No, but Trumpism IS FASCISM

The Trumpies are so desperate that they insist that their leader is not Hitler.  They are correct.  Trump doesn’t hate Jews or, probably even hate Mexicans.  But he does foment hatred and his policies are fascist.

Fascism was not originally about race or mass slaughter.  In German and in Stalin’s Russia, fascism was a system built on a great leader who would make the fatherland great again.  The great leaders … Hitler, Mussolini, Andrew Jackson, Mao, Franco, Peron, and their ilk … played to the lumpen proletariat, the working class, with promises of the good that would come from nationalism.  With the exception of Mao, all these great leaders, like Putin or Kim Jong-un today, used the exiting plutocracy or created a new plutocracy to run and profit from the “great again” national state.

The comparison to fascism is to a political philosophy that repeatedly has created disasters. Hitler and Stalin were extreme examples but their meme … extreme nationalism, idealization of a leader and fusion of corporate and government interests … is the meme of Duterte, Franco, Peron, and Mussolini.  Interestingly, China stands out as … at least for now … an exception.  Xi’s leadership is more Confucian and corporate then it is fascist.  Still, we need to be very afraid of what might happen if the Maoist state turned into a recrudescence of Tojo’s Japan.