Donald Trump is not a fascist

trump-is-not-hitlerIn several posts, I’ve hammered away at the Progressive canard that Donald Trump is a fascist and that conservatives generally are fascists. My central point — always — is that American conservatives, including Donald Trump, are the antithesis of fascists because they want less government control, while a defining feature of fascism is total government control (kind of along the lines of what Obama pushed and Hillary would have pushed further).

I finally got all my disparate thoughts consolidated into a single essay that Thomas Lifson was kind enough to publish at American Thinker:

For months now, the Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.

Sadly, Kinsley reveals, as so many before him have, that academic degrees are no substitute for intelligence, knowledge, critical analysis, and basic logic. The term “fascist” is a very distinct one and Kinsley can apply it to Trump only by redefining it entirely. His is a deconstructionist effort that leeches all meaning from the word.

Because Kinsley’s essay is currently behind a paywall, let me summarize briefly what his argument is before I demonstrate what a shoddy piece of disinformation it is.

Kinsley opens in a defensive posture, absolving himself of proving Godwin’s Law, which holds that internet discussions always end with Hitler analogies. Instead, Kinsley boasts, “I mean ‘fascist’ in the more clinical sense.”

What is this clinical sense? If you plow through an endless cascade of words, Kinsley accuses Trump of being a crony capitalist, not to enrich himself and his friends, but to claim boasting rights about his skills conferring material benefits on the American people. Kinsley calls this “corporate statism,” which he says is the same as “fascism,” although he considers himself too classy to call Trump a fascist (except when he calls Trump a fascist).

As is the case with so many Leftist arguments grounded in history, Kinsley could not be more wrong. “Corporate statism” is certainly a feature of Hitler’s fascism, but it’s also been a feature of Obama’s administration. Standing alone, corporate statism, while corrupt and unfair, is not fascism. It’s just garden-variety corruption. Actual “fascism” is not just about the state’s relationship to corporations; it’s also about the state’s relationship to the luckless individuals under its control.

If you like what you’ve read so far, please read the rest here.

UPDATE: Someone much more graphically gifted than I am created this spectacular poster about political ideologies and players from Left to Right (click on image to enlarge):

political-spectrum-poster

Hat tip: G. Howell