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 Trump’s fans ultimately began chanting “lügenpresse” at journalists; the term, German for “lying press,” was originally made popular by, yes, literal Nazis in literal Hitler’s Germany.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.
@Mish
Awesome, inspiring link. All the talk of the wall got me thinking.
(Satire warning)
If Murica is going to build a WALL, we really need to make it an architectural and aesthetic splendor of a WALL. We can’t have some half-assed combination of wall and fence built with shoddy fucking materials like it seems Drump is now proposing. If Murica, goddamn Murica, is going to build a WALL, we can’t let some dumb [slur for Chinese people] from, like, 500 years ago outdo us. We need to build the best, strongest, most beautiful goddamn wall anyone has ever seen. Let’s all petition our congressmen.
@Handsome Jack
I will consider your request.
No, really.
@Mish, @Belladonna
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s mystified!
@Belladonna,
See, that is a perfect description of how I felt reading you, Scildfreja, kupo, Headologist, et al talking about programming 😀
Someone in my Facebook Discworld fan group was explaining GNU today, in terms of how it works in Going Postal. I actually sort of understood – not the details, but the overall … thing.
@Headologist, you’re obviously a fan of DW – do you want to take a shot at it for me? (no obligation, tho’)
@Kat (whose comments lately have been even better than usual),
We can form a tiny club: Mammotheers Mystified by Programming but Willing to Learn?
I need a cat today.
http://youtu.be/96xC5JIkIpQ
I don’t know Flobots outside of “No Handlebars,” and that only because Pandora thought I would like it — I did.
I’ve retreated into OK Go fluff. Behold, my kids’ favorite music video.
http://youtu.be/LWGJA9i18Co
@HawkAtreides (I love your nick btw) and @Mish – thank you both and thanks for the link.
I pretty much never know what’s going on in here, but…
Two DBAs walk into a NOSQL bar. They leave because they can’t find a table.
pahahahaha
Here’s something I wonder:
So what if Trump doesn’t tick one or two to perfect accuracy? It is now 2016, not 19-fucking-20s-40s. The situation has changed, and the forms of fascism adjust, just like everything else.
Like, OMIGOSH, what if he ticks 12 out of 14 accurately, does that mean he’s NOT in danger of being or becoming one, or running the country in a fascist fashion? Wait, he also ticks markers outside of this checklist too, what about that?
FFS, people. This is not a 1/0 checklist that needs all signs ticked, this is more a Bayesian one, where even tiny fractions add up to that “yep, ring the alarms right now” result. Think of it being built like Bayesian spam filtering.
@ Mish
I am indeed a fan
@ Mish
I am indeed a fan, but sadly I have not read all of even the most popular books and in my attempt to slowly collect and read them, Going Postal is not one I have found. So… Remind me in a year or so? XP
Crap, double post. Sorry everyone.
@Mish
I’m assuming you’ve not read Going Postal then?
Basically, the ‘clacks’ is an optical telegraph, much like some that saw minor use in the 18th century on Earth. In addition to text that people pay to send, operators add prefix letter that say what to do with the message; not unlike header info in an email. Among these letters are G (Means ‘this message continues on past this station), N (Means ‘don’t record that the message went through), and U (Means ‘if you’re the end of the line, turn the message around and send it back). Thus, a GNU coded message just keeps getting sent up and down the line. The original purpose of these codes was to test the equipment and locate breaks in the line and such, but as in real life it took a full 30 seconds before code geeks were thinking of other things to do with them.
Hah! I like that. I shall have to remember it.
@Skiriki
Shifting the goal post, nice.
@The person I was talking to who linked the Paxton Article, I’m too tired to see straight, I didn’t look up your name again, not a jab, sorry, just too tired:
I hesitated to link this article myself, because it completely refutes David’s point. Paxton’s position, as an expert, isn’t clear cut at all. David and Eco, non experts, are absolutely certain. This is what I was pointing at: this list is bullshit. Once again, Chavez fits all boxes, as did Charles de Gaulle in the sixties, Clemenceau in 1917-1918 and Lee Kuan-Yew.
I did find some examples that show that we are back in 1933, though, such as when a resistant violently pushed a nazi down stairs from behind:
Or when a resistant had to argue with with a Jew about why he needed to be saved:
Or when a Jew verbally assaulted people unprovoked and just walked away:
Clearly, this is 1933 all over again. I see the racist acts that seem to rise right now. I also see the number of Hillary supporters who would not get off Trump’s ass for not saying he would recognize the results, verbally and physically assault people for wrongthink. There’s a million very good reasons to vote for Trump over Hillary. Since you’re interested in minorities opinions, I’d suggest talking to Lebanese Christians and ask them how they feel about Hillary’s links with Qatar. That woman was a disaster, and you won’t get me to feel sad about a billionaire Secretary of State who couldn’t become president, even if it echoes a bullshit trauma she made up of 14 year-old her wanting to be an astronaut, which is absolutely not a cliche anyone can get from every American movie ever made.
Oh and in 1933, Hitler had been designating the Jews and foreigners as enemies for about 15 years, and had attempted a coup with a militia he had created, which got him to jail. Clearly, we’re dealing with the same type of man here.
Get a grip, dialectic is your friend. You’ve explored the hypothesis that Trump is a fascist ad nauseam, now put it aside for a second and try to prove the opposite. At this point you’re just all pushing each other to become more agitated as time passes.
@MassHysteria:
It’s not goalpost-shifting if the situation has changed, dumb-ass.
Oh yes, a registry for Muslims is so unlike a registry for Jews. Piss off, troll.
Ah, dear.
I’m gonna have to reply to this, aren’t I?
Gimme a few. Long day.
http://orig15.deviantart.net/e5dd/f/2012/085/0/a/tired_fluttershy___vector_by_regolithx-d4txele.png
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes — *tag*.
Over to you, I’m gonna go to bed, way past midnight and I might turn into a Gremlin.
@MassHysteria
“That list doesn’t work because Chavez wasn’t a fascist he was a communist.”
https://panampost.com/valerie-marsman/2014/10/24/the-fascism-of-nicolas-maduro-and-hugo-chavez/
Oh look another one who fell for the propoganda that Chavez was anything other than a fascist thug that deserved to be shot old yeller style by a man who lost his friends to him.
Note to self:
The fascist racists are the ones being persecuted, not the minorities that are worried about the Nazis taking over the country.
“A million reasons to vote trump”
Because if you’re a nazi persecuting minorities and ignoring a rise in hate crimes Trump might as well be conservative jesus.
So would you kindly fuck off.
@Scildfreja:
I would have responded more comprehensively, had I any desire to slog through MassHysteria’s noxious emissions. In my opinion, I gave them all the treatment they deserved. But if you do respond to this ass-hat, I look forward to it.
Preemptive +1 for ban/delete, because holy shit.
Well…
I’m not even reading it. Or watching.
@HawkAtreides, on the floor again with a head full of rain
The nazi tells us
That his group are the chosen
And us the bad ones.
Funny is his pick
Of using chinese people
When Trump uses them.
David please ban this sophist for his verbal pollution and fascist tendencies.
@Moss
One MAJOR difference is that those particular Hillary supporters were nasty to those Trump for things they chose. Whereas there have many Trump supporters being nasty to people for things they did not choose. And there will be many more, unfortunately.