JackLuis
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2008
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Trumpism is a sign that faith in the American civil religion is collapsing
The author goes on to suggest that Trumpisim shows that the American civil religion, that of the Bill or Rights, Equal Justice, Separation of Church and State, etc. Has collapsed as Americans become separated from American Principles and see Politics as Soap Opera played on a large stage.
No matter who you side with in this election cycle, do you agree that we have allowed our system to degenerate rather than develop?
Even more worrying than the candidate himself, is the violent specter of Trumpism. Protesters have been forcibly ejected from Trump’s rallies, reporters have been assaulted, supporters have screamed out racial slurs to the approval of the candidate. Use of the term “fascist” to describe Trump in earnest started to proliferate this past fall. It then increased after he refused to condemn the support of David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and other white supremacist groups. As if to directly mock the concerns of everyone from establishment Republicans to the progressive left, Trump had his supporters at a rally in Florida last Saturday raised their right hands in an “oath” (to him, not the United States) whose ominous parallels to Hitler’s “Sieg Heil” seemed obvious, and intentional.
I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions on how appropriate the designation “fascist” is for Donald Trump. A good place to start is the classic and brilliant essay “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” by the recently deceased Italian literary critic Umberto Eco. He identifies “Ur-Fascism” as being defined by things like a “cult of tradition,” a sense of “action for action’s sake,” a “fear of difference,” “contempt for weakness,” and “selective populism.” You can go through and check off the similarities yourself. Trump’s omnipresent (and meaningless) call to “Make America Great Again” certainly evidences the cult of tradition, his contention that the United States has “become very weak and ineffective” shows both the contempt for weakness and a belief in action for actions sake – even to the point of abandoning the American values of due process, free speech, and constitutional rule of law which made America great in the first place. In his defense of economic policies which are traditionally read as more liberal, we see the selective populism of a candidate who doesn’t disparage the goals of the welfare state, but believes its bounty should only be shared by certain segments of the population. Eco even claims that the fascist will transfer his “will to power to sexual matters,” which we all saw during the bizarre spectacle of a major political candidate bragging about his penis size during the middle of a televised debate. In the short space of half-a-year we’ve gone from a man who was widely understood as a type of snake-oil-salesman, a huckster, and a carnival-barker, to fascist-like salutes at rallies.
The author goes on to suggest that Trumpisim shows that the American civil religion, that of the Bill or Rights, Equal Justice, Separation of Church and State, etc. Has collapsed as Americans become separated from American Principles and see Politics as Soap Opera played on a large stage.
No matter who you side with in this election cycle, do you agree that we have allowed our system to degenerate rather than develop?