But we did.
I don’t think he’s a National Socialist – for example, he’s an Islamophobe, not an anti-semite, per se – and is not fronting for the American Nazi Party. Trump is a Republican, and that group of people – particularly the white, older, and less affluent segments of the GOP – are very strongly attracted right now to fascist demagoguery: the strong man that will fix things through strength (and smashing the weak) and whose authority is based on charisma. Trump’s followers don’t want to hear the hair-splitting nuances of subtle policy issues, they want stark, black-and-white answers to the big questions, delivered with swagger and menace from a overconfident narcissist. And some of those questions:
- security in an insecure world (’ban all muslims’, ‘I’ll stare down Putin’)
- the browning of America (’close the Mexican border’, ‘round up all the illegals and deport them’)
- the logjam in Washington (’they’re all stupid’)
- and so on.
I’ve been predicting the rise of a populist simplifier for years now. In fact, I thought that the counterrevolution to Occupy would have been the right of a right wing populist. Maybe the Great Recession slowed that down.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/134920769222
