Josh Marshall found this essay in the British magazine, Prospect, and it's required reading for students of this age. I've been arguing for a while that Trump is not - strictly speaking - a fascist. Several on Twitter accused me (with some merit) of being pedantic. I was focusing on nomenclature when the country was on fire.
Except, the country wasn't really on fire, and certainly the Reichstag never burned. It never was Weimar for reasons big and small.
What this essay does so well is show how this is a NEW movement and should be understood as such or else the failure to understand it will lead it to more successes. Yes, it's authoritarian and should be understood as such. I've argued that Trump fits into the oligarchic authoritarianism that encompasses everything from Mobute's old regime in Zaire to Putin's Russia to Erdogan's Turkey to the House of Saud to potentially even the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet there is clearly something different about Trump (and Farage and Le Pen and Duterte). This essay notes that Trumpism is steeped in capitalism and the language of rights. While Trumpists decry the abuses they feel they have suffered under globalism, they are still endless consumers. There lives are defined by it. The Truck and Boat Parades are great examples of this, as they represent conspicuous consumption offered up to the Leader. They are consumers of celebrity culture the way oceans consume rivers. They drink in The Celebrity Apprentice and while some cluck their tongues and Trump's Twitter vulgarities, others cheer him along. The difference between a Trump Loyalist and a Generic Republican is whether they read Us magazine or the Wall Street Journal.
The language of "rights" has been largely hijacked at the moment by anti-maskers who claim they are being oppressed by having to follow public health measures. Their "right" to tell racist or sexist jokes is being infringed. They bleat about their First Amendment rights in ways that demonstrate first and foremost that they don't understand what the First Amendment is, but secondarily places them outside any normal definition of fascism.
The piece talks about social media in a way that has been largely done before, but adds that Twitter flamers and Facebook thread authors about the horrors of "transgender bathrooms" are not people who take the barricades. They are "creating content, " the laziest form of activism or protest. For the all the real damage that they do to a shared set of objective facts, they are simply angry ranters, not Brown Shirts.
Consumers are ultimately passive. Trump's audience consumed his rallies and ranted online. They talked about "taking back the country." And maybe the authors and I are wrong and they will launch a massive insurgency to try and topple Biden's government. But it sure seems like they will stay inside where it's warm and bleat about socialism and buy more weird-assed flags online.
Like Trump, his followers are not men of action. They are men of Twitter and Facebook and couch-bound outrage, at least until someone changes the channel.
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