It’s much easier to invoke inept comparisons than to analyze and combat the systemic decadence and decline of America By Graham Hryce, an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.By Graham Hryce, an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The ubiquitous and ongoing critique of Donald Trump from the so-called social democratic ‘left’ in America – namely that he is a ‘fascist’ – is not only inaccurate, but completely fails to comprehend Trump as a unique modern political phenomenon.
Trump is not a fascist.
Fascism emerged in the 1920s as an historically specific internationalist revolutionary political movement that sought to overthrow both liberal democracy and communism, while maintaining and preserving the capitalist economic order.
As Hungarian historian and philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs pointed out in the epilogue to his book ‘The Destruction of Reason’, published in 1953, it is simply impossible for fascist ideology to serve as a dominant ideology in Europe or America in the post-World War II era.
This is not to say that ruling liberal democratic ideologies in the West cannot manifest deeply illiberal components. Nor is it to maintain that such ideologies cannot generate authoritarian counter-ideologies that can become influential and dominant.
Even in the 1930s, fascism remained a subterranean political movement in those Western countries (America, Britain, and France) in which liberal democracy had become the prevailing political ideology in the 19th century and after World War I. (RT)
