's social life... lose their sense and are no longer able to combat the demonic, mythical power."
* Jurgen Habermas
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/
