It almost did in 2008, if i remember correctly, through Sarah Palin mainly while McCain distanced himself from it. I remember that a woman at a rally told McCain she was scared of Obama becoming president or something similar and John McCain defended Obama and explained he was not to be feared etc.stip wrote:That's been about 15-25% of the American electorate for quite some time. What's been unusual about this cycle is that it's driving one of the two major parties, and that is really due to the peculiar alchemy of trump.Mine wrote:I understand that. It's why i compared him to Berlusconi in an earlier post.zeb wrote:Trump's a singularity. If he didn't have his money, his profile and his weird charisma it would have been impossible for him to get this far. The election environment he's walked into has allowed him to flourish. It is hard to imagine this happening again.Mine wrote:It isn't, but someone like him getting close to it is worrying enough.zeb wrote:There's no way that Trump becomes President.
I think what is worrying is how much support he has. The people who are willing to vote for someone who is openly xenophobic, a white supremacists or however we want to define it, aren't going to disappear with him. Even if he gives up on his political ambitions after the GE someone else will purse those votes in likely a similar way unless there's a substantial enough shift in mentality and political discourse.
Didn't McCain chose to tone down the rethoric of his campaign because he thought it was going too far?
Palin was Trump's direct predecessor here in many ways. It's coincidentally when Trump's political ambitions started.
That really was interesting.Interesting article given the past few pages.
Trump's Not Hitler, He's Mussolini: How GOP Anti-Intellectualism Created a Modern Fascist Movement in America
By Fedja Buric, Salon
13 March 16
Very true.Also, as a historian I have learned to beware of historical analogies and generally eschew them whenever I can, particularly when it comes to an ideology that during World War II caused the deaths of 60 million human beings. The oversaturation of our discourse with Hitler comparisons is not only exasperating for any historian, but is offensive to the memory of Hitler’s many victims most notably the six million Jews his regime murdered in cold blood.
I wish this was explored more in the article and why there still is a connection to those roots on both sides of the Atlantic.That white supremacist groups back Donald Trump for president of the United States, and his slowness to disavow the support of David Duke, all illuminate the fascistic origins of Trump the phenomenon. In fact, Paxton acknowledges that while Fascism began in France and Italy, “the first version of the Klan in the defeated American south was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.” That the KKK was drawn to the Trump candidacy, and that he refused to disavow them speak volumes about his fascistic roots.
I saw the PBS series Eyes on The Prize sometimes last year and was surprised at the similarities between early 20th cenrtury racism and in the US and fascism here.
This is from the wikipedia entry for neo-fascism pertaining to Italy
With the beginning of Cold War it was feared by British government that the requested extradition of Italian war criminals to Yugoslavia would benefit PCI. Preventing anything like the Nuremberg trial for Italian war crimes, the collective memory of the crimes committed by Italians was expelled from public media, from textbooks in Italian schools, and also from the academic discourse on Western side of the Iron curtain throughout the Cold War.[10][11]
The National Alliance party did famously distance itself from Mussolini but it is still apologetic towards the war crimes in the Balkans mentioned above. This party was Berlusoconi's main political partner when he created his large alliance that won him the parliamentary elections. The 3 mentioned neo-fascist parties are also part of the unified Italian right. Interestingly they aren't explicitly neo-fascists on the outside in the way they conduct their campaigns etc. They'd have Mussolini posters hanging around them but they never run in elections as fascist.In 1946 a group of Fascist soldiers founded the Italian Social Movement to continue the idea of Benito Mussolini. The leader of the MSI was Giorgio Almirante. who remained at the head of the party until his death in 1988.
Despite attempts in the 1970s towards a "historic compromise" between the PCI and the DC, the PCI didn't take part in the executive power until the 1980s. In December 1970, Junio Valerio Borghese attempted, along with Stefano Delle Chiaie, the Borghese Coup which was supposed to install a neo-fascist regime. Neo-fascist groups took part in various false flag terrorist attacks, starting with the December 1969 Piazza Fontana massacre, for which Vincenzo Vinciguerra was convicted, and usually considered to have stopped with the 1980 Bologna railway bombing. A 2000 parliamentary report from the center-left Olive Tree coalition concluded that "the strategy of tension had been supported by the United States in order to impede the PCI, and, in a lesser measure, the PSI from reaching executive power"[citation needed].
Since the 1990s, National Alliance, led by Gianfranco Fini, a former member of Italian Social Movement, has distanced itself from Mussolini and fascism and made efforts to improve relations with Jewish groups, with most die-hards leaving it; it now seeks to present itself as a respectable right-wing party. Fini joined Silvio Berlusconi's government. Neo-fascist parties in Italy are Tricolour Flame ("Fiamma Tricolore"), New Force ("Forza Nuova") and the National Social Front ("fronte sociale nazionale").
Mussolini's granddaughter(also Sophia Loren's niece) has spent her whole career in this neo-fascist parties even furiously leaving the National Alliance when they kind of distanced themselves from Mussolini. She's currently an elected member of the European parliament and Italian senate. She's known for statements like i'd rather be a fascist than a fag. Just to give an idea of who she is. I think she embodies the continuity from the original fascism in the early 20th century to what is now called that.
I think this was made possible by what i quoted above. Fascism was never properly dealt with in Italy the way Nazism was in Germany. The racial superiority mentality survived to this day and the extremely charismatic extremely rich businessmen Berlusconi used to to get himself elected.
This is exactly what Trump is doing. His decision to pursue the presidency was very much pragmatic and i believe he delayed it to after Obama's 2nd term was over specifically to avoid going against him. His strategy wouldn't work if he run against a man of colour who is already in office.
I think Trump is a front runner and likely nominee for the exact same reasons Italian politicians can get away with being sympathetic to fascism. White supremacy and racism never really stopped completely - i mean you're still talking about the confederate flag, #oscarssowhite, black lives matter etc.
I even find interesting how white and Caucasian are actually not synonyms in the USA.
From what i can tell from outside Americans have a real hard time admitting they fucked up as a nation and when it comes to this part of your history you did big time just like Italians did with fascism and they also never dealt with that.
I think Trump wouldn't have half his audience if questions like whether the confederate flag should be banned were dealt with 50 years ago.
I just find it very convenient to attempt to explain Trumpmania without taking this into account.
It's also why he is compared to movements and historical figures from outside of the US instead of people in the US. It's deffinitelly not because xenophobia is exclusive to is Europeans.
How far from this is the notion that a black president isn't intellectually capable enough to pick a supreme justice candidate?Still, for a fascist to be accepted as legitimate he has to move the crowd and from the very beginning of his candidacy Trump has done this by stoking racial animosity and grievances. It is no coincidence that the Trump phenomenon emerges during the tenure of the first black President. It bears remembering that Trump’s first flirtation with running for office was nothing more than his insistent, nonsensical, irrational, and blatantly racist demand that President Obama show his birth certificate and his Harvard grades. This was more than a dog whistle to the angry whites that the first black President was not only un-American, literally, but that he was intellectually inferior to them, despite graduating from Harvard Law. If one considers this “original sin” of Trump then the KKK endorsement of his candidacy and Trump’s acceptance of it seem less strange.
That's a very famous statement and i'm sure footage of it can be found on youtube. The story behind it that i remember is different though. The version i know is that it was a premeditated move that was supposed to achieve exactly what it did.This transformation brings to mind a moment in the history of another authoritarian, the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic whose ascent to power wrecked the country of Yugoslavia and caused a series of vicious civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. When Milosevic first appeared on TV he did so as a mid-level member of the Communist party and spoke with the dry jargon of a Marxist intellectual. In 1987, party bosses sent Milosevic to the volatile Serbian province of Kosovo to quell a riot by Serb locals who were complaining that the majority Albanians had been perpetrating violence, and even genocide, against them. Feeling abandoned by the government, the Serb nationalists surrounded Milosevic telling him that Albanians were beating them. Milosevic hesitated. He began to employ the party jargon of national unity and promised to solve their problems, but the crowd grew rowdier and at one point, Milosevic looked scared. That’s when he uttered the phrase that would transform him from an anonymous politician to a Serb nationalist leader: “no one can dare to beat you!” The crowd erupted in cheers, propelling his career during which he destroyed not only his own party, but also the country at large. He would die nineteen years later in a prison cell at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands.
Oh hell no! Yugoslavia was never nothing more than a temporary solution. We would've never stick together longer than we did regardless of what happened. In reality the war was a consequence of that not the other way around. It's a complex topic and i've rambled too much already. Just to give an idea, only Serbs would identify themselves as Yugoslavians rarely anybody else.Today, the echoes of Fascism are all too audible to anyone willing to hear them. Having lost one country, Yugoslavia, I really don’t want to lose another one.
