“I have no major quibbles with what you wrote, other than (as you know already) I disagree with the notion that fascism is totally separate from economics, Fascism is about control, and control isn’t complete without economic control.”
You’ll find no serious disagreement with the view I’ve offered among any of the major experts and you’ll struggle in vain to find any sort of consistent economic policy within these regimes and certainly between them. Even fascist Chile, which I mentioned earlier, didn’t pursue, across the board, the laissez faire economic policies the regime imposed under the direction of American ideologues. They’re dictatorships, which holds certain general implications but that’s about it. You earlier mentioned Trump being a blowhard who contradicts himself on a regular basis. That’s actually typical of fascism at various stages with regard to what ordinary political parties conceive as programmatic doctrine.
“How that’s achieved is, in my view, a more secondary matter; I agree with Svetlana Voreskova that socialism (ownership of the means of product) and fascism (control of the individuals who produce and the corporations that produce) is largely a ‘distinction without a difference.’”
She didn’t do well on that. At all. But the totality of her “knowledge” of the subject was coming from quick Google searches and Wiki throughout that exchange, so I pretty much stopped expecting anything — got tired of the circular nonsense and let it be. That (rather stupid) argument was primarily focused on fascism but ended up repeatedly begging the question regarding socialism, something into which I usually don’t care to dive. The short version is that, by the time you’re down to defining “socialism” like that, the word has lost all meaning.
That all said, agreed, Trump is not a classical fascist in the sense of Hitler, Franco, or Mussolini; there are shared characteristics, but I again reiterate that it’s hard to find US politicians that share *zero* characteristics from whatever “list” one chooses to use.
With Trump, it isn’t just a matter of a few superficial shared characteristics; he’s closer to the real thing than America has ever seen at that level.
