Trial runs for fascism are in full flow
Babies in cages were no mistake by Trump but test-marketing for barbarism
by Fintan OToole
The Irish Times, Tue, Jun 26, 2018, 05:00
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget post-fascist what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesnt arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
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To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a mistake by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run and the trial has been a huge success. Trumps claim last week that immigrants infest the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course vermin. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
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https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trial-runs-for-fascism-are-in-full-flow-1.3543375