Elections Live Blog: Super Tuesday Edition

Trump is many things — a demagogue, a failed businessman, a “short-fingered vulgarian” — but he is not a fascist. A lot of people for decades now have written about how “fascist” has become a mostly-meaningless epithet for someone whose policies one disagrees with, and I’m inclined to agree with those people. Fascism is best used as a historically specific term for an ideology or kind of politics and strategy. To generalize it to the United States in 2016 strips the term of any meaning. We know who fascists were, what they looked like, and what they did. We also know that, except for the places in Europe where parties with fascist lineages still exist (like the National Front in France), fascism is mostly a thing of the past. Labeling fascism also obscures the many similarities between Trump and the Republican politicians who preceded him, like Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes: none of whom were fascists, though they might have been crooks, free-market zealots, theocrats, and thinly-veiled white supremacists.

What is new and most potentially damaging to the Republican Party’s future is Trump’s embrace of protectionism and vehemently anti-immigrant rhetoric. To be sure, many Republican candidates for office in the South have run on pledges to stop immigration. But the issues of immigration and free trade have been ones on which the Republican Party leadership has consciously attempted to moderate its stance. It’s important to remember that Republicans also claim to be the business-friendly party, and many of the party’s corporate elites have an interested in cheap labor. The kind of agenda Trump pledges to implement is totally unacceptable to people who make their fortunes outsourcing American jobs to sweatshops abroad. On immigration, the fissures in the Republican Party are most visible: a split between aggrieved white working class voters who feel Latino immigrants are taking their jobs and the wealthy country club set who are more than happy to employ recent immigrants willing to work for lower wages.

Is Trump dangerous? Yes, but I think it is too early to predict whether a Trump presidency would be more destructive and dangerous for working-class Americans and people around the world than previous Republican presidencies. After the 2008 financial crisis and the disaster of the Iraq War (of which the current refugee crisis is a direct consequence), and considering climate change’s impending destructive effects, it’s hard to imagine how Trump will be meaningfully worse. Sure, political language might be more vulgar, bellicose, and polarizing than in the past. But I’m inclined to prefer outright political conflict to dog-whistle politics or racism masquerading as southern gentility. To return to the question about fascism, there is a saying about how if there is a Nazi in the room, I want to know who it is. Well, with Trump’s campaign, if there’s a violent bigot in the room, I want to know who it is, and it’s becoming easier to know.
-JL ’17

7:30 pm