One of the most perceptive analyses of Trump and his followers was written more than two decades ago. I’m talking, of course, of Umberto Eco’s oft-discussed essay on what he calls Ur Fascism or Eternal Fascism, his attempt to set forth the central features that define Fascism. I reread it today for the umpteenth time, and was struck again by its eerie prescience.
Though it contains precisely zero references to Trump — who at the time was just a real estate mogul with a penchant for boasts and bankruptcy — Eco’s 14-point checklist describing what makes a fascist a fascist applies to Trump and Trumpism in so many ways it’s scary.
Let’s go through the list, shall we? The bold parts are Eco’s categories; the rest is my commentary.
The cult of tradition: Trump frequently harks back to what he sees as a former golden age for America. His slogan, after all, is Make America Great Again.
The rejection of modernism: Trump has famously said that he thinks “a lot of modern art is a con.” In the final days of his campaign a number of his most fervent followers convinced themselves that Hillary was a literal devil worshiper because her campaign chair John Podesta was once invited to a so-called “Spirit Cooking” dinner held by performance artist Marina Abramovic. Many of Trump’s fans seem to actually believe that her artistic performances are in fact Satanic rituals.
The cult of action for action’s sake: Trump is a whirligig of pointless action who repeatedly declared that Hillary was unfit for president because sometimes she took a day or two off from campaign events, and was even known to go to sleep from time to time.
Disagreement is treason: Trump has repeatedly called the press “corrupt” for not accepting his version of reality. During his rallies he regularly led what Orwell might have called “two-minute hates” against journalists covering his campaign. Trump’s fans ultimately began chanting “lügenpresse” at journalists; the term, German for “lying press,” was originally made popular by, yes, literal Nazis in literal Hitler’s Germany.
Fear of difference: Do I even need to cite examples here? Trump’s campaign, which began with a bizarre attack on Mexican immigrants, was largely based around Trump’s weaponization of this primal fear.
The appeal to a frustrated middle class: Again, do I even need to bother with examples? Trump’s whole campaign centered around his attempts to convince white middle-class Americans that they had more to fear from poor people of color than from wealthy tax-avoiders and serial-bankruptcy-declarers like him.
The obsession with a plot, possibly an international one: Trump, like many of his followers, is both a proud nationalist and a conspiracy theorist. He kicked off his political career alleging that Obama wasn’t born in America; last week he declared that the anti-Trump protests that have sprung up all over the country in the wake of his electoral college victory are the work of “professional protestors, incited by the media.” Trump’s fans on the alt-right blame everything on a cabal of Jewish globalists, a charge Trump himself echoed in the final ad for his campaign.
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies: You might have thought that Trump, in many ways the poster boy for ostentatious wealth, would have had a hard time pretending that Hillary and her supporters were the privileged ones. But Trump was somehow able to convince his fans he was a sort of “billionaire Robin Hood,” as Trump admirer Piers Morgan put it, while portraying Hillary as “a career politician who has repeatedly fleeced her positions of power to make millions of dollars for herself and her husband, and who carried with her a permanent smug sense of entitlement to be America’s first female president.”
Life is permanent warfare: Trump is someone who will go to war against a former beauty queen on Twitter at 3 AM. He’s always fighting someone. His advisors and surrogates also live in a constant state of war — from ideological scrapper Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart boss who Trump just picked as chief White House chief strategist, to spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, known to wear a literal necklace of bullets during her media appearances. Meanwhile, Trump’s alt-right fans — particularly those who learned virtually everything they know about politics from 4chan and Gamergate — are happy to serve tirelessly in Trump’s unofficial meme army.
Popular elitism: Given Trump’s penchant for superlatives, is it any shock to find his fans declaring themselves “the best supporters?”
Everybody is educated to become a hero: Declaring that “I alone can fix it,” Trump famously presented himself as the one true savior of American society. This makes voting for him, or wearing a Make America Great Again hat, itself a kind of heroism.
Machismo: The constant sexual boasting (including his casual admissions of sexual assault); the relentless misogyny; the schoolyard threats of violence — does anyone doubt that Trump wants the world to see him as the ultimate “alpha male?”
And then there’s that whole Wrestlemania thing.
Against “rotten” parliamentary governments: Trump clearly has very little comprehension of how government works, seeming to think that the president has or should have almost unlimited power. We’ll just have to see what happens the first time a legislative body stands in the way of his political desires.
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak: Trump’s fans have invented a whole weird lingo of their own, calling themselves “nimble navigators” and/or “cenntipedes” and flooding the web with Pepe memes. Trump hasn’t adopted any of this lingo for himself, but he does speak his own, distinctively Trumpian, version of American English — big league! Trump’s speeches are collections of slogans and platitudes; he regularly reduces his opponents to single insulting adjectives — “lyin’ Ted,” “little Marco,” “crooked Hillary.” Trumpspeak, like Newspeak, is an impoverished language filled with thought-stopping cliches.
So there we have it.
Trump basically ticks every one of Eco’s fourteen points. And of course many of his supporters are Hitler-worshipping, Jew-hating, Holocaust-advocating white supremacists. All Trump seems to be missing, Fascism-wise, is an armband.
If you haven’t read Eco’s essay, go read it now. If you have read it, go read it again.
H/T — Thanks to Skiriki, who pointed out some of Trump’s similarities to Eco’s Eternal Fascist in the comments here yesterday.
EDIT: Added more on Trumpspeak.
@TommyS
You have sealed your fate
By willingly ignoring
a campaign of hate.
Next time would you please
Think twice on what you will post?
Pretty pretty please?
Didn’t stick the flounce. 2/10.
Come down off that cross, kid.
If this was your favorite site, and you’ve been reading the comments, you’d know how things are around here, and how things work.
So I guess you haven’t been reading the comments.
I don’t think we’ll miss you, to be frank.
Free speech has been defended.
https://www.facebook.com/socialistmemecaucus/photos/a.261275940655458.58229.261266100656442/1073141852802192/?type=3&theater
TommyS sounds exactly like my Bernie or Bust brother. Didn’t vote because he literally would not distinguish between Hillary and Dump. The white, straight, male privelege is really strong, guys. Really really strong. My brother is a brocialist and he really really really hates Anita Sarkeesian.
I think a lot of us here at WHTM are discounting how much vindictive GamerGaters overlap with Sanders supporters and were so angry an openly FEMINIST woman ‘stole’ Bernie’s spot they literally stayed home, stuck their thumbs up their asses just so they could crow that Dump won and it’s all the fault of Anita Sarkeesian and Rebecca Watson and the rest of the SJWs.
@The Adjunct: Indeed. It was they whose fucking we wished for. The “Bernie Gloaters”.
@Pho with Beef and Basil
Thank you for saying this. I hadn’t made that connection but it’s so true.
Edit: Your nym makes me hungry. :p
Why the fuck should Trump be given a chance? He’s burned his bridges with reasonable and decent people a long time ago. As Maya Angelou said when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.
We know what his actions will be. Judging by him and the people who work with him, nothing good will come from his reign. Good things might come from opposition to him, but i see absolutely no reason to ”give him a chance”.
Take a look at this:
@skybison
Take that one as a freebie, because he didn’t need to whip up frenzied militarism or proclaim the supremacy of the military. The U.S. has been doing that for 60-plus years now.
@MassHysteria
You clearly have no clue what you’re talking about, please shut your pie hole until that changes.
Actually, nothing distingiuishes the ‘traditional far right’ from fascism except a couple of rhetorical flourishes.
@Kale
And you’d be right, too.
@MassHysteria:
Can you tell me how gay marriage is settled law and should be decided by the states, but Roe v Wade isn’t?
The amount of stupidity in your post is staggering.
Go the fuck away.
I’ve calmed down a bit, @TommyS, I apologize! I’ll be brief in my reply, since it seems you’ve taken a jetpack.
Er… two replies to this.
First one’s dorky. “Information” is composed of “Facts”. You don’t vet your information with facts. It’s already facts.
Second – “vetting” is difficult, and the fact that you so boldly state that you “vet your information with facts” suggests to me that you don’t know how to go about doing that. It’s very easy to feel confident in your position, but very, very hard to actually be confident.
Rule of thumb: If you don’t have an enormous, anxious weight in your gut from “Oh my god I could be wrong about everything” that keeps you up all night and makes you hesitant to mention your positions at all? You’re probably wrong. Ref for that is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Source: I am an artificial intelligence researcher who researches the ontological structure of knowledge.
We noticed. We agree that it’s terrible.
So why do you want us to just lay down and let one of the corruptors of American Democracy get his hands directly on the levers of power? With politicians there’s at least some leverage. With Trump, the brakes are off.
If it’s any consolation, I don’t think you’re lying about this. It shows well on you to demonstrate that you’re trying to be humble, and trying to communicate your opinion. I’m just not sure if you’re communicating it very well, and you’re not demonstrating any ability to understand the counter-arguments. Try focusing on that.
Not sure how you can justify giving him a chance, when doing so puts so much on the line. He’s said he’s going to deport 3 million people – after the election! He wants to put a climate change denier as the head of the EPA! His chief of staff runs a white supremacist website! His cabinet is filled to the brim with lobbyists, life-long politicians and CEOs! This is not a man that should be given a chance!
“I don’t know how to defend myself, so I’m just going to say you’re all terrible and leave”
If you’ve been here that long, you know what this commentariat is like. We’re raucous, we disagree all the time, and we have no problem at all telling someone off if we think they’re being terrible.
Keep posting, learn to take on new perspectives, and maybe you’ll grow and change. Or leave and stay stagnant, assured of your superiority.
Your choice.
I’ve been seeing this weird argument a lot the last week where someone argues that Donald Trump voters are bigots (or at least OK with bigotry) and someone makes the “counterargument” that Clinton was a weak, pro-establishment candidate.
Both of these are true. The people who voted for Trump and the people who stayed home* rather than vote for Clinton are two different groups reflective of two different problems.
Anyone saying we should be conciliatory to bigots is basically arguing that the people who stayed home are also bigots. But if they were, why didn’t they vote for Trump? We can and should condemn the Trump voters and reach out to the missing Democrats.
* Yes, there was voter suppression too, but not nearly enough to explain the 9 million people who voted for Obama in 2008 who were missing in 2016.
@scildfreja: “Source: I am an artificial intelligence researcher who researches the ontological structure of knowledge.”
Sorry for the OT, but that sounds like a really interesting field of research.
As for the election results… I just don’t know what to say except I’m sorry. 🙁
@scildfreja
In my dotage, I’m pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in software development and am especially fascinated by AI’s machine learning child.
I think it was really nice of MassHysteria to come ‘splain to us how Umberto Eco tots has no clue what he’s talking about because Wikipedia said so.
It transpires that also present at the Trump/Farage meeting was Raheem Kassam. He was a previous candidate for the UKIP leadership but he was rejected for being too right wing. Yup, someone so far right even UKIP won’t have him. He’s also something to do with Brietbart.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here but it says a lot about who Trump likes to associate with.
I realized Trump’s “let the state decide” shit is just a cover to take our rights away on a national level. The states can’t replace laws instantly, after all. It can take years to replace the repeals on a state level.
All he’s doing is hitting the cue ball to break. He will pocket every ball if we let him.
“Let’s pour arsenic in the drinking water! We’ve never tried that before, so why not give it a chance?”
@dustwolves, it is! I mean, it’s also horribly pedantic and boring and picky and wrong and deeply divided and arrgghhh! But yes, it’s very interesting. Not for the faint of heart, or faint of butt.
(I was quoting Strong Bad)
@Belladonna, if you want to chase that dragon, learn:
– Hadoop or Cassandra, or some other NoSQL data storage system. I am using Apache Cassandra, which is the same backbone used by Netflix to do their streaming services. Traditional data store technologies don’t have the ability to index and search all that information out there, so you have to go with a clustered MapReduce approach.
– Apache Spark, or some other cluster computing service. I am using Spark, which is the new hotness in distributed computing. You write your script and fire it off at the Spark server, which splits it into jobs for each of your database clusters. Each cluster does its own calculation, then the results are merged as needed based on your algorithm.
(Also note: I am an idiot, because Spark and Cassandra don’t play very nice with one another. Spark works better with Hadoop.)
– Convolutional Networks. They’re basically “Traditional Neural Networks that actually work.” They aren’t perfect, of course, but you don’t need to run your training set until the heat death of the universe before it stabilizes. They (and a few other neural network structures) are at the heart of modern ML.
– Other ML techniques! You’re sort of presented with two general paths: Big Data and Big Compute. BD has huge volumes of information and processes it all with quick, lightweight, clever algorithms – decision trees and markov nets and stuff. The goal is to find mysterious trends in huge data sets in as close to realtime as possible. That’s for stuff like market prediction and Twitter analysis and stuff. Big Compute, on the other hand, uses much more heavyweight algorithms – convolutional nets and stuff – to do much more sophisticated pattern matching. It’s not as realtime and tends to have to be trained much more. Google Imagesearch, Machine Vision, self-driving cars, that sort of stuff.
Few schools will give you any of this stuff. Most of them will give you 10 to 15-year-old processes, and will say annoying stuff like “Here’s a perceptron neural net, but no one uses them anymore ’cause they have a training problem”. That was cracked back in 2006, and cracked hard. You also won’t get any NoSQL for much the same reason. It may be mentioned in a course, but you won’t really get much else.
Jump into some Khan Academy courses if you haven’t, go see what you think of the field before you dive in. It’s deliciously crunchy and mathy and interesting, but it’s not for the faint of heart, or the faint of butt.
(thanks, Strong Mad)
Happy computing!
I think TommyS should give stepping on every cactus in the world a chance. We can’t really know what it will do until we give it a shot, after all! There is no possible way to foresee any consequences from it, so why not assume that the consequences will be okay and try it out?
Let’s be honest, it’s not Dump, it’s Pince and everyone behind him. Dump doesn’t have the foresight or knowledge to plan like that. He can’t even keep a business afloat.
Ugh, this is local to me:
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/east-york-alt-right-racist-posters-1.3850386
Ugh.
<3 Rhuu
We're gonna have to get to work now up here in Canada if we want to keep similar things from happening up here in 2019. I’m starting to subscribe to local politicians, and I’m probably going to be calling them to ask whether they’ll stand against the alt-right, and let them know exactly how they intend to do it. Volunteering in general will help too.
I don’t know what will help in your situation, but I think it’s time we get off our butts and out to work. We need to make the 49th a firewall, so that we can help support our friends to the south.
Let us all know if you need help!
@Scildfreya
Thanks so much! I’ve heard of Hadoop, Cassandra, and Spark, of course, but “heard of” leaves a long way to go. So much to learn before I die!
I’ll definitely look into your list of things!
DOES ANYONE ELSE REMEMBER THIS SONG FROM 2007? THIS IS THE OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO.
HOLY SHIT.
It’s like musicians were trying to warn us or something.