APOCALYPSE NOW:
● Shot: Panic Rooms Take Off as Buyers Prep for Trump, Hillary.
—Heat Street, Friday.
● Double-shot:
But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy.
* * * * * * * *
Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who singlehandedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today.
—“This is how fascism comes to America,” Robert Kagan, the left-leaning Brookings Institute, yesterday.
● Chaser:
To listen to the manner in which our friends on the left now talk about Donald Trump is to suspect that it is not. Time and time again, Trump has been compared to Hitler, to Mussolini, to George Wallace, and to Bull Connor. Time and time again, self-described “liberals” have recoiled at the man’s praise for internment, at his disrespect for minorities and dissenters, and at his enthusiasm for torture and for war crimes. Time and time again, it has been predicted — not without merit — that, while Trump would almost certainly lose a general election, an ill-timed recession or devastating terrorist attack could throw all bets to the curb. If one were to take literally the chatter that one hears on MSNBC and the fear that one smells in the pages of the New York Times and of the Washington Post, one would have no choice but to conclude that the progressives have joined the conservatives in worrying aloud about the wholesale abuse of power.
Hence my initial question: Have they? And, if they have, what knock-on effects has that worrying had? Having watched the rise of Trumpism — and, now, having seen the beginning of violence in its name — who out there is having second thoughts as to the wisdom of imbuing our central state with massive power?
That’s a serious, not a rhetorical, question. I would genuinely love to know how many “liberals” have begun to suspect that there are some pretty meaningful downsides to the consolidation of state authority.
— “Is Trump’s Rise Giving Progressives Second Thoughts?”, Charles C. W. Cooke, NRO, March 16th.