The Rise of Fascism in the US.

Part 1.

As I said I am getting Angry that so many of our American cousins are being conned by Donald Trump that he is the savior, messiah, the chosen one to fix all of the problems that face America. I am getting Angry that so many of those who should know better support a wannabe dictator who openly plans to upend the constitution and seek retribution on his political rivals. People need to understand that Trumps plan is to install himself as dictator and ruler of the US and is using the Fascist Playbook.

Fascism is a political ideology that is based on 8 foundational elements according to author Jason Stanley. This is where we will start, talking about Fascism and how Trump is using the Authoritarian playbook to subvert US democracy.

These elements for fascism are: A Mythic Past, Propaganda, Anti –intellectual, Hierarchy, Victimhood, Law and Order, and Sexual Anxiety. To that I would add one more element for Fascism to succeed and that is the use of Violence.

So what is meant by a Mythic Past? It takes the idea that in the past things were much better than today. Often we hear talking about times like the 50’s, 60’s as the mythic past to when the US was last great. Really and what about Vietnam, the assassination of two Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King, do they forget that? What of segregationist policies in the South or the rise of the KKK? How about the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis. The mythical past often is meant to disguise what the past was about, women not having rights like access to abortion, LGBTQ individuals were in the closet not doing Drag Queen Story Hour, Black History did not exist to them and the Confederacy was about Southern rights, like the right to own other human beings due to the color of their skin, the right to slavery.

While some people might talk about the mythical past with the fondness of a long-running episode of Leave it to Beaver, Fascism wants to focus on burying the rights of women, blacks, minorities and LGBTQ individuals to meet its own agenda of domination of the population as a whole.

Trump uses this idea in order to spread threats about how bad America now is and that only he can fix America and Make it Great Again, a phrase first used by Ronald Reagan. Trump uses the idea of the Mythical Past as a way to demonize groups, be them women, minorities, LGBTQ or his favorite target Immigrants, who Trump has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”, even though he married two immigrants. In his opinion immigrants are ruining America as they are bringing crime, drugs and rape into the US. Yet Trump seems to have no problem with White Supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, taking America back into a time where bigotry and racism were not talked about.

The second element is Propaganda and few understand this better than Joseph Goebbels who was Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” 

No President has challenged the peaceful transfer of power in the United States until Trump came along claiming that the election was rigged. He along with his myriad of lawyers and sycophants challenged the results in over 60 court actions and failed. Trump claimed to everyone that the election was stolen with massive voter fraud, but so far all the voter fraud that was found has been primarily done by MAGA Republicans, not democrats or immigrants.

This culminated in the events of January 6, 2021 where Trump incited, encouraged, motivated his supported in a speech to fight like hell and to stop the steal with absolutely no evidence of it. Even firms that were hired by the Trump team to find fraud like the CyberNinjas found no fraud and even found more votes for Biden.

This Steal conspiracy still continues and Trump mentions it at every opportunity. He is a master of deflection through chaos and by entertaining every conspiracy theory that comes out; no matter how crazy it appears because his base so badly wants to believe his BS or propaganda.

If you have not read the book 1984 by George Orwell then you should as the words of Goebbels reminds me of the basis of double speak. Like Goebbels, Trump believes that the truth is his mortal enemy and his administration coined the phrase “alternative facts” at the onset to combat the truth. In a second term he plans to take greater control of the media by controlling the licensing of networks through the White House not the Federal Communications Commission which is supposed to be independent and unbiased.

Trump hits these first two or the eight check boxes of a wannabe Fascist dictator and next blog I will discuss Anti-Intellectual and Hierarchy. Anti-intellectual is the attack on science via politics, remember Trump and the experts on Covid and his attacks on science. When I refer to a Hierarchy it is ideology based on a person’s race or religious faith, and that is what determines where a person is in society and Trump is very vocal with his opinion of immigrants who are not white or Christian.