'America Is At A Fascist Turning Point,' By Thom Hartmann
- 'America is at a fascist turning point — and only totally disempowering and humiliating Trump will stop it.'- Will our leaders and media have the courage to do it? Medium, Jan. 17, 2021.
If Trump isn’t exposed as a weakling fraud, our country dies. Battle lines are now drawn in neighborhoods, workplaces, and even families, as longtime relationships are torn apart over loyalty to America’s strongman fascist leader, Donald Trump. The main key to fascism, the one element that shows up in fascist takeovers worldwide and has for a century, is the emergence of a strongman leader who uses age-old aspects of toxic masculinity to draw in and hold his mostly-male followers.
While the ground is typically laid by an economic crisis and political power vacuums, the strongman and his masculinity-based rhetoric and actions are key to the movement really taking off.
Whether it’s the fascism of the 1930s with its well-remembered Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, or the fascism of Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Bin Salman or Donald Trump, the key that turns on the takeover is a strongman leader who promotes a macho values set and remaking of society in a brutal and predictable way. When we think of authoritarians, we typically think of men like just mentioned. But the majority of authoritarian-leaning people in society aren’t authoritarian leaders, they’re authoritarian followers. Science says they’re about 20 percent of any population.
While such followers may project their authority and compensatory “strength” by brutalizing their families or, when given legal authority like joining a police force or running a business, brutalizing their community or employees, at their core they’re longing for an authoritarian leader they can follow in the way the knights of legend swore “loyalty to the death” to King Arthur. The attraction to the strongman comes from his projection of masculinity, which draws authoritarian follower-types like a magnet, usually demonstrated by his willingness to break laws and norms in the service of his power and his claimed (and usually simplistic) “solutions to the problems of society.” Misogyny is also always featured in fascistic authoritarian regimes.
While this behavior is typically seen as antisocial and/or criminal and shunned when done by politicians and “normal people,” when a political strongman does it, it actually enhances his power and his followers’ devotion.
The world sees this today with fascist leaders like President Rodrigo Duterte of The Philippines, who publicly ordered his police squads to execute drug dealers on the streets and in their homes with a bullet to the head, without even arrest or trial, leading to the over 10,000 drug-user murders that he frequently brags about. Last week Duterte played the most naked of the strongman cards when he said that women, who he often refers to as “bitches,” are incapable of serving in leadership positions. “You know, the emotional setup of a woman and a man is totally different,” he said on January 14th. Having a woman as a leader, he added, “[W]ill drive you nuts. This is the sad story.”...
More, https://thomhartmann.medium.com/america-is-at-a-fascist-turning-point-and-only-totally-disempowering-and-humiliating-trump-will-9106154de199
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- NEW: "A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege" | The New Yorker, Jan. 17, 2021. Luke Mogelson followed Trump supporters as they forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, using his phone’s camera as a reporter’s notebook.
Read more of Luke Mogelson's original report, “Among the Insurrectionists"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's well worth reading and remembering. It cleared up a lot of questions for me. (
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Thanks a million for posting it; I'm saving this for future reference!
