Wednesday, November 25, 2015

GOP Civil War Looming as Trump Slides Toward Fascism?



As Donald Trumps slides increasingly down a path that makes one think of Adolph Hitler and/or Benito Mussolini and outright fascism, New Day For America PAC, which supports John Kasich, has launched a new ad that is displayed above that has assembled some of Donald Trump’s more extreme and vile statements. (Another source has fact checked and found that the majority of "facts" that Trump cites are not true). New Day for America is reporting that Trump is already threatening to sue them.  Meanwhile, a piece in The Week looks at The Donald's slide toward fascism.  Here are some highlights:

I made the case just a couple months back that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is a sort of fledgling Mussolini, nurturing an incipient fascist movement. As the first primaries approach, and Trump's lead in the polls is actually widening, his development toward outright fascism is progressing faster than I feared.

As of August, Trump had most of the ingredients for a fascist movement: the victim complex, the fervent nationalism, the obsession with national purity and cleansing purges, and the cult of personality. He was missing the organized violence, a left-wing challenge strong enough to push traditional conservative elites into his camp, support for wars of aggression, and a full-bore attack on democracy itself. He's made much progress on all but the last one.

It's clear now that the Paris attacks enormously energized the Trumpist movement. He's now speculating openly about invading Syria. Trump's proposals have gone from overt prejudice to things literally taken out of late Weimar history — closure of mosques and a national Muslim database. The rank-and-file have both fed off and stoked this behavior. When a lone protester started chanting "black lives matter" at a Trump rally, Trumpists jumped him (he was luckily not badly injured).  Trump later said, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." Hours later he lied about witnessing Muslim crowds celebrating 9/11, and retweeted nonsense racist garbage from a literal neo-Nazi.

Conditions are clearly fertile to start organizing a Trumpist paramilitary wing, a key fascist institution.  . . . . With an incomprehensible number of guns floating around the country, all Trump needs is a Röhm to get the organizing started — except probably with Carhartts and camouflage instead of imitation military uniforms.
Will other decent Republicans (those few that are left) join Kasich and call Trump out?  One can only hope so.

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