America's Pre-Fascist President

[demmiblue]

Given its terrible history, the term “fascist” is too often carelessly invoked. But fascism does not presuppose a holocaust. For Americans, the singular presidency of Donald Trump impels a measured consideration of what fascism truly is ― and how it grows. For fascism does not supplant democracy overnight. Rather it advances step-by-step, nourished by denial and disbelief, until it overruns the safeguards protecting decency and freedom.

Is Trump an agent of incipient fascism? Start with its historic cradle ― Europe in the 1920s and ’30s.

True, America’s democratic institutions are deeply rooted. But intelligent Germans and Italians dismissed the bigotry and unreason which overcame them ― their societies were too ancient, too civilized, to yield so easily. Until they did.

How? Both countries nurtured the seeds of democratic decline. Social fissures. Groups that felt beset by inimical forces. Demagogues who promised to subdue those forces in exchange for unquestioning fealty.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-patterson-fascism-trump_us_5b61e404e4b0fd5c73d58e14?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

[empedocles]

1. Yes!

[J_William_Ryan]

2. Exactly.

[appalachiablue]

3. 'It Can't Happen Here' (1935) political novel by American

author Sinclair Lewis about the rise of a fascist dictator US president who is thought to be modeled on the contemporary and popular Louisiana politician Huey Long. The country was in deep economic trouble and social unrest at the time.

In 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, a serious planned coup to overthrow new President Franklin D. Roosevelt was attempted. Prominent US bankers and industrialists led the conspiracy commonly referred to as 'The Business Plot.'

Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, the distinguished, respected military hero was approached by agents to join the plot but refused and testified before Congress and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1934 about the fascist, anti democratic coup to take over the White House. No one was ever prosecuted and the major press dismissed the plan as a hoax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Lewis
https://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler





Huey P. Long on the cover of TIME Magazine, 1935.

[appalachiablue]

4. Plot to Overthrow FDR & Establish An Authoritarian Fascist US State, 1934.

Last edited Thu Aug 2, 2018, 07:07 PM - Edit history (1)

The rise of fascism, dictators and paramilitary groups with the aid of industrialists in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s produced forceful leaders such as Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain and later 20th c. quasi- fascist authoritarians and dictators like Juan Peron in Argentina and others in South America, the Middle East and Asia.