the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.
.. The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution.
.. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.
.. Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian.
.. 1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
.. there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
.. 2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
.. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
.. 3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.
.. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”
.. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
.. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
.. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation
.. Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.
.. the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies
.. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order
.. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens
.. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
.. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
.. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.
Trump’s Speech Is Good. Really Good
I went to the gun range today. Thursdays in the early afternoon, around 2, is my usual range time. Usually there are 3-5 people shooting. Two weeks ago I was the only one. Today I was first in line when someone finished, which was 45 minutes later. Every alley was full, and there were groups of people in line behind me. One group had 8 people. Of those, only 2 had ever shot. The other 6 want to learn.
I talked to one of my buddies there, and [he] said Monday at 10:00, they open at 9:00, they were already putting people in line, and it has stayed that way all week. He said people are scared, learning to shoot, and trying to get their LTC [license to carry] as quickly as possible.
.. I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.
.. Whether or not Trump can or will do a thing about it is another question. But this is a really good speech on these themes.
.. Straight-up Nixon ’68. Henceforth, every incident of violence against the police, every left-wing riot outside Trump campaign stops, and every campus disturbance this fall, will be a Trump commercial.
.. Ross Douthat earlier today called it “Buchananism without religion.”
The Apotheosis of Donald J. Trump
The constitutional structure of American government forces politicians, no matter what their motives, to “feel constrained to say and do the right thing according to the Constitution whether or not they are sincere
.. But Trump, according to Tulis, is “unique in that no other previous major party presidential candidate has felt so unconstrained by these constitutional norms.”
In fact, the separation of powers under the Constitution was explicitlydesigned to prevent the usurpation of power by a political leader appealing to popular passions and prejudices. If the framers saw anything coming, it was exactly this: a demagogue in the true sense of the term, someone with a privileged background pretending to be a man of the people, channeling their grievances. In other words, a Trump-like candidate.
.. No previous nominee has been so much the creation of social media and so little the creation of a political party.
is not his determination to close the doors to immigration (that has all too many precedents in the American past), or his criticism of open world-trade agreements (that, too, is closer to the historical norm of U.S. policy than is commonly imagined), or the barely disguised racism (which was his entry, via the Birther movement, into national politics).
What is most distinctive is the strongman, authoritarian style of politics that he radiates so strongly both in the bigger-than-life-or-politics persona he projects and the trust-me, I’ll fix everything and make us great again, program he promises.
.. Capitalizing on legitimate discontent, Trump is both the exploiter and the beneficiary of stagnating median household income, declining productivityand gross domestic product growth, as well as a worldwide refugee and immigration crisis.
.. According to the American Psychological Association, some 72 percent of adults reported experiencing financial stress in 2014.
.. “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,” Robert Kagan, the Republican foreign policy analyst, wrote in May.
.. According to a June Reuters/Ipsos survey, the percentage of Trump voters who agree with such statements as “blacks are less intelligent than whites” and “blacks are more lazy than whites” far outstrip supporters of any other candidate, Democrat or Republican.
.. the nomination of Trump signals
the burnout of modern conservatism. Trump, or Trumpism, is the residue of that burnout — thick with the nativism, racism, and authoritarianism that were always there.
.. One of the “most egregious misreadings of Trump is that he is part of the populist tradition of Andrew Jackson,”
.. Trump, Wilentz concludes, is just “the sort of gouger and business sharper that the Populists organized to stop.”
.. The conservative movement, Richardson writes, had a built-in conflict that it failed to resolve. In order to win white working class support for deregulation and smaller government, Republican leaders had to make the case
that an activist government redistributed wealth from hardworking white men to lazy African-Americans, women and organized workers.
.. While Trump has sent mixed signals on gay rights issues, he and his operatives stood aside while members of the Republican Platform Committee produced a document affirming hard right social conservative values.
Step Right up and Make America Great Again
It seemed like the setup for a program on national security but turned out to be something darker and more encompassing:a pageant of fear, as my colleague John Cassidy has noted, directed at a vast range of opponents, from the Islamic State to Black Lives Matter to the Libyan mobs that sacked the consulate in Benghazi.
.. After a career in law enforcement, Clarke might have noted that the violent-crime rate in America has dropped by almost half during the past twenty-five years. Or that violent crime has dropped ten per cent since President Obama took office. Instead, he argued that there is reason for fear.
.. It could have been a powerful story, but it was punctuated by awkward attempts at humor about shooting terrorists (“like Whack-a-Mole”).
.. He also made a substantive observation about the nature of American power: “My message to you is very clear: Wake up, America! There is no substitute for American leadership and exceptionalism.”
.. But this was not a night for substance. This was vaudeville, updated for the war on terror. After Melania finished speaking, the crowd started to bail. By the time the highest-ranking national-security figure of the evening was given his chance to speak, he was declaiming to large patches of empty seats.