I honestly don't understand how someone who has read a thing in their life could deny that Trumpism is fascism at this point. But then I felt the same way on 1/6/21, so I'm certain they'll figure something out.
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IMHO they deny it because of a fear of a 'popular front' and the need to ally with 'neoliberals' to defeat it. This is a terrible argument; it means people suffer at the altar of political purity, but that's my theory of the Robin style folks intransigence.
The thing is that fascism, nazism, communism etc are not true ideologies. They have no real goals, they don't seek to solve any real world problems, they are theories about nothing, designed to troll people into commiting atrocities against whomever dear leader wants out of the way.
I distinctly remember being chastised by democrats for sounding the alarm bells when his rhetoric started up in 2015. I was told that my hyperbole was unfair and was going to help trump win.
That’s all my friends and I talked about leading up to the 2016 election. But we also thought he was a “joke” candidate and most people were decent and wouldn’t vote for him. Boy, were we stupid.
You can marshal mid-20th century theorists... but really, not contemporary historians of fascism. Robin (much of whose work I admire) is not conversant in any historiography of fascism past like... Hannah Arendt. And he doesn't want to hear it. Many such cases
I think they aren't (now, and weren't then) denying the denotation, they are denying the connotation. Yes, sure, it's authoritarian ethno-nationalism, but *we like it*
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/north-korea-defectors/
Fascism.
Fascists doing fascist stuff.