Historians have been divided over whether to describe Trumpism as fascism.
Excerpted text from essay by Rachel Shabi author of Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands.
Reaching for the term “fascist” isn’t about applying the ultimate insult, so much as preparing for the right response. It would mean not taking a government or leadership as normal.
And, in broader terms this would be the anti-fascist argument: that fascism,
WHO IS THIS? National Security Council staffer Michael Anton, far right neofascist intellectual attends news conference given by Michael Flynn
once identified as a political and social force, requires an altogether different form of opposition.
In the 1920s and early 1930s US newspapers were downplaying Hitler, seeing him as a joke, or someone who would be moderated by the system.
In 1922, The New York Times noted reliable sources “confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded”.
It is almost impossible to read this today. And it is unsettling in the context of assurances during Trump’s race-baiting campaign – he didn’t literally mean a Muslim ban, we were told.
As Gavriel Rosenfeld, professor of history at Fairfield University, told me by phone a few weeks ago, this is a good thing: a rigour in the face of an unfolding situation. It’s also true that overuse of the term “fascism” undermines its effect. In understanding “never again” as a statement of fact, rather than as an instruction to remain on guard, it is possible we may have grown complacent and perhaps opened the door to misuse: these days, everyone is a fascist.
But maybe we should just accept that even an accurate invocation of fascism will sound exaggerated, in a world that doesn’t believe it possible for there to be a modern-day, Western application.