What Do these MAGA Fascists Want? Trump billionaires want Project 2025 to break government and restore the Gilded Age

[ericjhensal]

https://erichensal.substack.com/p/what-do-these-maga-fascists-want

Today’s politics are a puzzlement to me. We say “fascism,” and that works well enough to understand our immediate challenges. But when you turn its aspects against the background of history, our politics become much less intelligible. Why attack the size of the bureaucracy and starve it of resources in a government shutdown when fascism historically has taken a different turn.

As opposed to the Project 2025 public-sector gutting or Steve Bannon’s deconstruction of the administrative state, Hitler—after purges—increased public employment. He enforced orthodoxy but built overlapping, competing bureaucracies. Mussolini did likewise in Italy. Classic fascism depends on a strong state apparatus to impose its will. Trump does not, except through ICE. His agenda is not party-building but progressive-destruction.
What is Trump doing?

Take the Department of Education, for example. Why would a classic fascist government dismantle an agency that could crack local control over education to install a national curriculum? Overall, the United States has a large, sophisticated bureaucracy that a Hitler would have purged in part, but otherwise grow substantially. So why is a fascist Trump and Project 2025 all about downsizing government when fascists usually grow government to build support using public jobs and oppress through new state enforcers.

From the bizarre cacophony of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Opus Dei fetishists and Q-Anon hangers-on that compose MAGA red hats writ large, there emerges one unifying notion in Trump’s actions. I do not believe the power and money behind Trump’s 2nd ascendancy cares for any of these ideologies the left frets about. Nor do they want to rule through a fascistic party structure—it would be too much work. The real goal is to return to an era in the United States where property and capital were despotic kings back in the 1890s.

*snip*

[FadedMullet]

1. Is it too much to call it "Fascism Lite"? The want complete control, but to then do as little as possible in governing.

........except stop doing the stuff that governments should do.

[ericjhensal]

2. Back to the future

Well, they want government doing the things that are important for making money. Like highways and protecting property rights...it's a Neo-Gilded Age.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. Great post! Welcome to DU, Eric!

[FadedMullet]

4. Terrific post there, new guy! Welcome and keep it up. Well done.