[D66] American Fascism: It Has Happened Here | nybooks.com

[R.O.]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here/

On 22-06-2020 17:18, R.O. wrote:
[...]
> Reading about the inchoate American fascist movements of the 1930s 
> during the Trump administration feels less prophetic than proleptic, a 
> time-lapse montage of a para-fascist order slowly willing itself into 
> existence over the course of nearly a century. It certainly seems less 
> surprising that recognizably fascistic violence is erupting in the 
> United States under Trump, as his attorney general sends troops to the 
> national capital to act as a private army, armed paramilitary groups 
> occupy state capitols, laws are passed to deny the citizenship and 
> rights of specific groups, and birthright citizenship as guaranteed 
> under the Fourteenth Amendment is attacked. When the president declares 
> voting an “honor” rather than a right and “jokes” about becoming 
> president for life, when the government makes efforts to add new 
> categories of ethnic identity to the decennial census for the first time 
> in the nation’s history, and when nationwide protests in response to 
> racial injustice become the pretext for mooting martial law, we are 
> watching an American fascist order pulling itself together.
> 
> Trump is neither aberrant nor original. Nativist reactionary populism is 
> nothing new in America, it just never made it to the White House before. 
> In the end, it matters very little whether Trump is a fascist in his 
> heart if he’s fascist in his actions. As one of Lewis’s characters notes 
> of the dictator in /It Can’t Happen Here/: “Buzz isn’t important—it’s 
> the sickness that made us throw him up that we’ve got to attend to.”
> 
> //

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