Curt Wechsler | April 7, 2019
The membership of American white-nationalist movements has grown by more than 600% since 2012, found extremism researcher J.M. Berger in a 2016 study. “Today, they outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.” Through an unrelenting barrage of daily outrages and twitter outbursts, the Trump/Pence regime is radically remaking society – step by step hammering into place a vicious American fascism. This is not insult or exaggeration, it is what they are doing.
But the embrace of pro-Trump extremists and sponsors of hate groups isn’t limited to social media. “The hard fact is that, in the U.S. at least, a measurable minority sympathize with the white-supremacist cause,” says TIME correspondent Charlie Campbell. “Adding to the urgency are indications that right-wing extremists have been emboldened by political leaders expressing the same xenophobia and intolerance.”
“The language our leaders use matters,” adds Clark Mindock at The Independent.
According to researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, U.S. cities experienced 2.3 more assaults than average on days when hosting 2016 campaign rallies for Donald Trump. “To prevent similar violence in the future, it is important to understand the underlying causes of this behavior, perhaps including the role that politiccal rhetoric might play in normalizing or promoting violence.”
“Homegrown” or “domestic” terrorism has emerged as a transnational threat.
According to a report at HuffPost, “‘Make America Great Again’ has become more than a U.S. political slogan … for white nationalist, radical right and anti-immigrant extremists all over the world, it’s a symbol; a kind of political messaging that transcends the specifics of country and language.
“Beyond mimicking Trump’s rhetoric to rile up nationalist sentiment in their own countries, the international far right embraces the U.S. president because he helps bolster the narrative of rising support for a global anti-immigrant, anti-establishment movement. When the most powerful person in the world says that “Islam hates us” and attempts to ban Muslim immigration, it’s proof that perhaps other world leaders can achieve a similar goal.”
U.S. politicians distract with promises of a savior, relying on the regular workings of the system – voting in Democrats who refuse to recognize or acknowledge the escalation of the Trump/Pence regime’s fascist program against the people on every front. The stark reality is that in passively waiting for Congress to find a “smoking gun,” the anger of millions has been corralled, domesticated, and diverted away from the street protests necessary to create the kind of political situation in which the demand that the Trump/Pence regime be removed from power is met.
Meanwhile, all this waiting has allowed this regime to terrorize more people, take away more rights, tear up more rules and norms, threaten more violence, issue more executive orders, throw more gasoline on the climate crisis, and issue more war cries and deadlier attacks on civilians, with a finger on the nuclear button.
The Trump/Pence Regime is More Dangerous Than Ever.
Fascism rules by organized repression and terror by the government: civil liberties stripped away, law re-written, dissent criminalized, the courts packed with fascists, and the separation of powers and church and state eviscerated. As part of radically remaking society, the Trump/Pence regime sharply attacks those in positions of power who oppose them. Fascism also mobilizes mobs of vicious thugs as we saw with Nazis marching and murdering in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Fascism can and is happening in America, just as it has always been alive in America,” observes investigative reporter Andrew Mitrovica. “[Trump’s] fascistic nature – which has been on routine and undeniable display – is not a new or surprising phenomenon, nor is the nationwide succor it attracts.”
Indeed, Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, suggests that there’s something inherently fascist about American politics:
“..the Ku Klux Klan deeply affected Adolf Hitler. He explicitly praised the 1924 Immigration Act, which severely limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the US, as a useful model.
“The 1920s and the 1930s was a very fascist time in the United States. You’ve got very patriarchal family values and a politics of resentment aimed at black Americans and other groups as internal threats, and this gets exported to Europe.
“So we have a long history of genocide against native peoples and anti-black racism and anti-immigration hysteria, and at the same time there’s a strain of American exceptionalism, which manifests as a kind of mythological history and encourages Americans to think of their own country as a unique force for good…
“This doesn’t make America a fascist country, but all of these ingredients are easily channeled into a fascist politics.”
“Every wrong that has been righted in American society has come from people acting without permission and changing the game,” writes Coco Das for RefuseFascism.org. “To stop this regime, we need thousands turning into millions who take to the streets day after day in a sustained, non-violent protest movement, refusing to stop until the Trump/Pence regime is driven from power.
“Imagine the difference it would make if people flooded the streets demanding that this regime must go because it is fascist, not just because of campaign finance violations. Our interests today are the interests of humanity. Together we must take responsibility ourselves, acting in fierce and sustained opposition outside the confines of politics as usual.
“What is stopping this regime worth to you? To all of us who have joined with Refuse Fascism, it is worth everything.”