https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-13-2024
"“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you
about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist.
He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the
nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to
the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council,
described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward.
Trump appointed Milley to that position.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican
immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant
stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule
for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in
Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used
increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea
that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that
they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or
executed, with the help of the military.
Myah Ward of
Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have
escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country
from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,”
and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris
“has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from
the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and
mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your
community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called
The True
Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a
disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they
previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously,
economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a
leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and
thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who
that is doesn't really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the
troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly
behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats,
deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric
works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's
behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing
with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in
order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that
enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they
behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated
badly."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
