For instance in the Beto O'Rouke and Ted Cruz debate Beto brought up the things Trump said about Cruz, his wife and dad, and now Cruz supports Trump. Cruz turned it around and said he he put hurt feelings aside because he has a job to do for the people of Texas. The conversation ended with Cruz putting a positive spin on it...Their should be commercials and billboards everywhere that say "If Ted won't stand up for his own wife or dad what makes you think he will stand up for you."...Its not about mud slinging. It's about holding him accountable to his lack of integrity and not allowing him to simply lie his way out of it. - Excellent!
gunballs, agree. It's the rhetoric that lends to suggesting Trump one would have a fascist government if he had the means and capability to create one.
Trump's constant lies are an attack on the truth, of reality, which seems both Paxton and Stanley agree is a prime fascist technique. It's sure been a real Trump favorite throughout his adult life. And there is a difference between seeing problems in institutions without condemning them outright as Trump does. He does that to endear himself to his base by feeding the deep mistrust many of them already have of government. It puts him on their side and feeds the false image of himself as an outsider when in fact he has been a consummate insider since the day he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. In all ways he is into creating a reality that doesn't actually exist.
His vilifying of immigrants - non-whites - by, for instance, calling Mexicans rapists and criminals is pure fascist rhetoric. Toss in his Muslim ban. And his pandering to white far-right Nazi types which he would have as his own brown-shirt brigade if he could organize it. At least i think he would if he could.
His demonizing of democratic institutions as the judiciary, the media, American intelligence agencies. Of fellow politicians on all sides, and so on. Basically all who disagree with him he could see as a deadly enemy one day. Trump plays the victim card as Liberace played the piano.
There's Trump's ultra-nationalist push too. Up military spending when it's already more than the next five biggest spenders put together. Whatever it is. It's all about MAGA. Again. What does that mean.
I have a heap of other articles saved. In one of them i think an author posits Paxton's position as basically that a fascist isn't one until he has been successful. Meaning i think until he actually has a fascist administration, though i haven't been able to find a Paxton quote close to it. I think the author takes it from Paxton's five stages
Fascism
Paxton has focused his work on exploring models and definition of fascism.
In his 1998 paper "The Five Stages of Fascism," he suggests that fascism cannot be defined solely by its ideology, since fascism is a complex political phenomenon rather than a relatively coherent body of doctrine like communism or socialism. Instead, he focuses on fascism's political context and functional development. The article identifies five paradigmatic stages of a fascist movement, although he notes that only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy progressed through all five:
1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power
4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.
5. Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.[12]
In his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton refines his five-stage model and puts forward the following definition for fascism:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Paxton#Fascism
toward a fascist government which i haven't altogether got my head around yet.
Sorry, the above feels messy. My mind spends a lot of time running circles around itself, Certainty is elusive. Still the struggle to understand is an interesting one.
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