One nazi less?

[Provost Harrison]

I am completely at a loss to understand why people keep making the argument "history is not literally repeating itself exactly as it did 90 years ago in every detail, therefore the very clear, broad trends we can all plainly see are not actually happening."

I find it baffling this handwringing about the definition. I sincerely hope it is just a manifestation of wishful thinking, that this isn't fascism. But all indicators and concensus suggest otherwise. Trump fits the "cult of personality" aspect perfectly with different flaws and manifestations. But they stack up to have the same end effect.

[Provost Harrison]

There is a very significant difference. Hitler seized power because he wanted to exterminate Jews and Communists, breed a master race of Germanic supermen, and forge a worldwide German Empire that would last a thousand years. He lied about a lot of things, but he seemed to sincerely be aiming towards that, and all his actions point in that general direction. Trump, while perfectly happy to do any number of barbarous things, is doing them because, basically, he wants attention. Specifically respectful attention, with groveling, and opportunities to be cruel to people who did not respect him in the past, and of course plenty of chances to steal stuff and possibly engage in coitus with much younger women, assuming the relevant parts of his body still work. He will, to those ends, say he wants this, that, and the other thing, and possibly on some shallow level believe as much due to his own limited self-awareness, but he doesn't actually seem to be committed to anything, and in fact despises those who do commit to things. Plenty of people have said he rolls his eyes at soldiers' graves--people who get themselves killed for other people are suckers, plain and simple. At the same time, Trump is much more impressionable than your typical fascist. If you hacked Truth Social to have all his followers' accounts praise him and ask him to go after those filthy unamerican antique dealers next, he would promptly launch a ferocious crusade against antique shops (somebody I know argues that the deployment of troops to American cities is largely due to his base criticizing him for not being assertive enough in his first term, which seems entirely consistent with his character).

You can argue that it doesn't matter if he's being an authoritarian thug, but he's not really being a very competent or organized authoritarian thug. He can be cast as one, if you insist on pattern-matching and ignoring the things that don't fit, but really he's doing a pretty crap job of actually taking over stuff; fascists were often kind of bad at getting control, and at many other things, but once they actually got their hands on power they were enthusiastic and thorough about crushing dissent. Trump's ten months into his second term and people are still honestly and without fear telling pollsters that, by and large, they do not like him, and the pollsters are publishing those results. He got Colbert's show canceled and Kimmel's ... sort of briefly halted, I think? Plenty of media outlets are still criticizing him, as well as plenty of private citizens. His orders are getting tied up in courts and the hostile judges aren't getting hauled out of their beds and disappeared in the dead of night. No free helicopter rides, no murdered critics. He's such a big bad strong man that he's picking on Venezuela, a pathetic friendless basket case of a country. He doesn't have the nerve to blow up Mexican boats, as that would risk a real war. Which reminds me--he has yet to conquer a single square mile of foreign land.

Looking at Wikipedia's timeline of early Nazi history now; conveniently, Hitler also got power in late January (1933). He'd outlawed all rival political parties by mid-July. Not "had a flunky call them criminal conspiracies after one of his buddies got shot," effectively and permanently abolished. Within a year he'd reorganized the entire government--if I'm understanding this right, what he did is roughly equivalent to Trump, in January 2026, firing all fifty state governors and liquidating their legislatures. Anybody expecting Trump to do anything remotely that significant in the next few months?

He is awful and is doing substantial harm, but he is not a fascist. If Vance took over, I might worry more, since Vance is actually smart and has enough of a theory of mind to try to make his lies credible.

It could be a matter of timescales. He has a firm grasp on the senior judiciary but other parts take longer. The playbook is the same but the practical execution is different because, by definition, the landscape is different in the modern US compared to Germany.

[Provost Harrison]

If you want to argue that there are strong fascist elements within MAGA, I won't dispute you. If you want to argue that MAGA post-Trump will be quite dangerous, agreed--in fact, it will be considerably more dangerous if it isn't discredited, because Trump's idiocy is holding it back! If you want to tell me with a straight face that Trump personally has a realistic road map to absolute power, or that his addled brain has a firm belief in any political ideology whatever, I'm just going to . He likes people praising him. He likes giving noogies to people who were mean to him. He doesn't like rules getting in his way. That's it.

You're getting caught up in semantics. There is a sizeable body of evidence to suggest this is fascism. Trump is a senile old man but there is a cult of personality to all the apparatus behind him have to do is operate him like a puppet - and that is exactly what they do, because he is rather predictable and incredibly suggestible and venal.

It's about the patterns, not about the precise match of circumstances, and looking at their behaviour given the modern context of the US (much more pseudochristianity laid on for example) and this has been building since the end of WWII because the whole ultrapatriotism, religious zealotry have allowed a strategy to be tailored for the US.

[Elok]

Okay. So, assuming he isn't stopped, what's his road map to absolute power look like? How is he going to seize power? Nothing he has done yet has made him even slightly more secure. He's wasting political capital on various absurd stunts that please his base and hurt random people but don't get anything done, while alienating people on the street. SCOTUS has supported him in some ways, resisted him in others--it notably declined to back his stop the steal nonsense back in '20. He is extremely vulnerable to impeachment at this point, he's overtly broken plenty of laws and ignored longstanding norms now. Of course that might put Vance in power, which concerns me much more, as I said.

People are resistant to "fascist!" because it's been thrown at (I think) literally every Republican presidential candidate since GWB. Green Day sang "Sieg Heil to the President Gas-Man" more than twenty damn years ago. The sky has been falling forever. What you are offering is not a realistic assessment of the situation. I would like Trumpism defeated but first the people trying to defeat it have to have a clear-eyed notion of what they're up against. Instead they're busy LARPing le resistance. I am hopeful that Trump will, in the end, hang himself, provided he gets enough rope. We have already seen, in the last administration, that government-by-senile-puppet does not work well, and Trump isn't a good puppet. He keeps trying to have his own ideas, and doesn't listen to any one set of people consistently.

[Lorizael]

If you want to argue that there are strong fascist elements within MAGA, I won't dispute you.

I have made this argument repeatedly for years.

He likes people praising him. He likes giving noogies to people who were mean to him. He doesn't like rules getting in his way. That's it.

This one, too.

And together, these strike me as very bad, because they reinforce each other. Trump says, "Things aren't going exactly my way. That's unfair!" And his fascist henchmen say, "You're right, Mr. President. And here's a very stupid legal argument for why things should go your way!" And Trump responds, "Wow, that's great! I'm going to put you in charge of stuff and then repeat what you said on air in the most mangled fashion possible!" And his fascist henchmen say, "Cool, very cool. Now I'm gonna go do the fascist things, and when you say the fascist things I'm gonna do in a really stupid way, people will quibble over whether you really mean it because you're completely incoherent." And Trump says, "Bigly! MAGA!! Thank you for your attention to this matter."

[Lorizael]

Green Day sang "Sieg Heil to the President Gas-Man" more than twenty damn years ago. The sky has been falling forever.

W gave us DHS, ICE, and the Patriot Act, among other things, all of which are tools fascists are using right now to make life terrible for a lot of vulnerable people in this country. Also he killed a million Iraqis.

[Elok]

I am not disputing that Trump is doing awful things, or that he is eroding important norms. I am disputing that this could conceivably end in an actual authoritarian or totalitarian regime with him at its head. He is too stupid and cowardly to do anything effective; he's just setting the country on fire and accelerating our ruin. I do think we could see the collapse of democracy under a right-wing regime--say in 2035 or so, if our finances collapse in hyperinflation. But that's very speculative at this point and any number of things could happen in the meantime.

[Provost Harrison]

I am not disputing that Trump is doing awful things, or that he is eroding important norms. I am disputing that this could conceivably end in an actual authoritarian or totalitarian regime with him at its head. He is too stupid and cowardly to do anything effective; he's just setting the country on fire and accelerating our ruin. I do think we could see the collapse of democracy under a right-wing regime--say in 2035 or so, if our finances collapse in hyperinflation. But that's very speculative at this point and any number of things could happen in the meantime.

No one says the trajectory is identical. There is a huge element of conspiracy theory and other such nonsense that has got mingled in with it because of the radicalisation of those who are vulnerable to it. Doesn't make it any less dangerous though, just a lot more volatile. But repression is increasing like lobsters in a slowly boiling pot. It's a pace that probably still feels geological but that's kind of the point, normalise and move on.

[Elok]

The '28 election is three years and one month away, if he even lasts that long. He doesn't have anything like geological time to work with. Not an historian, but I know America has had presidents abusing their power, sometimes in horrifying ways, since basically the beginning (Alien and Sedition Acts), and democracy has recovered. We recovered, and were stronger after, from a literal civil war. MAGA is awful, but this is not a fascist takeover. It's more just an inept old man who cosplays as a Fuhrer for Likes. Which, again, is undeniably quite bad, but keep some perspective.

[Lorizael]

I do think we could see the collapse of democracy under a right-wing regime--say in 2035 or so...

I think that would be bad.

[The Mad Monk]

I've said it before, Trump isn't a Fascist, he lacks the core competencies.

However, we are a country of talented people. It won't take long to find someone competent enough.

I think Hegseth's (is that how that's spelled? I can't be bothered to look it up) speech to every damn senior officer was a ham handed attempt to purge the ranks by offending all the decent ones into resigning.

[Elok]

I think that would be bad.

Yes, but the financial collapse would be pulling a lot of the weight here; effective totalitarian takeovers seem to require a very high level of social or economic dysfunction, way higher than ours, so my frets about fuhrers are much farther down the road (how far might change depending how badly Trump's ineptitude screws us). We're still the richest country in the world and most of us don't want to get off the couch. Of course you've heard me say as much before. We have a longstanding argument about this, where I point at long-term trends and you say the immediate problem is more important. That, I think, is still the case here. Probably we'll never close the gap.

[Bereta_Eder]

How is richness calculated?

every country has its myths but the US seems to have more than avergae (Greece remains the top dog on this of course)


howver we have a self deprimant facet that shames even the british however is there such a thing in the US?

I find it stupefying to hear such statements

[Bereta_Eder]

I mean I could never feel "pride" for elon musk but I can feel a sort of commie /danish pride in collective achievements in the way society functions and supports its members as a whole.
Do americans feel pride beause mayube they have the most billionaires (maybe). what about not giving its people what is rightfully theirs?

I don't know, I find this way of measuring things bizzare.

[Bereta_Eder]

I've said it before, Trump isn't a Fascist, he lacks the core competencies.

However, we are a country of talented people. It won't take long to find someone competent enough.

I think Hegseth's (is that how that's spelled? I can't be bothered to look it up) speech to every damn senior officer was a ham handed attempt to purge the ranks by offending all the decent ones into resigning.

He doesn't lack the necessairy attributes. not all nazis wanted to exectue jews upon noticing them. there was a gradual descent to madness.

maybe he is perceived as more of a clown/incompetent than a fascist, and it is beyond certain that he will fail eventually

I mean if not, and people actually support him, then we're talking about the end of an era.

it reminds me of the (far) left wing era in Greece during the debt crisis. It went away with the debt crisis. don't know what crisis the US is going through)