You know, I don't often say this, but these conservatives are on to something.

"Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign,"
Cato Institute president David Boaz 









"At a time when the nation is suffering under one of the most divisive and incompetent presidents in history, our people need positive, unifying leadership, not negative, destructive political rhetoric."
Ed Meese

Trump has made a living out of preying on and bullying society’s most vulnerable, with the help of government. He isn’t an outsider, but rather an unelected politician of the worst kind. He admits that he’s bought off elected officials in order get his way and to openly abuse the system.
Katie Pavlich





 

Liberals see fascism lurking in every Republican president. That's a shame, because America has never been inviting to fascism. True conservatism is especially hostile to fascism. The American conservative tradition has always included important elements — a libertarian skepticism of state power, a stress on localism and states’ rights, and a religious  emphasis on the conscience of an individual over the power of the collective — that inoculated its politics against fascism’s appeal.

But Trump, because he isn’t really an ideological conservative, lacks that inoculation. And while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace, he tends to differ from them in precisely the places where fascist temptations can creep in.

Buchanan, for instance, was a nationalist, but also a deeply religious man, whose campaigns were fueled as much by pro-life conviction as by populism. Not so Trump: He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.

Perot was an economic nationalist but also an obsessive deficit hawk and budget balancer, who won a lot of libertarian votes with his promise of a green-eyeshade approach to government. Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted with a hyperactive state so long as it’s working hand-in-glove with corporate interests.

Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump: When he sounds an anti-Washington note, the argument isn’t that local governments can do things better, or that local folkways need respect; it’s that he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce — er, Donald — at the top.

Whether or not we want to call Trump a fascist outright, then, it seems fair to say that he’s closer to the “proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative or his recent predecessors in right-wing populism.
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Writing for Slate  Jamelle Bouie argued that Trumpism, however ideologically inchoate, manifests at least seven of the hallmarks of fascism identified by the Italian polymath Umberto Eco.
They include:
a cult of action,
a celebration of aggressive masculinity,
an intolerance of criticism,
a fear of difference and outsiders,
a pitch to the frustrations of the lower middle class,
an intense nationalism and resentment at national humiliation, and
a “popular elitism” that promises every citizen that they’re part of “the best people of the world.”

Does this sound like Trump?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/opinion/campaign-stops/is-donald-trump-a-fascist.html