This is how fascism comes to America

[PC2]

Ok, I admit. I laughed a little. Then I threw up a bit in my mouth when I realised you werent being sarcastic. You have one of the most advanced and prosperous military industrial complexes in the world, I will give you that. The rest of your country is about one step short of being a festering shithole because of it. Your education system is aweful. Your political system is practically a circus. Your healthcare system is terrible. You have cities where the cops will actually tell you to run the lights and not stop beccause your life will be at risk if you do......... If you bothered spending even a fraction of what you dump into keeping your military aparatus going into actually improving your country, you would have been a freaking utopia by now, insead of a country that literally would stop properly functioning if it wasnt in a constant state of war or preparation for war.

I think we're doing good with productivity here, and yeah we'll need a strong military to help with industrial and technological advantages. I don't get why you are so negative about it. We constantly learn from past mistakes, no point in dwelling.

[Bollocks]

Reading this, and thinking of all the other hate Trump gets, I wonder... DO the people shelling out the hate realize they sound EXACTLY like the folks who equated Obama to some Commie Dictator?

Irony is fun.

Have you seen the actual policies that Trump proposed? Have you seen the way he has ascended to power? If you have take that and compare it to Fujimori or Goni by that matter.

- - - Updated - - -

The moment someone uses the name "Hitler", "fascism", or any of its derivatives to describe a political candidate, I immediately stop reading what they have to say. It's the most baseless and overused argument I've ever seen and it pretty much means that the accuser has nothing else to stand on. Moving on...

Read the entire article. At most its going to take you 1 minute of your life.

[Blayze]

Americans. You finally have a chance at a president too rich to need to be bought. Your political system brought this upon you.

[Hooked]

Americans. You finally have a chance at a president too rich to need to be bought. Your political system brought this upon you.

Yeah that's a good thing, Trump is going to put them all in jail.

[Nadiru]

Read the entire article. At most its going to take you 1 minute of your life.

I did. It took three minutes of my life, and I want a refund for reading that drivel. It's weird, Kagan's usually much more lucid than this. I guess his paymasters at the GOP have told him to push something anti-Trump out right now.

[mvaliz]

Americans. You finally have a chance at a president too rich to need to be bought. Your political system brought this upon you.

Too rich to be bought!? Please tell me there Skippy, exactly how is he making these billions? That's correct: through business contracts HE CURRENTLY HAS with many MANY other companies! Do you think, for one second, Donald Trump is going to act NOT in the interest of the hundreds, if not thousands, of companies he and his various businesses deal with!? The Monsanto's who produce food for his hotel chains? The factories that produce his clothing and provide the textiles? The construction contractors whom built his buildings and ship his materials? The casino machine operators who built the machines that sap the life out of his hotel guests? The Mayors and Governors who's palms he greased to get his hotel chains in to where he wanted them? The VERY same person who was greasing Hillary Clinton's palm when Romney was running??

Are people seriously that stupid to not understand how a Businessman works??? Somebody too rich has ALREADY BEEN BOUGHT BY DEFINITION!

[Bryntrollian]

Trump isn't a fascist you guys...

[Kaleredar]

Your saying Trump's ideas or implementations are bad, which is fine. My point is that some of the general ideas really do have good logic behind them regardless of Trump. Such as using profile statistics in airport policy or migration discrimination against Islamists and people who think gays should be executed.

Yeah, his ideas are bad and don't treat the problems he's pretending they do.

I said this before.

It's like a politician who says "gee the drought in California is really a problem" and then follows it up with "so we should fire guns into the sky to scare the rain out of the clouds!"

Then, sane, rational people say "that's moronic, not only will that not make it rain, it's extremely dangerous and will cause completely new problems"


Then the politician's supporters come out of the woodwork and say "Well then you must LOVE drought! Don't you know that the drought is a PROBLEM!? All he was trying to do is make it rain, HOW DARE YOU WANT US TO DIE OF DEHYDRATION?!"

Ignoring the fact that at no point was a logical solution provided to the issue at hand.


Putting Muslims on a watch list? Not going to stop terrorism. What DOES it do? Create a dangerous precedent allowing the government to track people based on religious beliefs, in addition to further scapegoating people that have absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Building a big-ass wall? It won't stop illegal immigrants, requires the federal government to take land from private citizens, and costs an ungodly amount of money.


So if none of these things actually accomplish anything, why did Trump propose them?

I refer you to chest-thumping overcompensating fear-mongering politics.


Trump asks his supporters to insult their own intelligence to vote for him. Which is why he doesn't have my vote.

ok, would Europe serve as a case study? Like say Sweden, and U.K.? Muslims do not fit well with western ideas, even after second gen. Only the third gen. shows accpetance of western values. Problem now is, First gen. outnumbers third gen, and going to outnumber them even more. Another issue is, what countries muslims are from. For example, even the educated wealthy pakistani muslims keep traditional muslim values.

I think Muslims in the US are a better case study for how Muslims act in the US than some cherry-picked, stitled statistics from other countries.

And no, Muslims in the US do not commit disproportionate amounts of crime.

[Slant]

Is it possible to apply Godwin's Law when the thread title and author of the article is heading there to begin with?

Nah, when the thread itself is all about that topic, Godwin doesn't apply.

[Super Kami Dende]

I believe Hillary would bring more Facism than Trump ever would.

[Slant]

I believe Hillary would bring more Facism than Trump ever would.

I think the word fascism is used in an inflationairy manner here... :P

[Pengalor]

And what exactly has Trump done to convince you that it's reasonable to expect him to govern strictly within the existing (vast) bounds of the Executive Branch?

What exactly makes you think he can do otherwise? I mean, in order to completely circumvent the democratic process he would require either violence on a wide scale or deep-seated corruption (from all sides, we're talking Mexico or Russia levels of corruption). You really think he's just going to be able to walk into the Oval Office, say "you have to do whatever I say now", and it'll just be so? I'm not sure what kind of evil mastermind you think he is but if he wants to actually have complete control he'll have to get his hands dirty and that would cause a massive stir.

[nextormento]

Actual fascist regimes are in the memory of living people. Young people even. The article is using a very triggering word to simply describe "things they don't like". This trivialization of Lived Experiences is impeding healing.
Help me fight this desperate and hateful rhetoric by making #ISurvivedFascism trend.

[Deleted]

Fascism is such an overused term it lost pretty much all meaning.

[Ravenblade]

What Mussolini and Franco did was actually fascism in its purest form. Hitler added his own touch by salting it with unfettered supremacism. However I don't believe Trump is a fascist per se, that is not to say some of his fanatic supporters or believers aren't. Historically the leader itself only maintains a certain fuel level, the fires that burn from it, the flames and their intensity, that is usually much more fierce and embroiling.

Chances are that Trump has started something he has barely any control over and where the level of disappointment - once his fiction meets reality, if elected to office that is - might be so colossal that anyone following him might be much worse and make Trump look like Ghandi in comparison. That is the problem with extremism in general and finds its allegoric mirror in Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice. The leader is forced to deliver and since politics has a way of making even the most ambitious man or woman trip over the carefully laid contraptions and spider webs that are the intricacies of the predecessor's political establishment failure and fabric softening in office are more common. Just look at Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Ambitious as he was, the time in office has softened the edges and made him drift towards stances he would furiously attack while he was still up for election.

Hillary Clinton knows the ins and outs of politics, she's a no-promise, no-gains choice for people who prefer a status quo, quite literally and more often than not that can be more substantial than any promises populists like Trump would like to make. Remember, even Bismarck knew that politics is the art of possible and the attainable.

I do not like Hillary Clinton myself since she's a principle hopper and ice-cold career politician but Trump's confetti parade of crazy statements and positions appeal to all kinds of people's resentments and emotions, it's not him, it's the people who feel their hearts being spoken to in napoleonic manner who are a problem. He's most certainly not a fascist but definitely a seditionist.

[Deleted]

Trump cannot be "Fascist".

One of the main points of Fascism is that the Man purpose was to further the goals of his Nation with his own actions.
Without that salt of socialism it cannot be Fascism.

[Independent voter]

Hyperbole.

Fascism involves believing your people are superior to other peoples genetically, that your people are more evolved than others.

If you're willing to vote for Trump he'd be more than happy to call you his own, no matter what your origins were.

[Spectral]

No. (If you weren't going to read the OP's post, but instead just leap to a kneejerk defense of Trump you could at least have the decency to admit that's what you're doing. Then again, you made it pretty clear.)

As the OP quoted, "This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who singlehandedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic."

This is offered up as a clear definition of fascism, not mere snarl-wording. Like it or not, Trumpism does clearly echo earlier 20th Century fascist movements, and the similarities should be troubling - and Trump's supporters should be at least willing to address them.

When you incorrectly dismiss the case out of hand, you are doing exactly what you accuse Trump's critics of doing - putting an (inaccurate) label on something, so that you can avoid the discomfort of having to think about what has been said.

There's a lot of text here, but not actually a real argument to address. The chunk that you quoted doesn't refute my point, it reinforces it. I don't really know how you could say otherwise. The author's argument is really pretty incoherent - he may as well have wrote, "I can't define a fascist, but I know one when I see one".

If the claim, as it seems to be, is that Trump has no coherent policy proposals is the defining factor, that's just plainly wrong - one can go to Trump's website and plainly see his proposed tax brackets, immigration policy, and spending plans outlined (I'm confident they don't make good economic sense, but they do exist).

[Ghostpanther]

Trump isn't a fascist by virtue of the fact that he needs to have a platform first.

Lol! He has a platform, it just happens to be one the left hate and some of the old guard GOP who feel their influence matters little now.

[Deleted]

I don't know about other people but I'm gonna vote for Trump because he's against illegal immigration, amnesty and critical of Globalism and Free Trade.

Also wants to lower my taxes \o/.

Guess that makes me a fascist. Oh well, too bad.