The term has been batted around for several years now….but the question should be is this American fascism?

An excellent question and the New Republic has covered it very well….

After all it is 2024 and a very important election (according to some) is in the works….maybe now is a good time to look at the whole thing a little closer.

“No, no,” some admonish: “Don’t get carried away. Sure, Donald Trump is dangerous, perhaps uniquely so. But … fascist? The need to label him a fascist says more about the labeler than about Trump.” This argument has sprung from certain quarters of the right, which was to be expected, but it has also sprouted from the left, where a point of view has arisen that the “hysterical” invocation of the f-word is as much a danger as Trump.

We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.

Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”

We unreservedly choose the latter course. And so we have assembled herein some of our leading intellectual historians of fascism; a member of the fourth estate who learned firsthand what the Trump lash feels like; a leading expert on civil-military relations; a great Guatemalan American novelist with a deep understanding of immigrants’ lives; one of our most incisive cultural critics; and a man with all-too-real experience in living under a notorious authoritarian regime. The scenarios they describe are certainly grim. We dare you to say, after reading these pieces, that they are impossible.

(newrepublic.com)

Trump’s rhetoric smacks of fascism….now he just chest thumping or does he really want the authoritarian rule to become fact?

To speculate on what the future of American culture might look like in a second Trump presidency, we must consider the past: the formative New York and educational years of Donald Trump himself. By a curious turn of fate, the young Donald and I share a birthplace and, generally speaking, an education at the same institutions of higher learning. I can’t pretend to know the influence our common background has on his attitude toward the arts, but I can make some informed guesses by contrasting Trump’s journey to my own. To understand Trump and the cues his base takes from him, we need to see him as the anti–New York New Yorker: intellectually incurious and leery of the crowded streets of the crown city of cosmopolitan difference in a nation that mythologizes rural communities of sameness.

Then there is Project 2025….a master plan….

The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do. Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name. It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to “[d]ismantle the administrative state” and “decentralize and privatize as much as possible,” allowing the American people to “live freely.” “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts told The New York Times in January. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.” The solution to this “slow start”—code for the restraints imposed by operating in a democracy—is counterrevolution.

The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies. The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order. The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ

https://newrepublic.com/article/181265/permanent-counterrevolution

What is the old saying?  “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck?”

Personally I think the time to fight this cancer is now……

January 2025 will be too late.

I Read, I Write, You Know

‘cognito ergo me agitare’