re: #242 Sic semper evello dildos tyrannis

Honestly, I dislike the “he’s like dictator X” comparisons because they ignore how Trump is simply an especially lumpy manifestation of what’s been hanging about in US politics for ages. Most of his ideas and patter are not borrowings from other places, but the same dank memes that US conservatives have been using for ages. Seriously—make a checklist of Trumpian horseshit and try and find an idea that hasn’t been comfortably seated in GOP rhetoric for the last four decades.

Nothing he says is new. He’s just presenting it in a more simplistic, more melodramatic package. No big words, no justifications…we’re the best, we’re going to do what we want, the people we’re angry at deserve anything we do to them.

He’s not winning a contest of political philosophies, he’s winning at manipulating the ethos. This is why Trump makes us think of dictators, and Hitler, in particular. Autocrats—be they dictators or monarchs—do not work solely in the medium of political ideology. They either appropriate the existing culture or create new cultural structures to justify their dominance.

In other words, fascism will come to America in a WWE costume and wearing The Hair. History isn’t going to exactly repeat itself, but it does have a tendency to rhyme, and Trump’s flirting with fascist tendencies is getting dangerous. The targets have to be adapted to US circumstances, so its vs. Mexicans and Muslims instead of vs. the Jews.

GOP rhetoric has been steadily getting more extreme and overheated for the last 40 years. Soft versions of eliminationist rhetoric are getting into the GOP mainstream, and the hard stuff is all over the GOP fringes.

IMO the single most important threshold for getting into real fascism is acceptance of scapegoating as a solution to political problems. The US is not at that point yet, but the Republican party is working quite diligently to change that.