President Donald Trump has been on the warpath against Democrats of color in recent weeks, telling four congresswomen (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts)to leave the United States and using racially incendiary language to insult Maryland Rep. Elijah E. Cummings and the residents of Baltimore (a predominantly black East Coast city). History/international studies professor Andrew Gawthorpe, who teaches at Leiden University in the Netherlands, asserts this week in The Guardian that Trumpism, for all its racism, isn’t a full-blown fascist movement — although he warns that the possibility for one certainly exists in the United States. And he describes in his Guardian piece what an American fascism would look like.
“Even the Trumpified Republican Party is not a fascist movement, and Trump is certainly no Hitler,” Gawthorpe asserts. “Full-blown fascism usually emerges under the pressure of economic collapse or existential war, but it is constructed from pre-existing social and political raw materials.”
Gawthorpe adds, however, that “while the Trump era hasn’t seen the rise of a true fascism in the United States, it has given us sharp and painful insights into the raw materials out of which a future American fascism might be constructed.”
View the complete July 31 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.