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All I know is I live in a country where the leader tried to undo the last election that he lost in and at any given time you can check in and see a steady drumbeat of him and his followers arguing that we should either cancel or undermine the next one. There’s another one of those in the news right now. There always is. Sometimes it’s a ‘joke’, sometimes it’s a pitch, but it’s a decently constant backdrop to life with this administration.
At the same time, all of my international friends are quite concerned about just being randomly targeted by masked federal agents. The admin uses these agents like a way to punish his enemies, sending them en masse to cities as a spectacle and political stunt. The leader of these agents was recorded upon arriving saying stuff like “This is OUR city now”. If you look a certain way these agents will demand to see your papers. And for my international friends, I’m reminded, this isn’t a normal state of affairs for a typical country. You don’t go to Spain to study your PhD and have masked federal agents engaging in showy clashes with whole cities where you risk being nabbed off the street if your Spanish accent is off, for example.
And at the same time, the leader of my country is constantly engaging in these bizarre fantasies to conduct territorial expansion by force. He was elected for nothing of the sort but now has an entire list of territories that he constantly talks about annexing. Because he’s obviously a man who just always exaggerates and aggrandizes himself, we took it as bluster and as some strange verbal tic. But then he just out and randomly conducted a decapitation strike on a country in order, as he reiterated thoroughly was the casus belli, “to take their oil”.
Yes, him backing down recently on two separate things was a major relief, and some of the alarms that have been blaring may be able able to be turned off for the time being. But he’s clearly got authoritarian, vindictive, and grandiose instincts and it’s only a matter of what will he choose to exercise them on next.
As a possible fascist, our major saving grace is that he does seem to lack a true fascists will to power. He could have gathered up more absolute power on this timeframe. Members of his camp were actually openly mourning that he didn’t do so. He’s not a Hitler or a Mussolini. But he does clearly admire authoritarianism (a whole trove of his quotes over the years supports this), and had he been a younger man this next set of elections may be in much more danger. I would not be surprised at all if his movement produces a genuine American fascist who does take the steps that he didn’t. He’s eroded the norms of political life so thoroughly that it would no longer be a shock to the populace at all.
Rather than a committed fascist, he’s more like a Latin American strongman who just lazily sort of does what he wants while enriching himself and bucks the remnants of the former system that try to stop him. But his movement, aside from the cult of personality and yes men, is indeed made of many committed and severe ideologues, which is the major difference.
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