No, says BU historian Jonathan Zatlin, but they can still be dangerous
www.bu.edu
This historian says Trump-GOP MAGA are not fascists because:
Fascism was a response to long-term trends and what was going on after 1918. What you see today, what Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene are saying, is completely unoriginal. It is an attempt to resurrect those responses in the interwar period to democratic and liberal rule. It’s not clear to me that you can call them fascists, since fascism was a historical phenomenon. Simply because you think violence is good, and you think racism is good, doesn’t make you a fascist.
He goes on to say today's GOP MAGA are
violent antidemocrats who are also violently racist. And the Republican Party is in danger of becoming the party of violence, antidemocracy, and racism. If there is any kind of similarity with the interwar period, it’s that you have conservatives willing to collaborate for political reasons with people who are often violent and racist and antidemocratic.
So, they aren't fascist but they sure act like them? Hence Biden's "semi-fascist" term. But we all know he meant fascist. It's a loaded term and a lot of liberals are repulsed by direct confrontation.
The historian doesn't think we should avoid confrontation:
You don’t make compromises with them. You have to call these things out. It’s important to call conspiracy theories out and debunk them. It’s a difficult thing to do, but all these things need to be called out. You cannot make alliances with people like this, because these ideas are so corrosive. [They] will swallow you whole. You cannot make idiotic statements like violence is part of democratic discourse.
I think the historian is and academic who is splitting hairs. Nobody says GOP MAGA is Nazi or Mussolini's fascism. But GOP MAGA is violent, antidemocratic, autocratic authoritarian, uses racist scapegoating, hierarchical, and nationalist. It looks like a fascist, walks like a fascist, talks like a fascist. It is fascist without the cool cars.
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