A few days back Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the conservative Brookings Institution, penned a brilliant and important essay entitled This Is How Fascism Comes to America
Scholars and pundits and assorted talking heads of the American news gaggle have spent the last several months quibbling over whether or not fascist is an appropriate word to use when describing Donald Trump and his ascent to the doorstep of political power in America. The truth is that I don't know if what Trump is neatly fits into the complicated definitions that we have of a word that has proven difficult to define.
Another, more important truth, is that it doesn't matter if Donald Trump is an actual fascist or not. I've read various rejections of the idea that Donald Trump is an honest-to-goodness fascist: he doesn't have a group of organized brownshirts following behind him and doing battle in the streets with political adversaries; there's no Trumpian equivalent of the Hitler Youth; Hitler had a history of political involvement that Trump lacks; Mussolini was at one-time a communist so something or another.
These ideas are so juvenile as to barely merit a response, but I'll give it a shot regardless. A serial killer is somebody who kills three or more people. It doesn't matter if he devours his victims like Jeffrey Dahmer or buries them in the basement like John Wayne Gacy. A fascist is somebody who whips up nationalistic, anti-minority fervor, someone who cloaks himself in the flag and promotes a sort of lawless military adventurism, someone who race-baits and sanctions violence against his political opponents.
Is Donald Trump an actual fascist? Again, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that his ascent heralds a startling and troubling new age in American history, an age where all of us must do battle with the very real possibility that our democratic institutions might not be as powerful and as durable as we once thought. Will Donald Trump tear down American democratic institutions if elected to the Presidency? Not likely. What is likely is that he will degrade them to the point of irrelevance through his corruption and his willingness to use the legal arsenal at the disposal of the executive branch.
Trump doesn't like Jeff Bezos, so perhaps he'll discover a new love for anti-monopoly sentiment, at least insofar as it concerns Amazon. Trump feels that Hillary and Bill Clinton wounded him too deeply during the Presidential race? Perhaps he'll instruct his Attorney General to investigate the Clinton Global Initiative.
Donald Trump is a bad man with a lot of really bad ideas. He is a dangerous man with a lot of dangerous ideas. He is a small, insecure, ill-tempered, insecure demagogue with a rabid following of the angry, ignorant, and incompetent from throughout the country, and his Presidency would, in one way or another, spell the beginning of the end for America.
Do not let this tragedy happen. Fight against Trump. Fight against fascism. Fight against authoritarian demagogues who threaten the survival of the country and the world. Fight, fight, fight.
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