One of the arguments that has been made against calling Trump a fascist is that there is a perceived lack of ideological framework. Trump, despite his best-selling books, is not a writer. I will readily allow that the ghostwritten Art of the Deal is no Mein Kampf nor Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. But I think it is a mistake to assume that the leader has to also be the chief ideologist. Trump himself clearly has beliefs about national power, race/ethnicity, gender roles, and power that form a sort of nascent ideological position.
Yes, a lot of it is incoherent, and he is hardly a deep thinker.* And while I think that age is catching up with him, I continue to think dementia is less explanatory than is the simple fact that he is an undisciplined, vain, and visceral person. I think it should be taken into account that he was born into privilege and often has failed upward. His ego means that he can pretend whatever he says matters and there is now no one who can tell him he has no clothes. He is, after all, President of the United States, and he is constantly praised by adoring fans on television, online, and whenever he wants, crowds of fans. He gets praise from world leaders. Look! A worthless, but cleverly fawning Nobel Peace Prize nomination!
I think that his ramblings and stupid statements are as much the consequences of a shallow intellect, an undisciplined mind, and an atmosphere of constant adulation as it is age.
But I digress.
Trump, again, is not going to produce the kinds of ideological clarity that Hitler and Lenin did, for example. But that does not mean we aren’t seeing significant ideological developments in this administration.
One clear example is the question of citizenship. Trump’s Executive Order that attempts to redefine birthright citizenship is part of a broad attempt to redefine who an American is. In that vein, we have Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, who is making speeches that cleave to a culture and ethnicity-based vision of what it means to be American.
Via TPM: JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others.
“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.
He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”
By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.
If one rejects the notion that we are a creedal nation (i.e., one based on ideas rather than ethnicity and bloodline), then one has to pick another basis, hence the reference to “ancestors.” Once one starts down this road, we will find ourselves talking about people groups (race/ethnicity) and “culture” rather than creedal statements like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” “e plubibus unum,” and “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” among others.
And for anyone who thinks this is some new concern, I have cooked up out of TDS, please note this post from 2007 (that’s getting on to decades ago, in case that fact escapes notice): Buchanan and “White America.”
The “Who is American?” puzzle piece is a major one.
A related puzzle piece is the expansion of ICE and immigration enforcement noted in today’s tab-clearing post. As TPM reported:
All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council and TPM’s own read of the legislation. ICE, responsible for enforcement, detentions, and removals, will oversee much of the spending.
The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.
Note that the gutting of USAID resulted in spending cuts of around $60 billion. And with this consequence, as per NPR: Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump aid cuts.
It is a plain ideological choice to determine that saving lives globally is not worth spending these dollars, but spending far more than that amount on arresting middle-aged women, gardeners, and day laborers.
They can tell us that they are just rounding up violent criminals and enhancing public safety, and many Americans will believe them. But what they are plainly doing is applying a specific ideological framework to immigrants (with exceptions made to those of a certain hue) and in an attempt to redefine what a “real” American is. I would note, too, that removing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of persons is just a means to make it easier to round them up and send them to places like Alligator Alcatraz via the security apparatus that Congress just funded.
Empowering masked agents who target ethnic groups using fear as a tactic so that they can be sent to camps with diminished or absent due process–what does that sound like to you, dear reader?
Speaking of ideological puzzle pieces, the accusations that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats, as propagated by Trump and Vance, were part of a white nationalist ideology. Lying about immigrants to make them sound weird, if not fully outside the norms of a host country, is classic fascism.
On the subject of race and our past, there was this story from a few weeks ago. The NYT reported, A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.
Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
[…]
But the question of how officials should respond to Mr. Damsky — who, in an interview, said that referring to him as a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong” — is not merely academic.
It is worth noting that the professor for the course, John L. Badalamenti, is a sitting federal judge.
There is a lot that could be said about this story, but this post is already quite long. But while yes, tolerance and intelectual diversity are important values, but this is not just tolerance, it is extolling white supremacy, especially at this elite of a level. It is an unhealthy, concerning puzzle piece.
To add another puzzle piece, we are starting to get weird rumblings about labor.
For example, as noted in the Open Forum the other day.
Granted, it is unclear what she is suggesting, but it has a definitively ominous undertone. Not only is that number almost certainly wrong, even if it is, are we suggesting that the federal government is going to force specific persons into specific jobs? This raises a host of moral and logistical issues.
Of course, like with a lot of the immigration rhetoric, this is about trying to forge a specific unreality that gives the administration even more power (such as taking away medical insurance from millions).
And we get reactionary “intellectuals” (who have influence over Vance) tweeting things like this.
All of this makes an essay like this from Timothy Snyder sound ominous and concerning, when in a vacuum it might sound hyperbolic: Concentration Camp Labor.
Let me conclude with an observation about symbols. I continue to note that Trump and often cabinet members/administration types appear at official events wearing Trump-branded merch. This is essentially free advertising for Trump’s business, which is not only gross but almost certainly unconstitutional** (not that anyone cares). On an arguably more important level, he is continually branding the American Presidency as Trump, not as the United States. Symbols matter, and it is not only an example of personalization of the office, which is the hallmark of dictatorships, but it fits into the broader enterprise noted above that determines what a “real” American is. And from Trump’s own behavior, symbolism, and rhetoric,*** it is identification with him, not with America itself.
I would remind everyone that a key element of fascist politics is the division of the world into “us” and “them.”
*Yes, my gift for understatement rears its ugly head once more.
**Article II, Section 1, paragraph 7: “he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” Free advertising by US government officials is clearly an emolument.
***He recently said he “hate[s]” Democrats (and that they “hate our country”), and let’s not forget that he called J6 a “day of love” because the protestors were on his side.
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Author: Steven L. Taylor
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