They WILL attempt to steal the 2020 election, the debacle in Wisconsin shows that they will gleefully kill their fellow citizens if they think it will give them the edge in the election. They will pull out ALL the stops for 2020.

Trump is openly encouraging the armed protesters blocking hospitals to protest stay at home orders… this is a trial run for him, he needs to see just how far he can get them to go in his name…if it looks like he cant steal the election with Russian assistance, then he will need these inbred rednecks to take to the streets.

The fact that, despite their criminal actions to subvert the election, they still lost in Wisconsin… that shows just how sick and angry people are getting with their blatant evil.

If they lose in 2020 the GOP is truly fucked… and those that supported this treason… well they will have to live with the anger of all those that have to clean up the mess they made of our nation…

And they will also have to deal with the millions mourning the deaths of loved ones the Trump supporters helped kill…

I hope every damned one of them gets the ‘thanks’ they deserve…

Its for the same reason I prefer “bourgeois” to “middle class”. I feel no need to apologize for Marxist terminology, it was perfectly valid and universally understood a century ago, even by those of us who aren’t Marxists, and still is today.

We drove the dictionary pedants off this forum a long time ago. We no longer need to accommodate them.

You, podrock and hank, devote many paragraphs to describing modern-day “fascism”, and what you’re describing is what political scientists and psychologists have been calling “authoritarian conservatism” since the first “WTF happened?” studies after WW2. The term has power to explain how we got here. People have expressed bafflement about how “respectable” conservatives mutated into Trumpists; but authoritarian conservatism explains how the authoritarianism was there all along (alongside the paranoia, as described in Hofstedters’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”), just waiting for a vicious demagogue to tease it out into the light. Trumpists are not an anomaly, they’re an evolution. An inevitable evolution from the starting conditions of post-WW2 conservatism.

I don’t know what short and catchy term describes the modern evil. It’s perhaps best labelled “authoritarian ethno-nationalist conservatism”, but that’s unwieldy and not at all catchy (in German that’s “autoritärer ethnonationalistischer Konservatismus”, but I don’t see how it reduces to something as catchy as “Nazi”). “Trumpist” does properly personalize it, much the way “Hitlerite” was a popular alternative to “Nazi”. Maybe that’s useful through the next election. Long term, well, that’s for future historians to figure out. Labels are always obvious in hindsight.

Remember Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil”?

I know that there was a whole lot of international money changing going on in the 30′s in relation to fascism. This time around it seems to be more, shall I say, mob-like? I haven’t read enough to understand how strong the rhyme of history is here.

The Information Age is putting a different spin on this phase of fascism. Much more effective (hence the term viral) than radio. And this applies to the Covid as well when contrasted to 1918. Information, good, bad, and everything in-between flows so much faster.

I agree that this occurrence does belong in the genus Fascies. But it is a new, possibly more dangerous species.

Going to go howl at the twilight with the rest of my neighbors.

Now granted, there are many flavors of fascism, but no two are identical, even if they do share much in common. Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Salazar are all the classic cases, but there are many others. There are even fascists on the Left; Stalin, Castro, Mao, I could go on.

Some are more toxic than others, but they all share one thing, one philosophy in common. They feel they deserve to rule because they and only they know the truth, any one who disagrees is not just mistaken, he is evil. That’s why they all have deadly enemies which they constantly seek out and try to destroy, or at least, banish from the body politic. Sometimes the Other is of a different race, or perhaps has different ideas on how economic affairs should be organized, or comes from a different culture or ethnic tradition, or religion. But its always US vs Them for these people.

And you know, I agree with them on that.