Sheer fascism

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," 

Donald Trump said in Iowa in January 2016

In this ways Trump has repeatedly pointed to the loyalty of his supporters.

The situation is unique in American history but hardly unusual elsewhere. From the fascist years in Europe to the age of military coups in Africa and Latin America, periods of antidemocratic, strongmen rulers have been a feature of political systems. 

Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.

New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.

Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump:

“The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”

By the way the term witch hunt that Trump uses was also used by Berlusconi; it’s also used by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It’s very successful at getting people to feel protective of them. On one hand, these macho men are constantly portraying themselves as strong and alpha male, but through the victimhood thing, they try to appeal to people’s care for them, and people feel very protective of them.

Now this kind of a new wave of such autocrats is cresting, with Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and arguably India joining the ranks of Turkey, Belarus and Russia in having governance that revolves around one man. 

Even in China, Xi Jinping has brought personalistic rule to new heights. He has been appointed a lifelong principal.

“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” 

Ben-Ghiat said, 

“so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” 

Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for 

“a more radical form of conservatism”. 

Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.

The cult of victimhood is a fundamental part of the strongman. 

And Benito Mussolini started it off by this one manner. They don’t represent their people like democratic politicians. They embody the people. They inhabit the people. They are the bearer of the people’s humiliations their sorrows. 

Adolf Hitler did this expertly and that’s why, people felt, in his speeches, he was screaming out the pain that all of Germany felt. He was embodying Germany’s victimhood. The most successful strongmen have all known how to do this.