A June 26, 2018 commentary by Fintan O’Toole surfaced in my news feed yesterday.
O’Toole gives us a context that too many overlook, dismissing Donald Trump as an incompetent moron. On this kind of thing he’s an expert.
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
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The back and forth, say one thing — say another, may look like incoherence and chaos at first glance. O’Toole tells us what is really going on. It’s intentional, it’s constantly moving the goal posts, it’s aimed at a definite end even if the path seems to twist and turn. This paragraph is truly alarming.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
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Trump knows exactly where he is going. Throwing babies in cages is a test. If he can do that and get away with it, as seems to be happening, he is not going to stop. When he talks about jailing reporters, killing them even, when he jokes about locking up Hillary and others — he’s not joking.
Read the whole thing, and pass it on. After you’ve read O’Toole, read Richard Wolffe.
Wolffe’s comments on Trump’s European Embarrassment Tour are even more chilling when you put them in the context supplied by O’Toole.
They better watch themselves because you are changing the culture. There’s a polite way to say this, but the time for good manners has long gone. The president of the United States just threatened the safety and security of immigrants the world over.
Not just in Europe, he made clear, as he continued to talk about American immigration. “We have very bad immigration laws and we’re, I mean, we’re doing incredibly well considering the fact that we virtually don’t have immigration laws,” he explained...
...This is the language and mentality of so many extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in Europe. So in the Trump spirit of saying it loud, it’s time to drop the euphemisms: Trump is today’s first major government to be led by the racist far right. It’s not some kind of new populist politics; it’s the old National Front.
It’s more than “not normal” – the media’s favorite phrase for expressing disapproval with the way Trump is blowing up the old norms. Trump personifies the kind of extremist policies that were the wet dreams of the John Birch Society and George Wallace.
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Again, read the whole thing. Read both of them.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Kevin Drum is worried about what is happening in Europe.
— which means Trump is pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire.
Europe’s long period of peace after World War II is in part by design — a lot of long-simmering ethnic conflicts were resolved by resettling entire populations after the war. Ethnic tensions are rising again, and right-wing movements are exploiting them to gain power. (Aided and abetted by both Putin and Trump.)
At this point in history, never has the world more needed leadership to champion liberal democracy and push back against authoritarianism on the march. Traditionally that role has been played by American presidents — but not now.
Donald J. Trump is the worst possible president at the worst possible time — backed by both Putin and the Republican Party.
RESIST.