Obama and Clinton were neoliberal to their bones, which meant lots of Realpolitik and backroom handshake deals with fascists in order to drive down the bargaining power of labor and transfer enormous volumes of wealth to business aristocrats. Whatever you might say of their methods, the consequences of their militarism abroad and their austerity economics at home was a steady rise in global fascist tendancy.
Meanwhile, if Reagan and Bush weren’t strictly qualified as fascists, they ran as close up to the line as they could get. Religious demagogues who leveraged a business media vomiting up disinformation and race panic to cultivate a white nationalist base of support and overthrow basic democratic institutions at home and abroad. The Brooks Brothers Riot was a coup in every way that mattered. Iran-Contra involved attempts at the illegal overthrow of multiple governments. Extremely fascist.
look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems
The German state was doing a holocaust well before The Weimar Republic. They were just doing it to brown people in Africa, rather than white people in Eastern Europe.
This is more than just “Pobody’s Nerfect”. It’s marginalized because it happened to people that modern western pop-historians don’t like to talk about on The History Channel or during NPR Story Hour. But it is absolutely fascism.
The invasion of Iraq was Fascism. The invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of governments in Chile and Honduras and Brazil and Argentina was Fascism. The constant feeding of racial resentment and inflaming of conspiracy theory among Florida Cuban ex-pats is fascism. The racial hysteria at the US/Mexico border is fascism.
Obama and Clinton were neoliberal to their bones, which meant lots of Realpolitik and backroom handshake deals with fascists in order to drive down the bargaining power of labor and transfer enormous volumes of wealth to business aristocrats. Whatever you might say of their methods, the consequences of their militarism abroad and their austerity economics at home was a steady rise in global fascist tendancy.
Meanwhile, if Reagan and Bush weren’t strictly qualified as fascists, they ran as close up to the line as they could get. Religious demagogues who leveraged a business media vomiting up disinformation and race panic to cultivate a white nationalist base of support and overthrow basic democratic institutions at home and abroad. The Brooks Brothers Riot was a coup in every way that mattered. Iran-Contra involved attempts at the illegal overthrow of multiple governments. Extremely fascist.
The German state was doing a holocaust well before The Weimar Republic. They were just doing it to brown people in Africa, rather than white people in Eastern Europe.
Shark Island concentration camp
This is more than just “Pobody’s Nerfect”. It’s marginalized because it happened to people that modern western pop-historians don’t like to talk about on The History Channel or during NPR Story Hour. But it is absolutely fascism.
The invasion of Iraq was Fascism. The invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of governments in Chile and Honduras and Brazil and Argentina was Fascism. The constant feeding of racial resentment and inflaming of conspiracy theory among Florida Cuban ex-pats is fascism. The racial hysteria at the US/Mexico border is fascism.
Trump didn’t invent any of this.