"Fascism With An American Face"
WHY TRUMP IS DIFFERENT—AND MUST BE REPELLED
By Adam Gopnik
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Donald Trump is not normal in any of these ways, and yet we continue to treat him as though he were. Those of us who warned last spring that he was being underestimated and “normalized” by a sinister process of gradual acceptance of the unacceptable turned out, tragically, to be right. Trump is not normal. Nothing about him is. One need only look at his rallies, track the rhetoric they offer and the vengeful orgy of hatred and misogyny and racism they induce, to see just how different he is. His followers are not, shall we say, there to root on their favored libertarian in his pursuit of free-market solutions to vexing social problems; they are there to scream insults and cry havoc on their (mostly imaginary) enemies, to revel in the riot of misogyny and racism that Trump has finally given them license to retrieve from the darkest chapters of our past. (“Not politically correct” means openly brutal to minorities and women.) A ten-year-old screams, “Take that bitch down!” to laughter. One need only track the past month’s series of outrages, each quickly receding into the distance, to recall that he has done not one but almost innumerable things that in any previous election would have been, quaint word, “disqualifying.” His Twitter assault on the former Miss Universe was followed by his confession and boasts of being a sexual predator, which were followed by the confirmation of numerable women that, yes, indeed, he is a sexual predator—met only by his snarling denials, none of them the least bit convincing, and the familiar big-lie technique of insisting that their stories have been “debunked” when they have not even been effectively denied.
The truth is that Trump’s “positions” on specific issues are more or less a matter of chance and whim and impulse (Of course women should be punished for having abortions! Ten minutes later: no, they shouldn’t) while his actual ideology, the song he sings every day, the one those listeners and followers gleefully vibrate to, is one anthem, and it is the sound of the authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses Americans have rejected since the founding of this country. Call them what you will—populist authoritarianism or extreme-right-wing ethno-nationalism—the active agents within a Trump speech and energizing a Trump rally are always the same: the worship of power in its most brutal and authoritarian forms (thus his admiration for Vladimir Putin and for the Chinese Communists who assaulted the protesters at Tiananmen Square); the reduction of all relations to dominance contests; the contempt for rational argument; the perpetual unashamed storm of lies; the appeal to hysterically exaggerated fears of outsiders; and, above all, the relentless sense of ethnic grievance that can be remedied only by acts of annihilating revenge. His is the ideology not of democratic patriotism but of a narrow nationalism alone—the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. He will “level the playing field” with the terrorist spectre of isis by forcing soldiers to commit war crimes; he will not merely kill our enemies but annihilate their families. His platform is resentment and his program is revenge, and that is an ideology with many faces and one name. This is fascism with an American face.
Because it is fascism with an American face, it can look, as things American so often do, in its own strange way not merely repellent but grotesquely entertaining—so much so that on some of these mornings of this final week it’s hard to recall the magnitude of the stakes. (The Trump stakes, of course, are not to be confused with Trump Steaks, one more failed brand.) Trump’s aggression slips so seamlessly inside the practices of professional wrestling and reality-television shows that one has to stop laughing long enough to remember, as our parents used to say, that there isn’t anything funny about it. Trump does what he does, as all good demagogues do, by instinct more than instruction: he senses that the “character” part in a professional-wrestling match must be always and entirely unrepentant and must never apologize—and, important detail, that the bad-guy persona can in fact become a good guy to the crowd if he is only given a chance to drop-kick the Muslim Sheik or the Mexican Intruder. And the strange rhythm of repeated insult is exactly the rhythm of “The Apprentice”—each week demands another outrage. But take no comfort from the squalid comedy: this is exactly what you would expect an American fascist to be, and to be like.
MORE:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-trump-is-different-and-must-be-repelled
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