Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism"
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Opinion by George F. Will
Columnist
July 10, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDTSo many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of “fascism” than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.
Europe’s revolutionary tradition exalted liberty, equality and fraternity until revolutionary fascism sacrificed the first to the second and third. Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism: the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.
Individualism, fascists insisted, produces a human dust of deracinated people (Nietzsche’s “the sand of humanity”), whose loneliness and purposelessness could be cured by gusts of charismatic leadership blowing them into vibrant national-cum-tribal collectivities. The gusts were fascist rhetoric, magnified by radio, which in its novelty was a more powerful political tool than television has ever been.The Enlightenment exalted freedom; fascism postulated destiny for those on “the right side of history.” Fascism was the youthful wave of the future: Mussolini was 39 when he became Italy’s youngest prime minister until then; Hitler became chancellor at 43; Franco was 43 when he ignited the 1936 military insurrection in Spain. In “Three Faces of Fascism” (1965), Ernst Nolte said that Mussolini, who “had no forerunners,” placed “fascism” in quotation marks as a neologism.
Fascism’s celebration of unfettered leaders proclaiming “only I can fix it” entailed disparagement of “parliamentarism,” the politics of incrementalism and conciliation. “Democracy,” said Mussolini, “has deprived the life of the people of ‘style’ . . . the color, the strength, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical; in sum, all that counts in the life of the masses. We play the lyre on all its strings.”
Fascism was entertainment built around rallies — e.g., those at Nuremberg — where crowds were played as passive instruments. Success manipulating the masses fed fascist leaders’ disdain for the led. Hitler described them as feminine, the ultimate fascist disparagement. Imagine the contempt a promiser feels for, say, people gulled by a promise that one nation will pay for a border wall built against it by another nation.
Mussolini, a fervent socialist until his politics mutated into a rival collectivism, distilled fascism to this: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” The Nazi Party — the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — effected a broad expansion of socialism’s agenda: Rather than merely melding the proletariat into a battering ram to pulverize the status quo, fascism would conscript into tribal solidarity the entire nation — with exceptions.
Fascism based national unity on shared domestic dreads — of the media as enemies of the people, of elites, or others who prevented national homogeneity and social purification. Jews were reviled as “cosmopolitans,” a precursor of today’s epithet: “globalists.”
In the 1920s, fascism captured Italy, in which, it has been said, the poetry of the Risorgimento — national unification achieved in 1870 — was followed by “the prose of everyday existence.” Mussolini, the bare-chested, jut-jawed, stallion-mounted alpha male, promised (as Vladimir Putin today does in diminished, sour Russia) derivative masculinity for men bored by humdrum life in a bourgeois “little Italy.” “On to Ethiopia!” was Mussolini’s hollow yelp of restored Roman grandeur.
Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy. “The democrats of [the newspaper] ‘Il Mondo’ want to know our program?” said Mussolini the month he came to power in 1922. “It is to break the bones of the democrats of ‘Il Mondo.’ ”
In the 1930s, Spain acquired a bland fascism — fascism without a charismatic personification: nervous nationalism, leavened by clericalism and corruption. Spain’s golden age was four centuries past; what was recent was the 1898 humiliation of the Spanish- American War. Paunchy Francisco Franco, a human black hole negating excitement, would make Spain great again by keeping it distinct from modern Europe, distinct in pre-Enlightenment backwardness.
Donald Trump, an envious acolyte of today’s various strongmen, appeals to those in thrall to country-music manliness: “We’re truck- driving, beer-drinking, big-chested Americans too freedom-loving to let any itsy-bitsy virus make us wear masks.” Trump, however, is a faux nationalist who disdains his nation’s golden age of international leadership and institution-building after 1945.
Trumpism, too, is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.
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Always interesting. Unless he’s talking about baseball.
I actually bought a book of his columns when I was 17.
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@jon-nyc said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
Always interesting. Unless he’s talking about baseball.
Agree on the baseball, to be sure.
He has a historical perspective that I appreciate, particularly in this column.
My respect for him grew when he and O'Reilly had that on-air spat.
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@Loki said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
Long and interesting essay.
That said you don’t need a treatise on why Trump isn’t a fascist, it was just one of many vomits produced that the lambs who couldn’t think for themselves believed.
"Trump isn't a fascist, technically" is courageous edge lord thought in Will's current social circles.
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@Loki said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
Fascism requires the overthrow of democracy. #Cancelculture is where the discussion needs to happen.
All the most perceptive and interesting cultural commentators I read or listen to seem to agree. And most of them come from the left originally, so that's saying something.
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Will jumped the shark ten years ago.
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@jon-nyc said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
I actually bought a book of his columns when I was 17.
That's probably the most unsurprising thing I'll hear all day.
Please love yourself.
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@Aqua-Letifer said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
@jon-nyc said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
I actually bought a book of his columns when I was 17.
That's probably the most unsurprising thing I'll hear all day.
Still, one of the saddest, amirite?
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
@Aqua-Letifer said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
@jon-nyc said in Will: "The difference between Trumpism and fascism":
I actually bought a book of his columns when I was 17.
That's probably the most unsurprising thing I'll hear all day.
Still, one of the saddest, amirite?
Definitely.
I also wish I had done the same, so, there's that. I was reading a book of missives by Mr. Ted L. Nancy at 17.
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When I was 17 I was drinking a significant amount of Vladivar vodka (made in Warrington) and discovering Charlie Parker.
I still don't know what went wrong.
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During, akshully. The baseball columns came in handy sometimes.
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr
