You can hear the bass drum pounding away as you read the headline of Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times editorial: “How Republics End.” Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. Here we have the other Big Three, the degenerate offspring of the 1920s and 1930s, and the list to which Krugman proposes to add President-elect Donald Trump. “What’s about to happen here is populist style, with a heavy racist component, wedded to oligarch-friendly, middle-class destroying policy,” Krugman tweets. “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes…but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac,” adds Robert Kagan in the Washington Post. For shorthand, we can define the ideology of fascism as ultra-nationalist, populist, anti-political and authoritarian incited by calls for mass participation in extreme violence. And, indeed, according to Krugman, “it takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare.”
Krugman is just the latest to call Trump the next great fascist. Comparing Trump to Hitler has become a parlor game on the Left with the likes of Ken Burns, Angela Davis, Louis C.K., Bill Maher and SNL and some Republicans including Glenn Beck and the former Governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, joining in. When Trump began asking crowds to raise their hands to swear oaths of loyalty, the quasi-“Seig Heil” had the Huffington Post immediately decrying the similarity between a “Trump Rally… [and] a Scene from Nazi Germany.” Sporcle, a popular website of trivia quizzes, even created a new distraction: they provide a quote, and you guess who said it, Trump or Hitler. The billionaire’s rise has even created a renaissance in political cartoons:
https://the-watch.blog/2017/01/08/fascism-in-the-usa-a-rebuttal/
