Nichols’ Observations Mean Trumpism is Fascist

Published at 09:00 on 13 June 2018

Recently I linked a Twitter thread by conservative academic Tom Nichols on the essential nature of Trump’s followers. And yes, Nichols is very much a conservative. Go check out his Twitter account and scroll through his posts; you’ll see gems like this one.

That latter point is, of course, largely irrelevant. What matters most is how well Nichols’ particular theory explains the behavior it is attempting to explain, and it does that very well. I am not aware of any competing explanation that works as well as the one Nichols recently espoused. Mainly I bring up the point of Nichols’ ideological proclivities simply to counter the accusation that he is nothing but a leftist saying things that the leftist writing this blog likes to hear.

Enough digression. Time to crack out my introductory PoliSci text, the one I bought in the early 1990’s when I started delving into the humanities on my own. My strategy was to go to the University of Washington’s course catalog, identify courses on topics of interest, go to the campus bookstore, purchase their texts, and proceed to study them on my own.

The text in question is the third edition of Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact by Leon P. Baradat. Its latest copyright is 1988, so nobody can accuse it of either being watered down to not pertain to Trump, or deliberately slanted to overly pertain to him. It’s a good insight into what has been traditionally regarded as the essential nature of fascism. This is what Baradat had to say about fascism in his introductory paragraph to the chapter he wrote on it:

… The resulting political vacuum was filled by charlatans whose ideas constituted reactionary rejections of modern institutions and values. Men like Mussolini and Hitler called upon their people to foresake reason and prudence, to follow their leaders with unquestioned obedience toward mythical, irrational, and inevitably disastrous goals [emphasis added].

In the following paragraph, Baradat writes: “The veracity of the myths were of little consequence, for they were used only as a means for motivation, not as a source of truth.” Sound anything like what Nichols just wrote?

Baradat, of course, also wrote of war and genocide in that introduction, which has not happened yet with Trump; moreover, Trump is a rank amateur at political oppression compared to Hitler, who within weeks of gaining power had jailed pretty much every significant opposition figure. That’s why I used the phrase “Trumpism is fascist” in my title, not “Trumpism is fascism.” Its essential nature is that of a fascist ideology, even though its expression currently falls short of full-blown fascism.

The US Empire is Ending

Published at 15:26 on 12 June 2018

What happened with the recent failed G7 summit is an escalation of a process that began with George W. Bush’s lying his way into a war of choice in Iraq: a series of real-life examples of why it is undesirable to have a sole global superpower in the world. As we are seeing, that superpower might just run off the rails, as countries tend to sometimes do.

It is not necessary to have any deeper understanding of how the machinations of capitalist class society make this inevitable; the lesson can be learnt, in incomplete form, whether or not one is a leftist who inquires into the nature and implications of class society. It is broader than capitalism, anyhow: regardless of the socioeconomic system, any gross disparity of power is fated to eventually prove itself to be the danger that it always was.

It was possible for students (i.e. those in other nations) to dismiss the first lesson as a historical anomaly when Obama won office. It will not be so easy for them to wave off the second, ongoing one.

The US Empire has inflicted a mortal wound upon itself. The wound may not initially appear to be mortal, but in time it will prove to be. It will not go away when Donald Trump goes away. It may even sometimes appear to be healing and the patient on the way to recovery, but such episodes will prove to be false hopes on the part of those making them.

The US empire is not ending in the way most of us on the left hoped it would, but it ending it is.

And It’s No. 2

Published at 08:23 on 12 June 2018

My prediction was spot-on. As if that’s a huge accomplishment or anything. This was so easy to see.

Something, but effectively nothing. Some sort of agreement that leaves all the difficult issues to be hashed out at some unspecified future date, coupled with many meaningless glad words about a new era.

Everything in this document has been in other agreements that North Korea has made in the past. None of those other agreements ended up making substantive changes to North Korea’s policies, so why should this one?

The only substantive new thing is that for the first time a US president met the North Korean dictator in person and fawned over him with disgusting (and false) rhetoric. And he did so in the immediate wake of repeatedly insulting the prime minister of Canada.

Most Likely Summit Outcomes

Published at 20:27 on 11 June 2018

Listed in no particular order:

  1. Nothing at all. One of the two crazy, unstable leaders throws a tantrum and walks out, or quickly reneges on an agreement he just signed.
  2. Something, but effectively nothing. Some sort of agreement that leaves all the difficult issues to be hashed out at some unspecified future date, coupled with many meaningless glad words about a new era.

What’s not going to happen? North Korea agreeing to give up its nukes and welcome US inspectors inside to verify it’s keeping good on its promise.

Tom Nichols Just Nailed It

Published at 08:08 on 11 June 2018

In this Twitter thread. It’s pointless to try to argue policy with Trumpist true believers so long as they remain true believers.

Instead, I would suggest focusing on reaching out to the unmotivated who sat by and allowed Trump to take power because they didn’t care enough about either side. Then there’s those who were simply too disgusted by both sides to vote for either. On that latter subset of voters: in a world where, as Marx observed, “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them,” why wouldn’t they be?

Also, focus on the disenchanted; some (not all, you can not count on it being all or even most) Trump voters will, after enough pain, start to question their decision and can be peeled off from his base. We’re already starting to see that with some capitalists and farmers getting queasy about the trade wars Trump is starting.

But there’s going to be true believers that stay true believers. Heck, there’s still Hitler and Stalin fans out there, who believe their idols have been massively unfairly treated by the opinions of a misinformed public. Trying to convert such people with facts and logic is mostly a wasted effort.

Nixon, Reagan, Bush the Younger, Trump: A Continuum

Published at 11:20 on 10 June 2018

From the standpoint of many Never Trump conservatives it’s politically incorrect to point this out, but there really is not an quantum gap between Trump and the Republican Party from the era of Nixon onwards.

It’s been a party built on lies and bigotry, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s lies about welfare queens driving Cadillacs (no evidence of such a person existed), to Bush the Younger’s lies about Iraq and his acolytes’ expressions of love for myth and contempt for truth, and their dislike for the rule of law.

Trump is merely more crude and blatant (and thus, in a sense, more fundamentally honest) about his fascistic principles; that’s all. For more details, see this Twitter thread.

Barney Frank, Bankster

Published at 07:54 on 25 May 2018

Barney Frank’s claims that Trump is not gutting the regulations that were passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis should be taken with not just a grain but a large block of salt, given that he now sits on the board of a bank poised to profit from the deregulation (no doubt at taxpayer expense when the next crisis rolls around).

And the Dodd-Frank regulations themselves were weak in the first place; they failed to fully replace the Glass-Steagall Act (which itself was repealed with no small amount of Democratic Party complicity).

It’s not just the Republicans that are at fault; the Democrats are the party of banksters and capitalism, too.