In Search of American Fascism - The New York Times - 0 views
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he is more fascistic, at least, than most of the populist candidates (Wallace, Perot, Buchanan) to whom he’s reasonably been compared.
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genuine-article fascism, it seems worth digging a little bit into the ways in which Trump doesn’t deserve the fascist label,
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hich riffed on Umberto Eco’s famous essay laying out various hallmarks of the fascist style. As Bouie noted
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Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution
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his revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages
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Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”;
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… If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know
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However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface
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But that’s a digression: My main purpose in quoting Eco is to point out how poorly these two descriptions fit Trump,
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But then, of course, these two descriptions make a poor fit for nearly every American political tradition,
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founding boast that ours is a novus ordo seclorum, and assumes that any pre-18th century wisdom cannot fully match the glories of our brave new republican experiment.
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Whether or not a conservative tradition is possible in this landscape, a traditionalist tradition does seem well-nigh-impossible.
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but then the South’s Protestant/agrarian/localist distinctives cut against fascism in all sorts of other ways.)
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Nor does a mere politics of nostalgia, of the kind that both right and left can manifest, really resemble the kind of traditionalism
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But what he’s nostalgic for is not some sort of deep, pre-modern antiquity or a pre-1789 ancien regime.
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co himself might say yes, since his essay suggests that just one hallmark of fascism in a political movement or culture suffices “to allow fascism to coagulate around it,”
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contretemps this was one of the assumptions held by a number of Jonah Goldberg’s critics, and one of the major claims lodged against his thesis
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This argument wasn’t completely persuasive: As Goldberg countered — and as Eco’s line about Saint Augustine and Stonehenge suggests
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Which means in turn that whether the figure being accused of fascist tendencies is Woodrow Wilson or Donald Trump, t
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approaching and approaching and approaching, but because of our shared American-ness, never quite getting all the way.