Why Trump isn't a fascist&The storming of the Capitol was not a coup.

A number of prominent commentators, including the *historians Timothy Snyder and Sarah Churchwell, the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and the Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich have been arguing for some time that Donald Trump is a fascist. The writer Rebecca Solnit has even called Trump’s *supporters “Nazis”.
Look at his contempt for democracy, they say; his attacks on the press and the judiciary, his rabble-rousing, his intolerance of all who oppose him, his authoritarianism, his self-identification with foreign dictators and strongmen, his nationalism and “America first” foreign policy. Look at the way he spurns international organisations, treaties and agreements, his racism and encouragement of white supremacist groups, his incitement to violence on the streets of the US.
Certainly, these carry strong echoes of fascism. Hitler and Mussolini attacked the free press, poured scorn on the judiciary, urged their followers to attack and kill their opponents, and put a murderous racism at the heart of their ideology. They tore up treaties, abandoned international organisations, undermined and ultimately destroyed parliamentary democracy, and promoted a cult of their own personality that seduced millions of citizens into accepting them as great redeemers.
The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable. How better to express the fear, loathing and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil? But few who have described Trump as a fascist can be called real experts in the field, not even Snyder. The majority of genuine specialists, including the historians Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman, Stanley Payne and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, agree that whatever else he is, Trump is not a fascist.
[See also: Why Boris Johnson is dangerously similar to Donald Trump]
Fascism and Nazism were the creation of the First World War, which militarised society and – in the minds of their leaders and supporters – discredited liberal democracy by associating it with armed defeat. In Germany, the defeat was catastrophic, entailing large territorial losses, the emasculation of the country as a great power, and the payment of huge financial reparations to the Allies. Italy was on the winning side in 1918, but the expected gains from banding together with Britain, France and the US failed to materialise, and the country left the war with what historians have called “the mentality of a defeated nation”.
What drove fascism and Nazism was the desire to refight the First World War, but this time to win it. Preparing for war, arming for war, educating for war and fighting a war defined fascist theory and praxis. Hitler’s aim of conquering territory was put into effect immediately in 1933, as he rearmed Germany and set it on a path to invade neighbouring countries. By mid-1940, Nazi Germany had conquered Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and most of western Europe. The Third Reich lived for war, breathed war and promoted war without limits. Similarly, Mussolini’s central aim was to create a new “Roman empire”, beginning with the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-36 and continuing with less successful attempts to subjugate countries around the Mediterranean, disastrously in the cases of Yugoslavia, Greece and North Africa.
For all of Trump’s hostility towards countries he perceives as enemies of the US, notably Iran, there is no indication that he sought a war with any foreign power, still less that he has been consumed by a desire for foreign conquest and the creation of an American empire. He is an isolationist, busy withdrawing US troops from foreign adventures, from Syria to Afghanistan. “America first” is not about launching foreign wars but disengaging from them.
***
Trump’s encouragement of violence against his opponents at home has been unsystematic. He has told his supporters to rough up reporters and suggested during the 2016 election campaign that his followers might like to make use of the Second Amendment of the US constitution (the right to bear arms) against Hillary Clinton. He has also described white supremacists as “good people”. But this bears no comparison to the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed stormtroopers and Squadristi that the Nazi and fascist leaders deployed on to the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison and often kill political opponents.
Hitler and Mussolini sought to transform their countries into perma-war states: a combination of education and propaganda on the one hand, and street-level violence and intimidation on the other, aimed to forge a new kind of citizen, one that was aggressive, regimented, arrogant, decisive, organised and obedient to the dictates of the state. GM Trevelyan poured scorn on Mussolini’s efforts to turn Italians into second-rate Germans, as the historian put it; but even in Germany this endeavour failed, except with a minority of Hitler’s most ardent followers.
The society Hitler wanted was portrayed in the final minutes of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), with endless serried ranks of uniformed SS troops marching across the screen like well-oiled automata. The reality was different, as the majority of Germans retreated from this dehumanising prospect into their own private lives.
Trump by contrast has encouraged a warped vision of personal freedom: a society in which people aren’t subject to government regulation or supervision, where anarchy and confusion reign, self-restraint is abandoned, violence is unchecked, and self-aggrandising corruption permeates politics.
Trump only has regard for those he *considers to be “winners”, and cannot bear the idea of defeat. Refusing a visit to a war cemetery in Paris in September 2020, he remarked that soldiers who died for their country on the field of battle were “losers” and “suckers”.
This mentality contrasts strongly with the central role of self-sacrifice in fascist ideology. Hitler regarded himself as a gambler: “I always go for broke,” he told Hermann Goering in 1939. There could be nothing but either total victory or total defeat. Suicide in the event of failure was always an option in his mind. Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels constructed a cult around Nazi “martyrs” such as Horst Wessel, the 22-year-old stormtrooper killed by communists three years before the Nazi seizure of power. They also honoured the men shot dead by police in the beer-hall putsch of 1923, parading the “blood flag” brandished by the would-by putschists at ceremonial commemorations every year.
Self-sacrifice for the nation was so central to Nazi ideology that when it became clear at the end of the Second World War that Nazism had been defeated, a wave of suicides swept the entire Nazi establishment, beginning with Hitler, Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Goering, and *cascading down the ranks.
***
Beyond differences in ideology and temperament are the contrasts in state organisation. In Germany and Italy during the 1930s and 1940s, businesses became helpmeets of the “corporate state”. Unions and labour organisations were crushed, while firms and captains of industry generated vast profits, only so long as what they produced served the party and the army.
Both Hitler and Mussolini ensured a near-total “coordination” of social institutions and voluntary associations, as everything from football clubs to male voice choirs was absorbed into the structures of the fascist state. This social policy was maintained by huge bureaucratic regimes, providing jobs for thousands of their followers hungry for income and status after years of hardship and privation.
During Trump’s disastrous four years in the White House government posts have been left unfilled, senior officials have been routinely fired and the commander-in-chief has spent much of his time playing golf. The kind of hyperactive dynamism that characterised fascist regimes was entirely absent. Congress has prevailed over Trump’s attempts to sideline or undermine it, and judges, including his own Supreme Court appointees, have adhered to and interpreted the law in ways that have sometimes thwarted Trump’s ambitions, notably rejecting his legal challenges to the presidential election. Election officials, among them long-term Republicans, have resisted his attempts to intimidate them, while the mainstream media has refused to broadcast his falsehoods, lies and misleading claims unchecked.
The damage Trump has done to American democracy is considerable, but the past four years of mayhem have demonstrated the resilience of American institutions, the law and the constitution. American democracy is damaged, but it survives.
Democratic culture in the European countries where fascism prevailed after 1918 had shallow roots. The German judiciary was overwhelmingly hostile to the Weimar Republic, and the idea of an unbiased, non-partisan press was too new to establish itself as an accepted feature of political life. The *legitimacy of the German political *system in the 1920s and early 1930s was weak, and the corrupt Italian polity was widely discredited.
A substantial portion of the American population – and, indeed, a majority of members of the Republican Party – refuses to accept the election of president-elect Joe Biden. But that does not mean they want the constitution to be overthrown, merely that they don’t think it’s been employed fairly.
The shocking scenes at the Capitol on 6 January, and the spectacle of Trump lauding those who attacked police and trashed Democratic Party congressional offices as patriots, underlined the real threat he and his followers pose to democratic norms and the rule of law. Armed insurrections are threatened by ultra-right groups across the country for Biden’s inauguration.
But 6 January was not an attempted coup. Nor is one likely to occur on 20 January. For all of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, the attack on Congress was not a pre-planned attempt to seize the reins of government. Trump is too chaotic and undisciplined to prepare and execute any kind of organised assault on democracy.
The storming of the Capitol has been compared to Hitler’s infamous beer-hall putsch on 9 November 1923. On that occasion, Hitler gathered his armed and uniformed supporters in a beer-hall in Munich, from where they marched towards the city centre. Germany was in crisis: inflation was out of control and the French had occupied the Ruhr earlier that year.
Hitler thought the conditions were favourable for a coup d’état and he proclaimed the formation of a “national dictatorship” headed by himself. But the coup went wrong, the putschists were met by a hail of police bullets, and Hitler was arrested and imprisoned for five years of “fortress confinement” (he only served nine months). The original intention was to seize the government in Munich and, as Mussolini had done in Rome in 1922, march on the capital. But the putsch was confused and chaotic and doomed to failure before it had begun.
***
Hitler drew two lessons from the debacle. First, seizing power by force in an open and direct confrontation with the government was not going to work; the ballot box not the bullet was the way to power. The second lesson was just as important: the beer-hall putsch was unsuccessful not least because Hitler had failed to secure the support of the political elite, the army, business, the civil service and the police.
He would not make the same mistake again. Between 1932 and 1933, he used his electoral success, which had elevated the Nazis to become the largest party in Germany, as a basis for negotiating with these groups to secure their backing for a coalition government that he would head. A vital factor was the redundancy of the legislature: disrupted by warring factions of uniformed Nazis and Communists, the Reichstag only met on a handful of occasions in 1932, and government legislated by decree. Exploiting this situation and unleashing his violent Brownshirts on to the streets, Hitler transformed the chancellorship into a dictatorship within a matter of months.
Is the storming of the Capitol on 6 January, like the beer-hall putsch, a beginning rather than an end? It seems clear that Trumpism as a political force in American life isn’t going away soon. Many of Trump’s supporters will continue to dispute the legitimacy of Biden’s election and to regard Donald Trump as the real president of the US. But there are signs that the events of 6 January have shocked many Republicans into abandoning Trump and his most fanatical supporters. The GOP may split; Trump may become the leader of a hard-right third party run from Mar-a-Lago. Time will tell.
[See also: American civil war]
But time is against Trump. Hitler and his followers were young men in 1923. They could afford to wait. Trump is in his seventies and can’t. A successor may emerge, but it seems unlikely that he would match Trump’s crowd appeal. Questions are being asked about the failure of the police to prevent the storming of the Capitol, but there is little evidence that the forces of order – the administrative and legal arms of the state, as well as the military – will prevent a peaceful transfer of power on 20 January. The situation in the US today is more like Munich in 1923 than Berlin ten years later.
To state these obvious facts is not to *encourage complacency. It means that rather than fighting the demons of the past – *fascism, Nazism, the militarised politics of Europe’s interwar years – it is necessary to fight the new demons of the present: disinformation, conspiracy theories and the blurring of fact and falsehood.
Banning dangerous and irresponsible figureheads like Trump from social media is a start – they incite violence and purvey misinformation to a degree that makes Goebbels look like George Washington (the first American president, who was said never to tell a lie). Trump’s incessant and false claims that the election was rigged have convinced many Americans that their votes no longer count for anything. This lack of democratic faith, not a violent seizure of power, is the real threat to the American republic.
Whether the US and its citizens succeed in preserving democracy and its institutions depends to a large extent on whether they succeed in identifying what the real threats are and developing appropriate means to defeat them. Imagining that they are *experiencing a rerun of the fascist *seizure of power isn’t going to help them very much in this task. You can’t win the political battles of the present if you’re always stuck in the past.

It wasn't a coup. You cannot coup a power that isn't in government yet.

He makes a very good argument that Trump isn't fascist, not unsurprising for someone that has written an academic trilogy on the Third Reich. However his argument that it was not an attempted coup is very lacking considering he likens it to the beer hall putsch and his entire argument seems to rest on one sentence "Trump is too chaotic and undisciplined to prepare and execute any kind of organised assault on democracy".

While he is an expert of Nazi history he is not an expert on coups. This author is however an expert on coups and makes a very good argument that it was in fact a coup just not one we are used to seeing in tin pot dictatorships and military juntas.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/11/capitol-riot-self-coup-trump-fiona-hill-457549

Trump may not have worn a blackshirt or gone round doing arm-raised salutes or introduced the swastika as the new flag of the US, but that doesn't mean he wasn't at least close to being a fascist in office, He certainly was a Peronist. His love of his own image was huge and obsessive. He promoted his family to top jobs with no qualifications. He poured out misinformation and lies and encouraged the mass media to do the same.

He posed as siding with the ordinary blue collar guy whilst pandering to billionaires and supporting dictators globally. His reign was very similar to that of other populist authoritarians. At the end, after losing the election by a wide margin, he tried to declare it illegal, caused a riot in the national assembly by the mob to try to overthrow it and tried to get the military to subvert it.

America has only not become a fascist dictatorship because key officials in the states defended democracy and because the military would not go along with it.

To be honest, i stand by the point that every dictator in those tin pot little countries is probably howling in laughter at whatever it was.

That being said, i would contend that a coup generally requires a concerted, planned and cohesive attempt to seize power. Whilst Trump egged on the hooligans (and certain elements of the mob might well have had some plan in mind) it still looks much more like your bog standard riot with no particular aim other than to smash some **** up and 'stop the steal'. After all, look at what happened when they actually got in they simply walked around, pissed in the corner and were eventually ejected again. I find it hard to square that with the generally accepted definition of what makes a coup a coup.
An insurrection? Probably to be honest but i still say a coup is overstating the facts. It was about as much a coup as those hooligans in the CHAZ in their attempt to eject those in power from that zone.

Out of interest Diddy, whats your view on the arguments bouncing around at the moment that this is only being treated as such a serious event because it was perpetrated by "the deplorables"? After all, from where one is sitting, this riot was much less destructive than the BLM ones, and the interesting comments regarding the Veeps egging them on in that instance. Granted its somewhat of a false equivalence but there are certain interesting parallels and double standards between the two (applying to both sides, i hasten to add)

At any rate though, a coup without the support of, well, a single branch of the government or law enforcement has got to be the single worst thought out one in history. Including that squalid little attempt by Thatchers boy and that amusing one in the Seychelles.

I disagree.

Trump and the Republicans tried everything to overtyrn the result of the election. From trying to suppress minority votes, to pumping out demonstrable lies and untruths, to pressuring states to stop counting votes, to asking secretaries of states to "find" additional votes, to filing scores of frivolous law suits, to asking states to send "alternative electors", to asking Congress to refuse to certify the electoral college, to pressuring Mike Pence to refuse to certify the electoral college, to egging on the mob to attack the Capitol.

Sure it was disorganised and pathetic. But that doesn't mean it wasn't an attempted coup. People are getting very hung up on technicalities such as the fact Trump was seeking to unlawfully stay in power rather than to overthrow an existing government. But that somewhat misses the point.

Any attempt to unlawfully stay in power or take power is a coup.

I think the point was more, and certainly my one if not the author here, is that whilst Trump might have fired up the rally it seems questionable to assert that he would have thought such a thing would/could ever effect a change in power (or a lack of change in this case).

Insurrection? Sure. Riot? Sure. Coup? I maintain this doesnt really meet the definition without having to do some gymnastics.

1. The "No rational person would think..." defence does not apply to Trump.
2. You can't defend an attempted murder by claiming you never really thought you'd be successful.

The gymnastics are actually being performed by those who are claiming that riotous insurrection directed at the very seat of government, plus concerted attempts to overturn the legitimate election result, do not essentially amount to an attempted coup.

"Your honour, my client may have attacked the victim with a meat cleaver, there may have been some loss of internal organs, and some extremities may have been removed, but it's a bit of a stretch to say he "butchered" him. My client has neither experience nor qualification in the meat supply industry."

2. Strawman if ever this was one.

Oh heaven forfend someone who actually knows what the definition of a coup is applies it properly. Never mind that using the justice system to try and further your cause, even if in a deeply cynical fashion, is not even close to what constitutes a coup - it being perfectly legal.

Once again, as it seems the message hasnt quite sunk in yet though, just because the opinion stated doesnt allign with your, er, unique view of the world doesnt make it wrong. If anything it probably points to the contrary. Now read the link, educate yourself as to why your examples are moronic, and come back when you have something of use to add outside of "you're wrong".

I'm curious, are you simply trolling my threads/posts for the hell of it or what I cant think of why else you seem intent to make these frankly irrelevant replies that add nothing to the conversation bar some strange strawman arguments and the occasional ad hominem thrown in for good measure.

You said "it seems questionable to assert that he would have thought such a thing would/could ever effect a change in power".
Therefore arguing that lack of belief in the success of a criminal enterprise does not mean it is not a criminal enterprise, is clearly not a straw man.


Again, you are insisting that only a strict, literal definition is acceptable in the context of a term that is regularly loosely applied. "Coup" is a term that is often applied in cases that do not precisely fit a specific definition. Really not sure why you are making such a fuss.


"Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence."
Not sure why you would think that your posts are immune from scrutiny. How do you think debate forums would work if everyone took exception to people challenging them?

I think the point was more, and certainly my one if not the author here, is that whilst Trump might have fired up the rally it seems questionable to assert that he would have thought such a thing would/could ever effect a change in power (or a lack of change in this case). The point being, getting people to riot is one thing, one he is demonstrably guilty of, but from the events of the day it seems to be stretching the definition of a coup when applied to the events. Insurrection? Sure. Riot? Sure. Coup? I maintain this doesnt really meet the definition without having to do some gymnastics. Simply because, in ones view, it tends to require forthought, planning and several other key definable traits (see the below link) - from the videos and accounts of that riot (whilst there were certainly some who came with a plan to keep Trump in power) most of them seem more to have come for the protest (a legitimate right, if for stupid reasons) and simply gone with the flow - as most riots end up being.
You're right in that this is getting bogged down in semantic details but details do very much matter in these cases. Instigating a riot/insurrection is one thing, staging a coup is quite another and to conflate the two would be a mistake. That's not to defend the blimps action but merely acknowledge the fact that it is reaching to say he planned and tried to execute a coup d'etat.

The last sentence us somewhat dubious though. Whilst possibly technically correct, few experts on the topic would cast such an egregiously wide net. A coup tends to be regarded as a specific event, not any old random attempt to cling on to power. See the below link for a good explanation of whilst it might technically be true it is still somewhat misleading;
https://theconversation.com/was-it-a-coup-no-but-siege-on-us-capitol-was-the-election-violence-of-a-fragile-democracy-152803

But hey, thats just ones opinion on the matter.

All i asked was that you make an actual contribution to the thread and your sole response was to get uppity that i use a word as it should be and whatever that odd last paragraph was meant to mean?

Add something useful to the thread or go back to your usual hobby of abusing people in the religion forum.

It's a fair point. I would argue thouh, that even without the riot, it would still be an attempted coup. A majority of Republican House members voted to throw out tens of millions of votes from States that voted Biden. As did a number of senators.

That was a genuine attempt to unlawfully stay in power, supported or even initiated by the President.