Behind the Stage of the Trump Show
Most news reports and commentaries on the Trump White House are delivered with an air of levity and condescension.
Trump is projected as a bumbler, an uninformed jokester who isn’t to be taken seriously. At best, reports on Trump’s exploits and tweets are given to the public as a kind of comic relief.
People laugh, throw up their hands—and move on.
Except—this ain’t a joke. Most daily newspapers have comics in them; they also have serious news coverage.
Trump—and the forces he has unleashed—are nothing to laugh about.
Consider what goes virtually unreported during this time of levity and mirth: Trump has installed more U.S. judges in less time than most of his predecessors.
These efforts will change the courts for generations.
Moreover, leftist scholars who’ve examined this government argue that we are witnessing, in the false name of populism, a kind of neo-fascism, which augers a kind of Trumpian authoritarianism that is downright ominous.
John Bellamy Foster, an editor at Monthly Review magazine, writes that what mainstream media is calling “populism” isn’t that at all. Foster argues that Trumpism is really a form of neo-fascism, which has elements similar to the European experiments of Italian fascism and German Nazism, masquerading as nationalism.
Foster cites the work of Italian philosopher, Julius Evola (1898-1974), who gave intellectual weight to the extreme xenophobia, exaltation of leaders and government/corporate collusion that typified Mussolini’s rise during the 1930s.
He also notes how fascists find “sub intellectual” support vital to their efforts.
Trumpism isn’t a joke: It’s a form of politics that has a long and disastrous history in Europe.
Call it by its true name: Neo-fascism.
Source: Foster, John Bellamy, “This is Not Populism,” Monthly Review, Vol. 69: No. 2, June 2017, pp.1-24.
—Prison Radio, March 11, 2018