The "Stop The Steal" movement and January 6th are/were obviously unconstitutional. Where we differ is that you don't think fascists can come to power via democratic processes, which is obviously incorrect.
In a prior post you said "[Trump] was legitimately elected in 2016 and he was no less fascist then."
As I see it, Trump can s*ck without actually being a fascist (see, Roger Griffin, below).
I think we agree that Trump s*cks. I think we may disagree somewhat on what the term "fascist" means.
>>>At that point [December 2015], the Muslim ban proposal, I
contacted five fascism experts and asked them if Trump qualified.
They all said no. Every one of them stated that to be a fascist, one must support the revolutionary, usually violent overthrow of the entire government/Constitution, and reject democracy entirely. In 2015, none were comfortable saying Trump went that far. He was too individualist for the inherently collectivist philosophy of fascism, and not sufficiently committed to the belief that violence is good for its own sake, as a vital cleansing force. Roger Griffin, the author of
The Nature of Fascism and a professor of history at Oxford Brookes University, summed it up well: “
You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist.” . . . Five years have now passed . . .
So I reached out to the experts I talked to back then. Four of the five replied, and I also got in touch with a few more scholars who have researched fascism to get a broader view.
The responses were, again, unanimous, albeit tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies.
No one thinks Trump is a fascist leader, full stop. . . .
[Roger Griffin] Basically, I think it matters whether we call Trump fascist or not fascist, not academically or intellectually, but because it’s a red herring — it actually diverts attention from where we should be doing the critique. If all our intellectual energies are, like Don Quixote, jousting with windmills and fascism, instead of actually jousting with the real enemies of democracy, and using our energies to avert the climate crisis, which is going to engulf us all, if we’re not careful, then we’re wasting our time.<<<(emphasis added)
Call him a kleptocrat, an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he doesn’t quite fit the definition of a fascist.
www.vox.com
The Vox article above was written in 2020. The following was written shortly after January 6. The responses were more varied. Some thought Trump crossed the line, others still didn't think Trump qualified.
The debate over whether to call Donald Trump a fascist, and why it matters.
www.vox.com
