As historian Timothy Snyder points out, "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because the basis upon which to do so has been undercut. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle."
For US President Donald Trump, lying is rhetorical gimmick in which everything that matters politically is denied, reason loses its power for informed judgments, and language serves to infantilize. Trump uses lying as a tool of power to discredit any attempt to hold him accountable for his actions, all while destroying those public spheres and institutional foundations necessary for the possibility of a democratic politics.
Fascism begins first with language and then gains momentum as an organizing force for shaping a culture that legitimates indiscriminate violence against entire groups.
Coupled with a society that worships celebrity culture, the power of spectacle makes it easier for Trump and his associates to rehabilitate fascist ideas, principles, and a fascist political culture.
Faux-Populism (also Trump) is the natural outcome of a neoliberal culture of hyper-punitiveness amplified through an ascendant fascist politics that enshrines militarization, privatization, deregulation, manic consumerism, the criminalization/dehumanizing of entire people groups, and the financialization of everything.
This new era of barbarism cannot be understood or addressed without a reminder that fascism has once again crystalized into new forms. Trump's rhetoric and policies are best understood as a contemporary remnant of the proto-fascist imagination.
While there is obviously no proportional or apples to apples comparison between Trump/other Right Wing Faux Populist and the fascist societies of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet, the basic tenets of extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, and a hatred of democracy and the rule of law are too similar to ignore.
Trump's ultra-nationalism, racism, policies aimed at social cleansing, his adoration of some of the world's most heinous dictators, and his hatred of democracy (and the rule of law) echoes a period in the 1930's and 40's when the unimaginable became possible; when genocide was the endpoint of dehumanizing others, and the mix of nativist and nationalist rhetoric ended in the horrors of the concentration camps.
Neo-nazi and fascist groups have found, in Trump, someone who echoes there rhetoric of "blood and soil" and the "fear of inferior blood" and has brought it to very center of power in the United States.
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