They wanted someone that would do what they wanted done without having to be controlled, and they got that with more to come. They got what they wanted. 1) The mental illnesses attendant on power are close enough to dementia that neither kind of affliction changes the label on the political setup. Lots of fascists become demented after a term in power, much as monarchists and communists do, and Trump has been in power to some degree for most of his adult life: that doesn't change the label on governing ideology. 2) Fascists are fuckups. These allegedly "responsible" Republicans had no control of Reagan or Cheney, either - whether they had control over H or W is debatable. Did they want control? Didn't matter. For their own safety they should have thought of that in advance, but as a secondary concern - their suddenly recognized lack of control over the Republican voting base they created is their central problem. Apparently after decades of repetition they believed their own schtick, and actually thought that anything in the horse barn was a horse - by the time they had the saddle cinched on the striped fur and the reins untangled from the whiskers and claws their future had taken on a certain inevitability. A decent liberal arts education might have come in handy - that always includes Machiavelli, who might have chocked their mental wheels before the slide into the ditch. At least they would have had a better chance of taking warning from Iran/Contra and the S&L debacle, for example, (speaking of out of control). Trump as President is absolutely something the fascists who took over the Republican Party created, along with his voting base - he's no more an aberration than Reagan or W. They spent decades of effort and billions of dollars creating Trump's voting base, deliberately and on purpose. They bought entire networks of radio stations, set up their own TV and cable operations, financed entire book and magazine publishing corporations and subsidiaries as mere auxiliary wings of an industry of support for wingnut intellectuals and media reps, all to arrange a media setup, voting base, and Party leadership, for the next Reagan. Trump fit like a glove. Trump is a mainstream, Party center, middle-of-the-road Republican. Trump=Republican, Republican=Trump. That was the standard take on Reagan, until too late. They were certainly not jokes - they and their fellow travelers were and are the intellectual shock troops of the fascist domination of US politics, as it expanded from its base in the Republican Party. Limbaugh earned his "majority maker" award, presented by the reps of a grateful and newly elected Republican House majority twenty five years ago; he earned it on merit. They were serious. That's how they won.
Yes, I'm aware of that. Also the tempering with voting machines, rolls, districts, suppression, etc. Also that time is dunning out for organized anything. So, how does the fascist ideology fit with the present chaos?
? Joke? How does the deliberate breakdown of law and destruction of legal governance over capitalist corporate power fit into a fascist takeover of representative government? You are asking that question seriously?
I am asking it seriously. What is the ideal being promoted - explicitly? It's not as if the capitalist corporate power hadn't got control of governance already. It's not as if democracy had been functioning at anything close to its ideal. It's not as if government had been "representative" of the polity up to this moment. So, what is to be gained by destroying the facade behind which they've been operating so successfully for so long?
I have no idea what you are asking about. "Ideal"? Who said anything about an ideal? Chaos creation is historically, stereotypically, and now visibly in the US, a fascist political tactic. It creates fear, dependency, contempt for legitimate government, and so forth. It's how they roll, and always have. Power and money for the mob boss, his familia, and all of their friends. For starters. Yes, it is. Major aspects of the New Deal remain in place, elections still stand between the CEOs and the means of State violence, taxes on the wealthy are not zero, many laws still apply to them and are enforced, etc etc.
You keep talking about an "ideology" . I'm asking: What is idea in the center of this ology? Every ism has a central tenet, a philosophical basis, a guiding principle. That is a mere tactic, in a larger strategy, in the service an over-arching purpose. What is that ultimate purpose? Yes, we know how tactics work. That is not ideology. That is a unit of social organization; in you example, for the service of simple greed. So, again -- how does the ism of fascism fit into the present American society-scape?
So we have ideology - normally an entire suite of coordinated ideas, none of them predominant, acting as a coherent guide for governance and public commitment to principle. As I have noted repeatedly, fascism in general probably doesn't technically "have" one of those - since all ideological rhetoric or claims by fascists comprise propaganda and/or bullshit rather than guidelines for governance or commitments to principle. But one can recognize the plausibility of another interpretation: that fascism has many ideologies, mutually contradictory, kept on hand for their usefulness in various circumstances. Then we have "ideal", apparently singular, which is a bit vague - am I supposed to assume all ideologies have an ideal? That seems dubious. At any rate the US Republican Party has no ideals I can see - whether or not it has an ideology I leave to your taxonomic preference. In my taxonomy, it doesn't. And finally this notion of an "idea", again singular, that one is supposed to find in the "center" of some ideology the US Republican Party is assumed to have. Now the Republican Party does occasionally and with no little pride in the accomplishment flaunt its possession of ideas - that the Presidency is a bully pirate nest, that the President is accountable to nobody, that might makes right, that the best way to elicit rational behavior and good citizenship from the rich is to unburden them from Federal taxation, that wealth and power indicate merit and earned entitlement, that everybody acts and talks like them or wants to, that there's a sucker born every minute, and so forth. But these are not central ideas in an ideology. More or less my take, yep. Already noted: "Power and money for the mob boss, his familia, and all of their friends. ". It fits the Republican Party-scape. It's the ordinary, classic, traditional, name for the way that political Party behaves and justifies its behavior. Mussolini came up with the name, and it stuck - one needs names for these things, after all. There's no point in overthinking the US Republican Party. The Republicans aren't. The simplest take, and the best supported by evidence etc, is that it is in fact what it looks and acts and talks like - a fascist political Party.
Of course it does. The single, central ideal is "purity". That can be ethno-racial (obviously not the US, which is why the white supremacists are only ever marginal to the conservative machinery) religious or moral purity; in any case, it's about a group identity set up as the human ideal - the pinnacle of creation. The state is the designated repository and guardian of the group's moral identity. (Hence all conservative parties' touting of 'values' - christian, family, patriotic, natural-order, social hierarchy - whatever.) Fascists go beyond conservatives in adding aspiration to the identity/values: master race, White man's burden, manifest destiny, jihad... The rhetoric is merely external. The underlying principle is a mythical uniquely American identity which must be preserved; must be defended from external attack and internal degradation. (Make America Great Again). The guidelines for governance are: - those in charge deserve to be in charge (we won big, it was the most perfect win ever); - they'll protect you from outsiders (kill em all, let God sort em out) - nominal empowerment of the loyal cadres (don't give up your guns or they'll take your cows) - disenfranchisement of opposing factions (kneecapping trade unions and constitutional safeguards of minority rights, gerymandering) - central control of administration and finance (wealth concentration) - rewriting the law to enforce the central authority (stuffing SCOTUS afap) - a big, disciplined, loyal military apparatus. (throw money at generals) While these aspects of the fascist state appeal to the very conservative, they don't always serve the interests of trade, commerce and banking. To put the machinery at the service of big money, you have to hollow it out: keep the propaganda and slogans (Trump is good at yelling the slogans); keep the accoutrements and methodology, but remove the central values. That's not an Ism; that's a bag of tricks. Hence the definition, yes. Not in reality - at least, not since it was gutted by its financial supporters. In the minds of its old adherents, the conservative ideal was more or less the Puritan one: church, family, country, hard work, obedience to authority, law and order. (Even earlier, it was liberty, equality and democracy - but who remembers that far back?) Funnily enough, it seems to me the GOP came nearest to actual fascism right after beating it: Truman-Eisenhower era. For some 40 years back, the central idea [purpose] of the puppeteers behind conservatism has been trickle-up-economics; in the last ten years, what with climate change and other bad shit coming down the pipeline, it's been accelerated to feeding frenzy. But this is because it's not a political party anymore. The Democrats, in spite of many cop-outs and sell-outs, still behave like a political party - internecine conflict, arguments, factions, diverse voter bases, platforms, plans and concepts of governance. Republicans are wearing their party like a mere garment: a bear-skin to disguise a pack of hyenas. It has the appearance, but not the substance: Fascism is an economic system in which the government controls the private entities that own the factors of production. The four factors are entrepreneurship, capital goods, natural resources, and labor. A central planning authority directs company leaders to work in the national interest. These capitalists have no national interest. This money is borderless and directionless: its only function is to grow. Kinda like... what's that disease again? He also unified Italy and established central control over its economy. GOP does the opposite. Trump does some a lot of disrupting, and bullying and self-praising, but no purposeful, concerted directing. If you don't worry too much about the meaning of words... But they do. They have, for many years, expertly altered the public vernacular; subverted and perverted meaning, making discourse perilous at best, and even sequential thought, problematic.
The GOP does not do the opposite. And the question was one of political tactics, strategy, agenda, "ideology" in a sense, etc - not specific outcome. Trump is unlikely to try to re-establish the Roman Empire, either. ? Taking fascist rhetoric at face value is not a reasonable approach to analysis - as with Trump now, a focus on behavior prevents many confusions. Meanwhile, "purity" has not been all that centrally featured (or idealistically promoted) in many fascist regimes (Paraguay, Spain, Chile, Argentina, - - - the Americas and SE Asia overall). White supremacists are central to the US fascist machinery, the single most important component of the Republican voting base. They are the farthest from "marginal" of any faction in US politics. Yet another stereotypical fascist characteristic the modern GOP shares with well-known fascist governments elsewhere. I've seen this reliance on sophisticated propaganda, especially of the Big Lie kind, proposed as an identifying feature of fascist government. You don't present one. The immediate resort to "ideal" rather than ideology, the invocation of "principles" and similar irrelevancies, followed by a list of power grab tactics and standard rhetorical gambits, highlights this absence. Fascism doesn't have an ideology in any strict sense - one can see a sort of meta-ideological approach in the propaganda, which borrows from the ideologies of anything and anybody without regard for coherence or consistency, but fascists have little interest in governance itself or how best to engage in it. Trickle down, you mean. And in fascist hands it's rhetorical only, part of the propaganda barrage - the only "idea" involved is tax cuts for the capos. More rhetoric, retracted and redeployed as expedient. Trump has no more interest in American identity, mythical or otherwise, than a bullfrog. Richard Cheney, Charles Koch, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Robert Mercer, Michael Steele, Sheldon Adelson, Jerry Falwell, Rupert Murdoch - none of the Party leadership, media, religious support, or financial backing, acts according to any such principle. Fascists indeed depend largely on a bag of tricks for seizing and holding wealth and power. Like the other organized criminal operations at the lower levels of the hierarchy it tops, fascist governance has essentially no intellectual depth or intellectual sophistication, no theory or encompassing worldview - fascist governance is mind-numbingly brutal and crude and shallow and simplistic.
Last I heard, the opposite of uniting was dividing. The GOP has been doing that. That's the question you addressed; it's not the one I asked. It wasn't an anlysis; it was a statement of central ideal, as defined in the philosophy of an "ism". With trump, every ideology is irrelevant. he picks fights, throws hissy-fits and seeks revenge. If so, you've just re-established racial/ethnic purity at the center of American fascism. Oh. I thought I'd laid it out quite clearly. Why would I mean that??? If you've been paying attention over the last 40 years, you know that wealth and power have been steadily trickling upward. That flow has increased over time and been accelerated by the last few power-grabs. Thus, it is simple graft, not an ideology. My problem with you calling it that is the confusion. It's tempting to see repeating pattern, but when one does that, one can lose sight of the actual process, which may be far more simple and straightforward than a philosophical label. But you will have your label, and I will stop challenging your use of it.
Ok, full circle accomplished. You have been reading my posts. The GOP is acting as fascist political parties and movements throughout history have acted and act now - including isolating and slandering and threatening prominent groups and individuals it has designated its enemies ("them"), while organizing its friends (those safe from being threatened and abused, "us") around blind loyalty above all. You are the one who referred to that behavior (when engaged in by the well-known fascist governments of record) as unifying. There is no particular coherent philosophy or central ideal in fascism, any more than there is in organized crime generally. Which is why serious analysis focuses on behavior, (the composition and use of the propaganda rather than its intellectual content, say) and opposition to fascism that relies on such liberal humanist specialties as rhetoric or argument gets blown away. Identity is not purity. Supremacism is not purity. Behavior, not rhetoric, determines what has been "established". Our boy is indeed a stereotypical fascist demagogue, albeit one lacking a personal base among the military command. You mean like this? Perhaps you could be more informative, or precise, about what exactly confuses you in that kind of posting - the intention (and response motivation) there was to justify identifying the political movement now embodied in (although not restricted to) the US Republican Party and its predictable (and predicted) demagogue of a leader. It's just that I think it's probably easier to discuss what has been long described and thought about and written about by others via their descriptions and writings etc, rather than start from scratch - especially when under time and information pressure from an incoming fascist administration, with delay a species of failure. The book "The Fifth Risk" was published sixteen months before Republican governance met the coronavirus, and about sixteen months after Trump could have been impeached and removed for publicly identified cause. That's not enough time to rename an entity like "fascism", after a century's usage, and good reason not to try. So my problem with people refusing to use the long established common name for what's in front of them is that others come to harm on that account - fascism operates under a fog of misrepresentation and dissemblance, destroying history and imposing amnesia as it advances, rendering thought itself a dangerous proclivity. That is poor preparation for sound governance of a real country. Failing to even identify, let alone prevent, a fascist takeover of one's government is a serious failure of adult political responsibility. - - - - To avoid that, use accurate labels that immediately highlight that actual process. Do not conceal the simple and straightforward state of affairs behind vague and wordy complications or outright misrepresentations of nomenclature, when a familiar name for the familiar thing is ready to hand and informatively valuable: the Republican Party is an (the) American fascist political Party. The common and ordinary name for what we have been seeing in and from the Republican Party is "fascism". And that immediately provides us with a century's worth of history and analysis bearing on what it will do and how it will behave - and maybe how best to defeat it, take power away from it, and reclaim the benefits of representative government under a liberal humanist tradition.
Hence "fascism". It would be good to throw off the attempted destruction of the term, and employ it routinely - with the other terms, such as "liberal" and :"socialist" and so forth, whose attempted destruction has led too many into complicity with the propaganda operation involved. Word do not gain or lose meaning according to what Republican - fascist - media feeds intend, unless the community of educated people cooperates. Observe the haplessness of the punditry - and the bizarre errors of thought and prediction - who lack the vocabulary to describe what they are reduced to calling "Trumpism", as if it had suddenly appeared on the planet in the person of this one man.
