Fascism expert: Donald Trump’s coup is not over

F

floridafan

Verified User
Dismiss Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on the 2020 election at your peril, warns Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of the new book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In our recent interview for Salon Talks, Ben-Ghiat — a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU — observes that Trump probably hasn’t actually studied other leaders in history who transformed functioning democracies into authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless, his actions line up almost perfectly with many who have done just that, from Benito Mussolini in fascist Italy to Vladimir Putin in contemporary Russia.

“For the strongman, politics is always personal,” Ben-Ghiat explains which may sound ironic given that “strongmen” are all about displaying virility. As she explained in our conversation, they tend to take every slight personally, and that’s certainly the case with President Trump, who constantly complains that he’s a victim who has been treated unfairly, which for some reason has endeared him even further to his supporters.

Even with Trump on his way out in January, Ben-Ghiat makes clear the threat of authoritarianism in America is not over. She explains that the Republican Party is increasingly embracing undemocratic methods to acquire and retain power, from voter ID laws to blocking Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. Some GOP elected officials — thankfully, not all — even enabled Trump’s efforts to overturn or delegitimize the 2020 election results.

Ben-Ghiat’s book it serves as a wake-up call for any who believe what we are seeing is nothing more than an extra dose of our “normal” hyper-partisan politics. If we as a nation don’t attempt to rein in the use of undemocratic or anti-democratic tactics, the U.S. may end up featured in future history books as a former democracy that slid into authoritarianism
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/02/hi...mps-coup-is-not-over-his-enablers-arent-done/
 
What a great (and terrifying) read. Excerpt:

"Clearly Joe Biden and many leading Democrats have made the strategic decision not to join this battle, to stay above it. Maybe on Twitter, you see some members of Congress, but they certainly have not flooded the zone calling this out. It concerns me that it almost feels like an unintentional appeasement of Donald Trump, letting him say what he's going to say because democracy is going to win out at the end of the day. Does history tell us that's a good or bad strategy?


"I'm really glad you made that point, because I think one of the hard truths we have to face is that the GOP is an authoritarian party. The other day they issued a very aggressive declaration, saying they're going to fight to liberate the country from tyranny, which is this old right-wing line that democracy is tyranny and authoritarian government is freedom. So they went out in a new aggressive way, saying they're going to back [Trump] all the way to the end.

"We're in a situation where Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India, who are not liberal rulers, have called Biden to congratulate him on the election, but the GOP will not concede. In this situation, it's very important that the Democrats come out very strongly, because the history of authoritarian shows that Trump is a bully and if you don't push back against him, he will take more advantage and consider you to be a lesser opponent. I think they're going to have to change their messaging, because things are getting very, very frightening, very, very serious. Being above it all is not going to work."

The (D)s need to grow a spine and speak out more forcefully against what #LOSER45 is trying to do post-election. We've already seen in recent history how appeasement and "we go high" doesn't work when dealing with would-be tyrants.
 
Hello floridafan,

floridafan said:
Dismiss Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on the 2020 election at your peril, warns Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of the new book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In our recent interview for Salon Talks, Ben-Ghiat — a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU — observes that Trump probably hasn’t actually studied other leaders in history who transformed functioning democracies into authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless, his actions line up almost perfectly with many who have done just that, from Benito Mussolini in fascist Italy to Vladimir Putin in contemporary Russia.

“For the strongman, politics is always personal,” Ben-Ghiat explains which may sound ironic given that “strongmen” are all about displaying virility. As she explained in our conversation, they tend to take every slight personally, and that’s certainly the case with President Trump, who constantly complains that he’s a victim who has been treated unfairly, which for some reason has endeared him even further to his supporters.

Even with Trump on his way out in January, Ben-Ghiat makes clear the threat of authoritarianism in America is not over. She explains that the Republican Party is increasingly embracing undemocratic methods to acquire and retain power, from voter ID laws to blocking Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. Some GOP elected officials — thankfully, not all — even enabled Trump’s efforts to overturn or delegitimize the 2020 election results.

Ben-Ghiat’s book it serves as a wake-up call for any who believe what we are seeing is nothing more than an extra dose of our “normal” hyper-partisan politics. If we as a nation don’t attempt to rein in the use of undemocratic or anti-democratic tactics, the U.S. may end up featured in future history books as a former democracy that slid into authoritarianism
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/02/hi...mps-coup-is-not-over-his-enablers-arent-done/
Click to expand...

From the OP link:

"I think one of the hard truths we have to face is that the GOP is an authoritarian party. The other day they issued a very aggressive declaration, saying they're going to fight to liberate the country from tyranny, which is this old right-wing line that democracy is tyranny and authoritarian government is freedom."

Can't deny that.
 
Another radical Leftist academic quack, this time from the rather radical Leftist leaning New York University comes out with her latest hit piece on Trump. This is hardly the first time she's called him a "fascist." I'd like to ask her exactly which of his "...actions line up almost prefectly with... Benito Mussolini...to Vladimir Putin..."

My bet is she'd go right to the logical fallacy of appeal to authority and say she's an academic with a PhD and that means people like me shouldn't or are somehow not qualified to question her conclusions.

As for this bit...

“For the strongman, politics is always personal,” Ben-Ghiat explains which may sound ironic given that “strongmen” are all about displaying virility.
Click to expand...

Virility? Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all barely had women in their lives. They didn't display typical masculine virility at all. None were particularly pretentious about their appearance either. Any leader in a position of real power from CEO's to Monarchs throughout history tend to take criticism poorly. What does that show other than she has no grasp of the very subject she's supposedly an "expert" in?
 
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Hello T. A. Gardner,

T. A. Gardner said:
Another radical Leftist academic quack, this time from the rather radical Leftist leaning New York University comes out with her latest hit piece on Trump. This is hardly the first time she's called him a "fascist." I'd like to ask her exactly which of his "...actions line up almost prefectly with... Benito Mussolini...to Vladimir Putin..."

My bet is she'd go right to the logical fallacy of appeal to authority and say she's an academic with a PhD and that means people like me shouldn't or are somehow not qualified to question her conclusions.

As for this bit...



Virility? Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all barely had women in their lives. They didn't display typical masculine virility at all. None were particularly pretentious about their appearance either. Any leader in a position of real power from CEO's to Monarchs throughout history tend to take criticism poorly. What does that show other than she has no grasp of the very subject she's supposedly an "expert" in?
Click to expand...

Did you read the whole article?

I found it very interesting.

And eerily similar to what is going on with the Trump administration.

From the OP article:

"Unfortunately for us, his personality, the impulsiveness, the need to humiliate others, even those who work for him, his grandiosity, his anxieties, his fears of his insecurities, all of it matches up 100 percent to all the other rulers. The outcomes are different, as you say. We're not in a one-party state fascist era. He didn't come to power through a military coup, but the personality type, which leads to these dynamics of government from the inner sanctums to not wanting to leave to humiliating others, is the same.

In 1931, Mussolini's head of the fascist party learned he was fired by reading it in the newspaper. And Mobutu in the Congo used to have, I call them "sadistic dictator games." He used to have rallies and everybody had to be assembled, with his officials in the first row. Then he would announce, live on television, which ones were fired. Rex Tillerson in 2018 was scrolling through Twitter while on the toilet and that's how he found out he was fired. So again, the dynamics are the same, even if the outcome — like what happens to the people who get fired — changes."
 
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This bit from the OP article sounds very familiar:

"And the thing about it is, it connects to their masculinity. I have a whole chapter on virility because on the one hand they're supposed to be alpha males, right? Trump is retweeting his face on the body of Sylvester Stallone. We can laugh at that stuff, but it's deadly serious. On the other hand, they're victims, whining all the time about being persecuted. And this actually makes people feel tenderly toward them, it's even endearing. So you go to Trump rallies and journalists will get these quotes, like a woman will say, "I'd wade through a sea of COVID to save Trump." Stuff like that. All of them have done this over a hundred years, and this is why women are a big fan base for these men who are definitely not working toward women's rights."
 
floridafan said:
Dismiss Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on the 2020 election at your peril, warns Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of the new book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In our recent interview for Salon Talks, Ben-Ghiat — a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU — observes that Trump probably hasn’t actually studied other leaders in history who transformed functioning democracies into authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless, his actions line up almost perfectly with many who have done just that, from Benito Mussolini in fascist Italy to Vladimir Putin in contemporary Russia.

“For the strongman, politics is always personal,” Ben-Ghiat explains which may sound ironic given that “strongmen” are all about displaying virility. As she explained in our conversation, they tend to take every slight personally, and that’s certainly the case with President Trump, who constantly complains that he’s a victim who has been treated unfairly, which for some reason has endeared him even further to his supporters.

Even with Trump on his way out in January, Ben-Ghiat makes clear the threat of authoritarianism in America is not over. She explains that the Republican Party is increasingly embracing undemocratic methods to acquire and retain power, from voter ID laws to blocking Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. Some GOP elected officials — thankfully, not all — even enabled Trump’s efforts to overturn or delegitimize the 2020 election results.

Ben-Ghiat’s book it serves as a wake-up call for any who believe what we are seeing is nothing more than an extra dose of our “normal” hyper-partisan politics. If we as a nation don’t attempt to rein in the use of undemocratic or anti-democratic tactics, the U.S. may end up featured in future history books as a former democracy that slid into authoritarianism
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/02/hi...mps-coup-is-not-over-his-enablers-arent-done/
Click to expand...



Remember that McConnell refused to hold a proper hearing in the Senate and threatened an immediate vote of not guilty.
 
PoliTalker said:
This bit from the OP article sounds very familiar:

"And the thing about it is, it connects to their masculinity. I have a whole chapter on virility because on the one hand they're supposed to be alpha males, right? Trump is retweeting his face on the body of Sylvester Stallone. We can laugh at that stuff, but it's deadly serious. On the other hand, they're victims, whining all the time about being persecuted. And this actually makes people feel tenderly toward them, it's even endearing. So you go to Trump rallies and journalists will get these quotes, like a woman will say, "I'd wade through a sea of COVID to save Trump." Stuff like that. All of them have done this over a hundred years, and this is why women are a big fan base for these men who are definitely not working toward women's rights."
Click to expand...


Messiah complex. The Victim-Hero.
 
floridafan said:
Dismiss Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on the 2020 election at your peril, warns Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of the new book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” In our recent interview for Salon Talks, Ben-Ghiat — a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU — observes that Trump probably hasn’t actually studied other leaders in history who transformed functioning democracies into authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless, his actions line up almost perfectly with many who have done just that, from Benito Mussolini in fascist Italy to Vladimir Putin in contemporary Russia.

“For the strongman, politics is always personal,” Ben-Ghiat explains which may sound ironic given that “strongmen” are all about displaying virility. As she explained in our conversation, they tend to take every slight personally, and that’s certainly the case with President Trump, who constantly complains that he’s a victim who has been treated unfairly, which for some reason has endeared him even further to his supporters.

Even with Trump on his way out in January, Ben-Ghiat makes clear the threat of authoritarianism in America is not over. She explains that the Republican Party is increasingly embracing undemocratic methods to acquire and retain power, from voter ID laws to blocking Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. Some GOP elected officials — thankfully, not all — even enabled Trump’s efforts to overturn or delegitimize the 2020 election results.

Ben-Ghiat’s book it serves as a wake-up call for any who believe what we are seeing is nothing more than an extra dose of our “normal” hyper-partisan politics. If we as a nation don’t attempt to rein in the use of undemocratic or anti-democratic tactics, the U.S. may end up featured in future history books as a former democracy that slid into authoritarianism
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/02/hi...mps-coup-is-not-over-his-enablers-arent-done/
Click to expand...

Hey shit stain tell us what a fascist is. If you say trump then you will only confirm what we all already know, that you're a dumbass cunt.
 
Yakuda said:
Hey shit stain tell us what a fascist is. If you say trump then you will only confirm what we all already know, that you're a dumbass cunt.
Click to expand...

he is working very hard at it, my little stinking cunt. Sadly he aint bright enough to pull it off, nor are you. All the while your kind is encouraging, in the name of our constitution, to throw the constitution out the window. You were a fucking loser and you will always be, honey cunt.
 
floridafan said:
he is working very hard at it, my little stinking cunt. Sadly he aint bright enough to pull it off, nor are you. All the while your kind is encouraging, in the name of our constitution, to throw the constitution out the window. You were a fucking loser and you will always be, honey cunt.
Click to expand...

So you don't even know what a fucking fascist is but you think trump is one. You are the dumbest motherfucker on this site.
 
Yakuda said:
Hey shit stain tell us what a fascist is. If you say trump then you will only confirm what we all already know, that you're a dumbass cunt.
Click to expand...

tumblr_np4bvqOFgg1qkml81o1_500.jpg
 
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