Republican Radicalization Against Democracy

Ohio Valley Militiamen

They say they are patriotic democrats, but their tactics are fascist

and their realities are fantasies

Some people believe the impeachment is a waste of time and/or energizes the ex-president's supporters. That makes no sense to me. If people do not try to defend democracy and the rule of law against what is now reasonably seen as a bigoted fascist, anti-democratic GOP, democracy and the rule of law just might be lost. Bigoted, corrupt fascism just might replace them. Those are the stakes. 

An article in The Atlantic argues that although the GOP is moderating on some policy issues in view of public opinion, it really is hardening against democracy in favor of something more reality-detached and authoritarian. The Atlantic writes:

The republican party is radicalizing against democracy. This is the central political fact of our moment. Instead of organizing its coalition around shared policy goals, the GOP has chosen to emphasize hatred and fear of its political opponents, who—they warn—will destroy their supporters and the country. Those Manichaean stakes are used to justify every effort to retain power, and make keeping power the GOP’s highest purpose. We are living with a deadly example of just how far those efforts can go, and things are likely to get worse.

And so the Biden era of American politics is shaping up as a contest between the growing ideological hegemony of liberalism, and the intensifying opposition of a political minority that has proved willing to engage in violence in order to hold on to power. This fight isn’t ultimately about policy, where the gaps are narrowing. It’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy—and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.

In 2020, some hoped that the colossal failures of the Trump administration and the shocking catastrophe of the coronavirus would usher in a similar landslide, but those hopes were disappointed. If COVID-19 and Donald Trump didn’t manage to produce a decisive result, it is hard to imagine what would. With structural polarization and high levels of party competition, blowout electoral victories are no longer a realistic path to achieving change. Instead, political movements win by making the controversial things they’re pushing part of the consensus. (emphasis added)

The article goes on to argue that urban, well-educated liberals are dominant in society and "the commanding heights of American culture are largely occupied by their ideological foes." That argument does not ring true. It ignores the fact that most of the perceived differences in values, which as usual are not named, are largely manufactured by years of relentless, outrageous authoritarian propaganda and lies from the GOP and powerful conservative media leviathans (Fox, Sinclair Broadcasting, Cumulus Media, iHeartMedia). 

The differences in worldview and values would be much smaller if one took dark free speech out of the equation. Look at the first highlighted part of The Atlantic article. The author, Chris Hayes at MSNBC, understands that propaganda is the core of authoritarian conservative messaging. He just does not connect that fact with it being a source of social and political division based mostly on dark free speech (lies, deceit, ludicrous character assassination, baseless conspiracy theories, irrational emotional manipulation (fomented fear, anger, distrust, bigotry, etc.) and partisan motivated reasoning). That fantasy, not reality, is the main source of left vs. right differences.

The real fundamental difference is that conservative anti-democratic authoritarianism is pushing for concentrated power by suppressing elections and ignoring the rule of law and other democratic norms. The fascist right is trying to destroy democracy and the rule of law by calling it a patriotic attempt to save them. That is the most important basis of major left vs right differences. In my opinion, most of the differences are illusory. Even differences over abortion arguably are significantly or mostly illusory in view of the human condition and the power of dark free speech to distort reality.

Hayes ends his essay with this thought:

Yet the fight to democratize political power is precisely what is most necessary. Any progress toward that goal, any effort to push back against minoritarian control, will lead to bitter conflict. But there is no way to avoid that fight if we’re to defeat the growing faction that seeks to destroy majority rule. No substantive victories can endure unless democracy is refortified against its foes. That task comes first.

That makes a lot of sense. Centralization of political power by an intimidation[1] and propaganda-powered minority is the real threat.

Footnote:

1. The New York Times discusses the intimidation aspect of an armed, vocal GOP minority in an article, ‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants:

Actions taken by paramilitary groups in Michigan last year, emboldened by President Donald J. Trump, signaled a profound shift in Republican politics and a national crisis in the making. 

Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

Regarding the Impeachment Trial

So far, the ex-president's defense looks weak at best and otherwise ridiculous. Regardless, it will be sufficient to provide cover for republican Senators to vote against conviction. Maybe a possible public backlash might change some fascist GOP minds. But maybe not.

The first defense argument throws the coup attempters under the bus. The attorney urges prosecution of all of them. But otherwise the defense ignores the coup attempt and talks about all sorts of things other than what happened on Jan. 6. Here, the ex-president shows his loyalty to himself before loyalty to those deceived and misguided supporters who went out on a limb for him.

The next argument was expected. It says that there is no basis for impeachment now because the ex-president is out of office. Those arguments were not convincing. The House managers were convincing that there is a basis to impeach now. The House managers also pointed out that the ex-president's lawyers simply ignored two arguments in the House legal brief. That evinces the legal weakness of the defense.  

The House raised an emotional allegation 'snap impeachment' and an erratic rush to impeachment. The fear mongering there is that the Senate should not to set such a damaging precedent. Again, the defense raised no evidence that they claim was overlooked. Not one shred. All of the evidence I am aware since the House impeachment vote is against the ex-president, not for him.

On top of that, the ex-president's defense is riddled with lies and crackpot legal reasoning. The Washington Post writes: 

Former president Donald Trump will probably be acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial that is set to begin Tuesday.

But just because Trump’s defense is likely to succeed — by giving at least 34 senators a reason not to vote to convict — that doesn’t mean it’s good. On the eve of the trial, the defense team reinforced just how haphazard and strained its efforts have been.

Trump’s defense has rested on arguments that do little to address his culpability for allegedly inciting the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. It has argued that the proceedings themselves are unconstitutional and that Trump has a right to free speech — without focusing much on the established limits on such speech, which include incitement.

While making their constitutionality argument, for instance, Trump’s attorneys repeatedly cite constitutional law professor Brian Kalt’s analysis — no fewer than 15 times, in fact. They note that Kalt has cited the words of founders such as Alexander Hamilton, saying that “Hamilton seemed to believe that removal was a required component of the impeachment penalty, which suggests that he viewed late impeachment as impossible.”

As Kalt has noted, though, the 2001 analysis they cite actually argued in favor of an impeachment and trial after an official was out of office. Kalt merely cited the evidence for both sides and then disputed arguments such as the one above.

When lawyers have a weak hand, they have to make weak arguments. That's all they can do. But in court they cannot lie. Lying is what the ex-president's lawyers did. But they will probably face no ethics or other repercussions because they are talking to the US Senate. Lying to senators in an impeachment trial is apparently just fine and dandy.

Another WaPo article points out another whopper from the ex-president and argued in his legal brief:

President Donald Trump was “horrified” when violence broke out at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, as a joint session of Congress convened to confirm that he lost the election, according to his defense attorneys.

Trump tweeted calls for peace “upon hearing of the reports of violence” and took “immediate steps” to mobilize resources to counter the rioters storming the building, his lawyers argued in a brief filed Monday in advance of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. It is “absolutely not true,” they wrote, that Trump failed to act swiftly to quell the riot.

But that revisionist history [lies] conflicts with the timeline of events on the day of the Capitol riot, as well as accounts of multiple people in contact with the president that day, who have said Trump was initially pleased to see a halt in the counting of the electoral college votes. Some former White House officials have acknowledged that he only belatedly and reluctantly issued calls for peace, after first ignoring public and private entreaties to do so.

But the decision by Trump’s attorneys to also assert a claim about Trump’s reaction that day in a footnote to their legal brief could give the House impeachment managers an opening as they prosecute their case. Among the possible witnesses who could rebut the contention that Trump moved quickly to rein his supporters are Republican senators who will now sit as jurors in the impeachment trial — some of whom have spoken publicly about their failed attempts to get the president to act expeditiously when his supporters invaded the Capitol.

That same day, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) told conservative radio broadcaster Hugh Hewitt that it was “not an open question” as to whether Trump had been “derelict in his duty,” saying there had been a delay in the deployment of the National Guard to help the Capitol Police repel rioters.

“As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building,” he said, indicating that he had learned of Trump’s reaction from “senior White House officials.”

In real legal proceedings, lies like that are rejected and the lawyers making them are subject to ethics violations. But again, this is a political proceeding in a US Senate impeachment. Apparently, lies are acceptable in that venue.

And then, there is this from WaPo about the validity of the impeachment:

“This is not a trial of a president but of a private citizen. … This proceeding … violates the Constitution.” — Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in remarks on the Senate floor, Jan. 26, 2021

“The theory that the impeachment of a former official is unconstitutional is flat-out wrong by every frame of analysis: constitutional context, historical practice, precedent and basic common sense. It’s been completely debunked by constitutional scholars from all across the political spectrum.” — Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), in remarks on the Senate floor, Jan. 26, 2021

Scores of law professors, historians and pundits have weighed in as the Senate begins its trial of former president Donald Trump, who was impeached by the House for allegedly inciting insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Our 2019 fact check was prompted by a tweet from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally who said that “you actually can impeach former presidents” and suggested former president Barack Obama get the treatment. (This came during Trump’s first impeachment, over his dealings with Ukraine.)

Now the shoe is on the other foot. In recent weeks, some of the same scholars we spoke to in 2019 about the Obama claim have firmed up their views when asked about Trump. For his part, Gaetz is now giving kudos to the “brilliance” of Paul’s floor remarks, in which the senator argued that impeaching former officials is unconstitutional. Go figure.

No need to go figure. This is a political proceeding, not a legal one. The GOP is hell-bent on making that as clear as possible. The ex-president's lies and crackpot reasoning and GOP senators taking it seriously make that obvious.

WWJD?

 

Work with me here on this hypothetical….

Assuming Jesus actually existed/exists, and assuming that Jesus could cast a modern-day vote in a U.S. presidential election:

Question: Do you foresee Jesus the man as voting Democratic, Republican, Independent, Other (give Party)?

Since you are not God (omniscient) and therefore can’t know in advance how Jesus would vote, provide the "circumstantial evidence" as to why you chose as you did.  I.e., what evidence led you to your conclusion?

Thanks for hypothesizing and recommending.

Christian Propaganda: Fomenting Fear, Anger and Violence

Evangelical rhetoric:

10:40 to 12:00: “The madder they are, the more fearful they are, 

the more money they're gonna send you.”

Boy, oh boy, those Evangelical preachers really know how to make the congregation fearful and angry. An article by The American Prospect, The Religious Right’s Rhetoric Fueled the Insurrection, makes that clear. TAP writes:

The morning after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol interrupted but failed to stop congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election, The Dove Christian television network’s morning news program featured hard-right activist John Guandolo telling viewers that the insurrectionists showed “restraint” by not executing the “traitors” in Congress.

“I don’t see any other way out than a real armed counterrevolution to this hostile revolution that’s taking place, primarily driven by the communists,” said Guandolo, who trains law enforcement agencies to view Muslims as terrorist threats.

These leaders and media outlets inflated the stakes of Trump’s re-election campaign and post-election efforts to “stop the steal” by portraying them as part of a spiritual war between good and evil. In their telling, Trump was the divinely anointed leader of the forces of light, and his opponents were agents of Satan bent on crushing religious freedom and destroying the American republic. Prayer and calls for spiritual warfare were blended with invocations of “1776.”

Paula White, a longtime spiritual adviser to Trump, used her position as a White House aide and campaign spokesperson to engage in the fearmongering strategy to get conservative Christians to vote for Trump. “They want to take our churches,” she said at an Evangelicals for Trump rally last summer. “They want to take our freedoms. They want to take our liberties. They want to take everything.”

At that same event, Atlanta-area megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin warned that if evangelicals didn’t mobilize to keep Trump in power, they wouldn’t get a second chance to protect their freedom or their children’s future: “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

In September, Pentecostal televangelist and religious-right activist Rick Joyner announced on Jim Bakker’s television show that God has “seeded” the country with military veterans to head up Christian militias in preparation for civil war. In October, he assured his viewers that life for most Americans would go on pretty much as usual during the coming civil war because the militias would be focused on “inner cities.”

At a religious-right rally on the National Mall in September, Frank Amedia, a former Trump campaign adviser who founded the POTUS Shield network to wage spiritual warfare on Trump’s behalf, warned people not to stand in the way of God’s plans to return Trump to office, saying, “This is not a time to contend with God and his plan upon this nation and this Earth right now, for the fury of the Lord has gone out and shall accomplish that which he has said he shall do.”

When it became clear that Trump had lost, and that his response would be to deny the legitimacy of the election, most of his religious-right backers joined him. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and other right-wing leaders associated with the Council for National Policy—a secretive umbrella group of right-wing organizations—signed a letter in mid-December urging state legislatures to override voters and stating, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”

Jericho March, organized by two Trump administration staffers who said God had given them visions to get Christians into the streets to protest “corruption” in the election, teamed up with religious-right activist Ed Martin and Stop the Steal activist Ali Alexander to organize a December 12 “prayer rally” on the National Mall. They called it “Let the Church ROAR.”

Among the roaring speakers was Stewart Rhodes, founder of the extremist Oath Keepers, who warned that if Trump didn’t use the military to stay in power, militias like his would be forced to engage in a “much more bloody war.” Metaxas, the rally’s master of ceremonies, was apparently not troubled by Rhodes’s threat, responding with a “God bless you” and telling the crowd that Rhodes was “keepin’ it real, folks.”

California pastor Ché Ahn, a leader of the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, called the “stolen” election “the most egregious fraud” in U.S. history and said, “I believe that this week we’re going to throw Jezebel out … and we’re gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” (emphasis added)

The TAP article continues like this. There is plenty of evidence of how some or most pro-ex-president Evangelicals viewed the 2020 election. Those people were made fearful and enraged on the basis of blatant lies. 

After the coup attempt of Jan. 6, a few of the radical religious preachers stepped back and disavowed the political violence. That does not absolve them of their culpability or the immorality or evil of misleading their flocks and opening their minds to a civil war based on no real threat. The only threat was and still is the centuries old Christian persecution myth. 

The church is the state

Assessing threat

Lots of data from social science research makes it clear that humans are generally lousy at estimating risk. Various unconscious biases tend to skew risk assessments unless people are shown risk data. Even then, some reject the data because they unconsciously feel threat, not consciously assess threat. The unconscious mind often overrides or distorts facts and reasoning when emotions like fear and anger are in play. Uncontrolled emotions tend to make most people, me included, less rational.

In view of the rhetoric TAP article cites, what is the risk of radical right Christianity starting a bloody civil war? Some of the rhetoric explicitly calls for violence. Under current circumstances, a large-scale civil war seems very unlikely. The threat of Christian violence is now on the radar screens of everyone who is paying attention and the ex-president does not have his national platform to keep spewing his poison and lies from. Those factors probably lessen the Christian threat.

Did the preachers and others who incited violence cross the line and break laws against inciting violence? If not, should the laws be made clearer or broader, or is that too risky? Is it unreasonable to even consider pro-violence right-wing Christianity a significant threat? 

Legitimate threat or innocent posturing?

It goes from posturing to threat the instant the 

trigger is pulled and innocents are harmed or killed

Thanks to PD for pointing out the TAP article.

Christian Nationalism and Violent Christian Extremism

A long Politico article, It’s Time to Talk About Violent Christian Extremism, reports an interview with Elizabeth Neumann. Neumann is a former official at the Department of Homeland Security. She is a devout Christian. She resigned from the T**** administration in April 2020. Politico reports:

Now, after the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory helped to motivate the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with many participants touting their Christian faith — and as evangelical pastors throughout the country ache over the spread of the conspiracy theory among their flocks, and its very real human toll — it’s worth asking whether the time has come for a new wave of outreach to religious communities, this time aimed at evangelical Christians.

“I personally feel a great burden, since I came from these communities, to try to figure out how to help the leaders,” says Elizabeth Neumann, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security who resigned from Trump administration in April 2020. The challenge in part is that, in this “particular case, I don’t know if the government is a credible voice at all,” she says. “You don’t want ‘Big Brother’ calling the local pastor and saying, ‘Hey, here’s your tips for the week.’”

Neumann, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, is a devout Christian. Her knowledge of that world, and her expertise on issues of violent extremism, gives her a unique insight into the ways QAnon is driving some Christians to extremism and violence.

She sees QAnon’s popularity among certain segments of Christendom not as an aberration, but as the troubling-but-natural outgrowth of a strain of American Christianity. In this tradition, one’s belief is based less on scripture than on conservative culture, some political disagreements are seen as having nigh-apocalyptic stakes and “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through the faith. For this type of believer, love of God and love of country are sometimes seen as one and the same.

Christian nationalism is “a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom,” Neumann says, referring to teachings that posit America as God’s chosen nation. Christians who subscribe to those teachings believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage, Neumann says.

“[Christian nationalists] see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us,” she says. “When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

We saw any number of people spending more time online looking for answers. You had increases in militia movements. The Moonshot CVE Group, which studies radicalization, said that in states with stay-at-home orders that lasted 10 days or longer, [online] searches for white-supremacist content increased by 21 percent. In states where there either weren’t stay-at-home orders or they lasted nine days or fewer, that increase was only 1 percent. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen, but we predicted that we would see violence in some form or fashion. The militia that attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — that was horrible, but not really shocking. The violence at protests? Not surprising. And the fact that you had white-supremacist groups using the protests to commit accelerationist violence was also not surprising — even though the president thought it was Antifa. We knew we were going to see more radicalization and violence.

The combination of that on top of a pandemic, on top of a campaign where the president was sowing his own conspiracy theories and laying the groundwork for what eventually became [the lie] that the election had been stolen — well, some would say he started laying the groundwork four years ago. For people who studied disinformation, it became clear that the call was coming from inside the house. That kind of primordial soup makes conditions ripe for vulnerable individuals to move into this space. QAnon is not designed to be logical; it’s designed to meet these emotional and psychological needs. 

Q: Do you see anything about the evangelical tradition that could make its believers more susceptible to QAnon? 

A: I really struggle with this question. I’ve been trying to figure out how it is so obvious to me — and I don’t mean to pat myself on the back. I actually do read the Bible. Yet there are people who read scripture and attend church but are also die-hard into believing the election was stolen or have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. What’s the distinction there? I find that hard to answer.

There is, in more conservative Christian movements, a strong authoritarian streak, where they don’t believe in the infallibility of their pastor, but they act like it; they don’t believe in the infallibility of the head of the home, but they sometimes act like it; where you’re not allowed to question authority. You see this on full display in the criticisms of the way the Southern Baptist Convention is dealing with sexual abuse, which is so similar to the Catholic Church [sex abuse scandal]. There is this increasing frustration that church leaders have [this view]: “If we admit sin, then they won’t trust us to lead anymore.” But if the church is not a safe place to admit that you messed up, then I don’t know where is — or you clearly don’t believe what you preach. 

Another factor is Christian nationalism. That’s a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom. It’s subtle: Like, you had the Christian flag and the American flag at the front of the church, and if you went to a Christian school, you pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and the American flag. There was this merger that was always there when I was growing up. And it was really there for the generation ahead of me, in the ’50s and ’60s. Some people interpreted it as: Love of country and love of our faith are the same thing. And for others, there’s an actual explicit theology. 

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us. They view the last 50 years of moral decline as us breaking our covenant, and that because of that, God’s going to remove His blessing. When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.  

Now, here’s the caveat: Some of that fear is not out of thin air. There is a real “cancel culture,” where you see a mob mentality swarm on somebody who holds a biblically based viewpoint on, say, gay marriage, and you see someone forced out of a position or lose sponsorships or advertising. But they follow that to what they think is a logical conclusion — that eventually, pastors will not be able to preach against homosexuality or abortion, and if [they do], they’re going to end up arrested and unable to preach. I’ve heard that argument made multiple times over the last 10 years. The irrationality is the idea that there are no protections, that the courts wouldn’t step in and say, “No, the First Amendment applies to Christians as well.” (emphasis added)

The article goes on at length in this vein. One point is clear: Christian Nationalism and other Christian practices has led to a fusion of God with country and violence in defense of God and country is justified. This is the kind of mindset that fits with anti-democratic authoritarianism, including fascism.

A past discussion here discussed the tactics that church leaders use to generate money. At ~10:40 to 12:00 of the interview below, Evangelical Rev. Rob Schenck discusses what he was told by professional fundraisers about how to keep his revenues flowing. Specifically, to keep revenues up he had keep his congregation angry and fearful: “The madder they are, the more fearful they are, the more money they're gonna send you.”

It is easy to see that congregations are irrationally being made fearful and angry by church leaders they trust, the Christian persecution myth. In turn, that unjustified fear and anger can lead to acceptance of fascism and use of violence in defense of God and country, which are one and the same. Democracy and political opposition become the enemy of the people.

Conservative, radical right, authoritarian, fascist, tribe, cult

They all loved it and supported it --

now they own the beast and its legacy

The GOP's opinion 

What are the best labels for the pro-ex-president wing of the GOP and the less pro-ex-president wing? Today, the GOP tends to refer to itself as moderate to conservative, patriotic, democratic and fully grounded in facts, true truths and sound reasoning. It sees itself as a big tent party and open to competing ideas and internal dissent.

My opinion

Years ago the GOP was generally conservative and moderately tolerant of internal dissent and differing policy choices. After Obama won the election in 2008, the party morphed into a radical right authoritarian tribe, although that process had been underway since the 1980s or maybe even earlier. Obama's election crystallized the transition. 

Then on Jan. 6, most of the GOP leadership and rank and file membership supported the coup attempt to keep the ex-president in power. That crossed a line and converted that part of the GOP into a fascist personality cult. Both the radical right authoritarian tribe and the fascist personality cult sharply departed from reliance on facts, truths and sound reasoning. Instead, those phases of the party's evolution turned to full blown embrace of lies, deceit, emotional manipulation, partisan motivated reasoning and fantasy, often including some crackpot conspiracy theory or another. 

Upon conversion to the radical right authoritarian variant, the GOP went from moderately or mildly pro-democracy to solidly anti-democratic, e.g., via aggressive voter suppression and constant attacks on the legitimacy and motives of political opposition. It also fully converted to a small tent party with little to no tolerance for dissent or competing ideas. Years of RINO hunts had mostly ideologically cleansed the party of center-right, moderate and liberal republican voters and politicians. The last great RINO hunt is underway now between the remnants of the old radical right authoritarian GOP and the new fascist personality cult GOP. Each side is fighting tooth and claw for total dominance.

Experts opinions

One expert, Robert Paxton, Columbia professor and author of The Anatomy of Fascism who embraced the fascism label for Trump, has this definition of the pro-Trump movement from his book:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Another expert, Sheri Berman, (political science, Barnard College, author of The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century), disagrees:

We should reserve the term “fascism” for leaders or movements that are not merely authoritarian. Fascists were revolutionaries, they aspired to control the state, economy and society (totalitarian vs authoritarian), had large, organized mass movements behind them (which included institutionalized paramilitaries alongside control of the military as well as extensive secret police and intelligence services) and of course came to power after democracy had largely failed. So to my mind Trump (and the Republican party) remain better characterized as pseudo-authoritarian rather than fascist — both because of their particular features/characteristics and because for all its weaknesses and flaws, American democracy (at least thus far) has not deteriorated to the point where constraining institutions no longer operate.

Commentary:

#1: The the ex-president's slogan and ethos of “Make American Great Again” is intended to evoke a sense of national decline, humiliation, and victimhood, particularly on the part of white Americans. And on January 6, at least, the movement attempted to use redemptive violence unchecked by the law to achieve a kind of “internal cleansing,” complete with killings of opposition lawmakers.

But a few caveats: Fascist movements in the 1930s genuinely rejected liberal democracy, not just in practice but as an ideal worth aspiring toward. The de facto position of Trumpists in recent weeks has been to overturn democratic election results, but importantly, that is not what they perceive themselves as doing.

#2: There’s a distinction between more modern forms of authoritarianism and historical fascism. Fascists saw themselves as challengers to elected institutions and democratic forms of government. Hitler and Mussolini canceled elections once they consolidated power; today, regimes like Putin’s in Russia or Erdogan’s in Turkey simply use crackdowns on opposition forces and election rigging to ensure they are not electorally challenged.

The latter model at least pays lip service to constitutional and democratic norms, much as Trump continues to insist that he should be president not because the democratic system is corrupt but because he in fact won according to democratic norms. This approach is no less authoritarian, but for the reasons Berman describes, it’s arguably less fascist.

#3: A dispute over another word — “coup” — can shed some light on if and why the dispute matters. Multiple scholars of international relations who study coups argued in the wake of the riot on January 6 that the term “coup” was inaccurate. One observer wrote this about that:

“At no point did yesterday’s protestors attempt to actually seize control of the levers of state power— nor did anyone watching think these goons were now running the government,” Erica De Bruin, assistant professor of government at Hamilton College and author of How to Prevent Coups d’État, wrote.

To critics, this is splitting hairs. In a pointed meme, sociologist Kieran Healy translated commentators saying, “It’s not a coup because it doesn’t meet the technical conditions of the military branch yadda yadda yadda …” as actually saying, “I have a very comfortable job.”

The split on “fascism” feels akin to the split over “coup,” and both arguments seem to suffer from some confusion over what exactly we’re arguing about. On the one side are academics who value these definitions because they enable better research and analysis. If you study coups, you need to have a clear definition of what a coup is before you start compiling data sets, looking for causes and patterns, etc. And that definition may not perfectly anticipate what people want to call coups in the future.

.... a couple of concerns about whether it’s wise for laypeople to use “fascism” to express alarm and outrage at Trump and Trumpism. The first has to do with the future, and the second has to do with America’s past.

My first concern about using the word “fascism” now is that things could get much, much worse — and at that point, will we have the vocabulary to describe what is happening? I first heard fascism comparisons flying in American politics back in the mid-2000s. I remember an adult I knew from church forwarding me a list of “warning signs of fascism” enumerated by writer Lawrence Britt back in 2003. The list, clearly constructed to evoke aspects of the Bush administration, included items like “religion and ruling elite tied together,” “power of corporations protected,” and “obsession with national security.”

#4: Living in an alternative information ecosystem that has falsely told the ex-president's supporters over and over again that the election was rigged, they view themselves as defenders of the Constitution, protecting America from rampant voter fraud. Their rhetoric suggests that they see their mission as saving constitutional democracy, not undermining it. That’s distinct from, say, Nazism or Mussolini’s fascism, which did not attempt to uphold democracy even in rigged form but rejected it as undesirable.

My technical analysis

At what point does the reality of intentional propaganda that deceives, deludes and enrages people excuse their utterly baseless attempt to overthrow a government by violence in the name of saving it? The Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt was the first time in American history that the transfer of power was violent and bloody, not peaceful. Most of the GOP leadership in congress and some or most red state governments supported it.

What happened on Jan. 6 was an attempted coup by actual fascists. Those people and their supporters in the GOP intended to overthrow the US government by force. They said so. They all claimed to believe that the election was illegitimate, despite not one shred of evidence of widespread vote fraud, vote or vote count cheating, or widespread voter or count irregularity. The only major fraud attempts were by the ex-president, his crackpot liar supporters including the fascists Lou Dobbs, Rudi, Sydney, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Greene, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy and the ex-president itself.

Clearly, reasonable minds will differ. 

The source for this OP: https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/2021/01/27/the-f-word/

The fascist and maybe authoritarian wings of the GOP have either forgotten that episode 

or they self-delude and propagandize their own fascism into 

something they falsely believe is democratic