What matters about identifying the Trumpist line as fascist is that it is diagnostic."
— Adam Gopnik’s article in New Yorker about how chaos and incoherence are an integral part of facism www.newyorker.com/…
It’s part of the fascist inheritance to create such a fire-hose blast of corruption and lies that trying to focus on any one drop becomes impossible—that blast has the uncanny effect not of washing away the truth but of drowning your attention. You just want to get out of its way.
…fascism is a specific style and practice of authoritarian politics, which Trump then, and Trumpism now, re-creates—one that has specific character traits without having any axiomatic ideology, taking on new aspects in each new nation that it afflicts. Fascism is, by its nature, chaotic and incoherent and chameleonic—that’s why it needs a strongman to organize around. A weak, fragile, incompetent makeup-girdle-diaper-shoe lift-hairpiece wearing man-baby bigot “strong man”.
The Leader is, by definition, always right since the truth is whatever happens to emit from his (it’s always going to be a “he/him”) mouth or his pen at any given moment even if it contradicts the previous exclamation. Listeners are actively discouraged from thinking critically; that would be disloyal.
And then, at the end there is this very serious warning:
“Calling Trump the F-Word
What matters about identifying the Trumpist line as fascist is that it is diagnostic."
— Adam Gopnik’s article in New Yorker about how chaos and incoherence are an integral part of facism www.newyorker.com/…
It’s part of the fascist inheritance to create such a fire-hose blast of corruption and lies that trying to focus on any one drop becomes impossible—that blast has the uncanny effect not of washing away the truth but of drowning your attention. You just want to get out of its way.
…fascism is a specific style and practice of authoritarian politics, which Trump then, and Trumpism now, re-creates—one that has specific character traits without having any axiomatic ideology, taking on new aspects in each new nation that it afflicts. Fascism is, by its nature, chaotic and incoherent and chameleonic—that’s why it needs a strongman to organize around. A weak, fragile, incompetent makeup-girdle-diaper-shoe lift-hairpiece wearing man-baby bigot “strong man”.
The Leader is, by definition, always right since the truth is whatever happens to emit from his (it’s always going to be a “he/him”) mouth or his pen at any given moment even if it contradicts the previous exclamation. Listeners are actively discouraged from thinking critically; that would be disloyal.
And then, at the end there is this very serious warning:
Fascism thrives on institutional timidity.
-Round ’em up.