Is Donald Trump a Fascist? - The New York Times - 0 views
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you usually hear liberals sling against the right: That the real estate magnate turned populist is actually a fascist.
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The hook for this charge was Trump’s illiberal musings about Muslims and databases and his lies — or, to be charitable, false memories
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argued that Trumpism, however ideologically inchoate, manifests at least seven of the hallmarks of fascism identified by the Italian polymath Umberto Eco.
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“beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists”
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One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking.
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nd while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace,
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He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.
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Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted
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Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump:
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Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a
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Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-
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precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him
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but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who
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Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far —
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the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration
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then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step
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The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.