Must-Read: If "fascist" means anything, it means somebody who claims to be a strong leader who will (a) solve problems, (b) eliminate the cretinism of parliaments, and (c) identify the enemies of the people--internal and external--and deal with them harshly. If you want to say that "fascism" proper is a disease of the twentieth century, and that the twenty-first century has "neo-fascism", I will not complain:
Gideon Rachman: Is Donald Trump a Fascist?: "Labeling a politician a fascist is not usually helpful...
...[In] 1944, George Orwell wrote....
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.... I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting... Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek... and I do not know what else.
And yet... different commentators have pointed to different aspects of the Trump campaign to justify applying the “f-word”. Andrew Sullivan... Trump “has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible”.... [For] Robert Kagan... fascism is... an ideological mess... [plus] a veneration of the strongman.... Robert Reich... [also] points to Trump’s veneration of strong leadership, alongside his nationalism and the undercurrent of violence in his movement, adding – “The content of what he says is utterly irrelevant. It is the style.”...
If you are looking for some academic rigour to be brought to this debate, there is no better authority than Robert Paxton, a professor at Columbia University and author of “The Anatomy of Fascism”. Anybody expecting a genuine academic to pour cold water on loose journalistic talk that Trump is a fascist might be sobered by Paxton.... Paxton... note[s that]... Trump... does not have his own militia to call upon. There are, as yet, no Trumpian equivalents of Mussolini’s “blackshirts” or Hitler’s “brownshirts”.... Even if Trump falls short, his extraordinary popularity says something very worrying.... As a recent New York Times review of Volker Ullrich’s new biography of Hitler puts it:
What is truly frightening in Ullrich’s book is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seemed to be secretly waiting for him.
