http://www.nationalreview.com/node/436201/print The Consequences of Calling Trump a Fascist Become Clear in San Jose
If you dub Trump ‘Hitler,’ can you be surprised when people oppose him with violence?
By Noah Daponte-Smith — June 3, 2016
Political violence has returned to the United States. Outside a Donald Trump rally in San Jose Thursday night, anti-Trump protesters viciously attacked the presumptive Republican nominee’s supporters as they exited the arena in which Trump spoke. This was not the first instance of mass political violence against Trump’s supporters — the fracas outside a rally in Chicago in March was probably more egregious — but it was certainly as visible and ugly as any other. You could be forgiven for mistaking it for the 1968 Democratic Convention.
If political violence is one theme of the Trump campaign — both as implicitly encouraged by the candidate throughout this long primary season and as exercised against the supporters at his rallies — a torturous debate over fascism is another. To many, Trump’s strongman tactics, his insistence on making attendees at his rallies swear oaths to him, and his apparent disregard for the separation of powers and rule of law, reek of the demons of the 20th century. Many see in Trump — and the new class of Eastern European autocrats whom he, in many ways, resembles — shades of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.
Left-wing pundits have made authoritarianism central to their critique of Trump. A December article by Jamelle Bouie in Slate carried the revealing, pithy headline “Donald Trump Is a Fascist,” and argued that to say so isn’t to launch “a partisan attack. It is the political label that best describes what the GOP frontrunner has become.” Bouie made sure to note that he wasn’t just using the label “fascist” to disparage Trump’s candidacy; rather, he argued, any dispassionate analysis would conclude that Trump was indeed a fascist, the inheritor of the legacies of the men who destroyed Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Jamil Smith had a similar take. Though he shied away from explicitly dubbing Trump a fascist, he had no problems with calling Trump’s ideas fascist — a distinction without difference. Others went further: George Clooney called Trump not only a fascist but a “xenophobic fascist” and Louis C.K. saw fit to call Trump “Hitler.” This attitude is not confined merely to the left; Robert Kagan, the neoconservative thinker, published a much-discussed op-ed in the Washington Post last month that argued Trump’s candidacy is “how fascism comes to America.”
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