Thank you for putting this into the right words for me, this gets a +1000 from me.

Mutatis mutandi Trump reminds me of Huey Long: smart mouth, many ideas that actually make sense, shameless pandering to Joe Lunchpail .Trump's disgraceful attempt to imply  pervasive disloyalty by US  Muslims is analogous  to Long's  shifting   allegiance from FDR to Fr..Coughlin.

Irresponsible over simplifiers almost always do well during Recessions when the poor ( understandably) are  searching for a target for their unfocussed hate. The fun of watching Trump infuriate the Establishment is more than offset by the damage-potential of his calculated attempt to rise to power by stirring up inter group hatred.

I do not see it as a revolution of the one percent but as a clear manifestation of a one percent-er who is a would-be emperor whose clever act is to go naked in public. But, for would be emperors; Little man, little prick; big man, all prick is a fair descriptor.

I have had my share of laughs at Trump the Thunderbigot and expect to have many more.  A significant part of his shtick is comedy that could be played out by reading from a stack of right-wing bumper stickers and making faces as he did so, much like Letterman’s Top Ten nightly routines. But the comedian is not the joke. The fact that so many take his shtick seriously does in fact say something significant about our country, IMO. I would not be surprised to see his followers adapt a symbolic salute or gesture [I first made the ironic error of writing “jesture”] of some sort that would let them say everything about themselves and their beliefs as applied to Trump but which would be used reflexively and not stimulate any reflective thought at all while strengthening the animal-pack psychological response to what they see as a strong leader at a time when they think his type of leadership is needed.

So, what does “Fascism” mean today and what’s in a name? Sometimes a lot and sometimes different things to different people. Names can either  identify or misidentify the object they are attached to. A friend who was like me an agnostic who would bet that atheists are correct was very serious about a woman who was a strongly committed Christian. When they discussed their beliefs she would say that he was a Christian because of his values and that he was a Christian was very important to her. She insisted that because his values were so much the same as those of a good Christian, as she saw it, that he was one even if he rejected the name. She was correct in identifying his nature but wrong about him being a Christian. He did not believe in a deity and did not accept Jesus as his savior so he certainly wasn’t a Christian.  At some points in time in some places that might have been sufficient cause for him to be tortured or killed by people who certainly were Christians.  For a people to call themselves “Muslim” is enough for many Christians to justify killing them right now.  Some would call that one of the defining characteristics of Fascism.

A definition of Fascism is always somewhat ambiguous and most attempts to define it in its modern usage go to the nature of fascistic beliefs in relation to those who originally openly pushed those beliefs as a political ideology and named that ideology Fascism. Nobody in America, or at least damned few, today calls themselves either Fascist or fascistic. “Fascist” is now almost universally a cuss word when leveled at a person or group but it was once a name that millions proudly called themselves. The inclinations in human nature that led entire countries to openly embrace fascism and the characteristics that the word identifies have not evolved out of our nature. In somewhat of a reversal of my friend’s situation, people or groups can deny and ignore the faults of their actual nature even to themselves by denying that they are fascist and in a sense they are correct in the denial so long as they do not accept the name “Fascist”. By calling themselves “Christians”, for instance, they can claim characteristics that are diametrically opposed to their true nature or at least to the nature of the governmental choices they wish to see prevail so as to stay comfortably on top, or maybe just to get there, even though it requires crushing others.  Jesus would have kicked out their stained-glass windows.

A majority of voters in the South once called themselves “Democrats”. Their politics did not change overnight but in that case they changed their name overnight to one which more closely aligned with how they really believed. We will never have a Fascist party in the USA but we might have a fascist party right now or at least one headed more in that direction. Actually, we may have two.  

Neocons have been a tremendous force in our government for quite a while now. To the extent that “Neoconism” can be described as an ideology that follows the philosophical teachings of Strauss they probably are not fascists, there being several significant differences in what the espouse, but they have ideas that would certainly appeal to a person who made a studied choice to embrace fascism by name as many once did. By being followers of Strauss neocons acknowledge that they have given themselves both the “‘right” and the obligation to lie for manipulative purposes and then call themselves noble for doing so. Many of their lies are cogs in a machine that pushes things that fascists would vote for. The neocons are at least honest enough, some of them, to come back and reclaim the name after a few years of it being a bit of an embarrassment when it should be considered as much a slur as is the word fascist.

If we define fascism as did Dr. Lawrence Britt  or maybe Umberto Eco, then I see our country as quite fascistic in its actions beyond its shores and containing a very large and scarily growing element of fascistic thought within its borders. And so I also see Trump as funny and I do laugh at him but while doing so I do not want to let myself ignore the fact that his popularity does in fact signify a more open acceptance of fascism at least in the way I would define it.  So, call it what you will, but being voters in system called a democracy, if we the people are the water so are we a part the wave, whether we want to be or not. The modern fascist just needs a cool name that everyone can embrace and feel good about. Here is one, how about “Exceptional”?

This is not meant in any way to diss your blog, Michael, but is just thinking with my fingers. It is more of a long ramble than I expected when I began and more disjointed than I would hope but what the hell, it is snowing outside so I might as well sit in cool comfort at my keyboard and rant away, stopping occasionally along the way for a cup of coffee and a chuckle about global warming.