The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism

If you go to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, you can see a sign hanging there that tells you what to look for if you’re worried that your country may be slipping into fascism. Let’s take a look at their twelve early warning signs of fascism.

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
2. Disdain for human rights
3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
4. Rampant sexism
5. Controlled mass media
6. Obsession with national security
7. Religion and government intertwined
8. Corporate power protected
9. Labor power suppressed
10. Disdain for intellectual and the arts
11. Obsession with crime and punishment
12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

You can follow the links above, but it shouldn’t be necessary if you’ve been paying any attention. Trump’s message is based on putting America first, making America great again, and is clearly a powerful form of nationalism that we’re also seeing arise in other countries including China and throughout Europe.

Trump’s disdain for human rights is legend, but examples include his desire to kill the relatives of terrorists (something he accomplished this week), his insistence that he’ll do “worse than waterboarding” and his statement in the White House that “torture absolutely works.”

Trump has used Mexican “rapists” and Islamic terrorists as unifying enemies. This tactic is actually perhaps the core of his political strategy.

Trump’s sexism is one of the most transparent and well-established things we know about him.

Just this week, Trump advocated that someone friendly to him buy the New York Times. His chief adviser Steve Bannon comes from the Breitbart media dynamo and has told the media to shut their mouth. So far, Trumpists do not own much of the media, so they seek to marginalize and intimidate them. In any case, Fox News does a pretty good job on their own, and the right owns talk radio.

Trump has already used national security as an excuse to ban Muslims and purge opponents in the Justice Department. The State Department comes next.

As for entwining religion and government, that can be seen in Mike Pence’s entire political career, but it’s also evident in the way that Trump has nakedly tried to make his immigration ban apply more fully to Muslims than to Christians. The Republican Party has had fascist tendencies in this regard that long predate Trump, but Trump has really run with (white) Christian nationalism as a fundamental part of his appeal. He cast himself as the defender of this group.

Trump has appointed the richest cabinet in history and proposes corporate friendly policies to match.

His nominee for Labor Secretary is a strong opponent of organized labor and Trump has had a poor relationship with labor in his business career. Most recently, this has been in the news in relation to the labor force at his Las Vegas hotel. Overall, Trump will go after unions across the board, especially public service unions and government employees.

On humanities and arts, The Hill reports that under the current budget blueprint, “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.” Of course, the Trumpistas’ disdain for “bicoastal elites” is almost unlimited, and their contempt for intellectuals and academics is total.

Trump’s obsession with crime and punishment is clear from his revival of Richard Nixon’s ‘Law and Order’ rhetoric and his constant comparisons of black communities to violent hellholes.

Finally, it’s a little too early to talk about rampant corruption and cronyism, but it’s not too early to point out that Trump is violating the Emoluments Clause to the Constitution by using his position as president to attract foreign patronage to his hotels. His refusal to disclose his taxes or to truly distance himself from his corporations will assure both the perception and the reality of corruption and cronyism. In any case, one of the best established things about Trump is that he is a crooked man who doesn’t honor contracts, engages in fraudulent enterprises, and likes to use his financial clout to bully people in the legal system. This will continue now that he’s president.

So, there you have it. Twelve early signs of fascism, and Trump and his movement have already checked 11 of the boxes and are assured of checking the twelfth.

I guess the next question we need to ask is, will fascism make American great again?

 

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

32 thoughts on “The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism”

    2. People do realize that Tor, Signal and most of the other products people flog were funded by the US Government, right?  Usually through the CIA.  Just sayin’.

  2. Trump/Bannon won’t be going after all those “law enforcement” unions that endorsed him or welcomed his election.  How well those people are dug into local, state, and federal agencies isn’t known, but it’s not insignificant.  And based on 2016 exit polling of members of the US military, it appears that Pentagon efforts to root out such people beginning in the aftermath of the OKC bombing has had mixed results.

    The Intercept – Secret Docs Reveal: President Trump has inherited an FBI with vast hidden powers.  

  3. Important post, a shame it can’t become part of the corporate media “dialogue”—largely because of Reason 5.

    You neglected to mention fraudulent elections, but that criteria sort of explains itself.  We have open voter suppression by the nationally dominant party (also based on fear of internal enemies), and discussions of unfair apportionment of Blue State Only electoral votes (to make a democratically illegitimate electoral system more illegitimate of course). The American Fuhrer is (repeatedly) making baseless propagandistic claims that the vote was skewed by illegal voting, and that further vote suppression (in a putative democratic regime) may be necessary—after a phony show investigation (by Repubs) is completed.

    In any event, the country is about at the stage the Weimar Republic was in when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. So we await the Reichstag Fire and the declaration of national emergency, although the rhetoric of the Muslim Ban(tm) is already quite identifiable.  Heil Trumper!

    1. So we await the Reichstag Fire and the declaration of national emergency, …

      So what are “We the People” going to DO about it?  Wait for the Dems to ride to the rescue?  Good Luck!

        1. Step 1: I have no “biological” family; ergo, I’m a “free agent”.

          Step 2: Time for another Diary. This time …. mmmmmm … a metaphor.  I’ll get on it.

          Oh, and

          Step 3: I have ZERO debt and save 70% of my “income” every month. In cash!

          Step 4: I am one pissed off biochemist!

  4. Oh, I don’t think it’s too early to talk about rampant corruption.

    On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to start accepting “campaign contributions” right away. Given that a sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases, etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to Trump.

    http://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5#.8irgaaxx3

    By filing with the FEC for his 2020 campaign…

    …

    1. It’s only unusual in that Trump was the first GOP to take that step.  It was only a matter of time.  It will be interesting to see when the first Democrat files, and who it is.  It’s also what happens when you need a billion dollars to run a presidential race.

  5. Some of these symptoms exists before Cheeto became president.  Bill Clinton helped one of those along.  Just goes to show the rot didn’t just start with Cheeto.

  7. “…I guess the next question we need to ask is, will fascism make American great again?”

    No, that is not the next question to ask, because, like absolutely any other question whatsoever, half the people will give a different answer to it from the other half.  And at that point, it no longer even matters which half is “right”.

  9. The market is down triple digits again today. Keep that up Donald and your corporate friends will come for you. They got money too.  

  11. From Counterpunch:

    The Resistance and Its Double by C.J. Hopkins.

    So the neoliberal ruling classes are putting on a little revolution, to which you and I are cordially invited. The occasion is the takeover of the United States by Vladimir Putin and his Manchurian President or the official launch of the Trumpian Reich, whichever hysterical scenario you prefer. Dress is casual. Children are welcome, as this is a strictly non-violent uprising, which will take place on the weekends, mostly, so as not to interfere with school or work. Colorful signage and puppets are encouraged, but you can leave your gas mask and welder’s gloves at home, as there won’t be any tear gas canisters or rubber bullets coming your way. Oh, and it will definitely be televised.

    The rebellion began on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, when the nation’s capitol was stormed by thousands of militant liberals in pink woolly hats. Michael Moore and Madonna were there, as was John Kerry, and his dog, apparently. Expletive-laden speeches were delivered. Virtue was signaled. Selfies were taken. Requiems for Saint Obama were sung. Notwithstanding the totally unthreatening nature of the whole affair, according to Charles “The Withering Gaze” Blow, Resident Guerrilla Fighter at The New York Times, this was the birth of a new “dissident” movement. “This was an uprising! This was resistance!” The Withering Gaze cried out from the barricades, or from his offices high above midtown Manhattan. Much of the mainstream media concurred. “The Women’s March will spark the resistance!”The Guardian assured its Jacobinian subscribers. “The Resistance Rises!” proclaimed Time`s new cover. CNN featured “The Twitter Resistance.” Rolling Stone introduced “The Leaders of the Resistance,” a coalition of grassroots activists, NGOs, and business interests, but mostly it was the Pussy Hat People that were being marketed as the movement’s vanguard.

    Which, all right, credit where credit is due to the organizers of the Women’s March. Calling it a “Women’s March” (a) imbued it with a grassroots aura, (b) obscured the larger power struggle between the neoliberal establishment and the neo-nationalist Trump regime, and (c) rendered it impossible to criticize without coming off as a misogynist creep. What kind of monster, after all, would want to criticize millions of women dressed as vaginas and other reproductive organs for “being proactive about women’s rights,” and “joining in their diversity,” and so on, because they accidentally happened to organize their protests in a way that perfectly aligned with the aims of the global neoliberal establishment, which is relentlessly delegitimizing Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with women? Imagine, if they had called it a “Liberals’ March,” or a “Deep State March,” or a “March to Restore the Democrats to Power as Soon as Possible.” It wouldn’t have been anywhere nearly as effective, in terms of framing the official narrative.

    The “Resistance” sprang into action again in response to Trump’s “Muslim Ban” this weekend. Following word that he had ordered a blanket entry ban of people from a list of seven so-called “countries of concern” (that the Obama administration had identified in its Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, and stripped of Visa Waiver Program privileges), Michael Moore blew his Twitter horn, summoning thousands of outraged protesters to Terminal 4 of JFK Airport to militantly assemble in a designated area (so as not to impede the normal flow of traffic) and completely shut down an adjacent parking lot. The protests spread to airports throughout the country and “sparked “fury and anguish around the world,” according to the Sunday edition of The Guardian (which, as of approximately 08:30 this Sunday has gone to Emergency Live-Tweet mode to cover every fascistic twist in this evolving Fall of Democracy story).

    Now, before any Trumpward-leaning readers get too excited about where I’m going with this, I should probably state for the record here that I regard the man as a dangerous idiot, made even more dangerous by the fact that his program appears to be primarily the work of Steve Bannon, who is not an idiot and is much more dangerous. I’m imagining Bannon slouched on a couch in his lair in the White House this Sunday morning, sporting his signature impish grin as he scans the reaction of the mainstream media to his latest perfectly calculated gambit. The man knows exactly what he’s doing. With a stroke of Trump’s pen he has simultaneously reassured his neo-nationalist base that Trump’s promises were not just empty threats and provoked the media and urban liberals into an understandable but mindless frenzy of unfocused anti-Trump “resistance.” This is a textbook insurrectionist tactic that Bannon has been employing with alarming success.

    The reason he has been so successful is that the Trump regime and the neoliberal establishment are playing to two entirely different audiences. The Trumpians are playing to “flyover country,” not just nationally, also internationally. For reasons I’ll get into in more detail shortly, many of these non-urban working class folks are not real thrilled with Globalism and are responding to Trump’s neo-nationalist message. The neoliberal elites are playing to their base, most of whom are no less misguided than the folks they deride in “flyover country.” This is mostly due to the identity politics that have been part and parcel of neoliberal ideology for going on the last fifty years, and is why the so-called “resistance” to Trump is centered around issues like racism and misogyny, rather than any kind of cogent reading of the global political dynamics at play here.

    This is the problem with identity politics when divorced from a broader political discussion and over-simplified for mass consumption. By occupying the conceptual territory where any deeper or more threatening analysis of political dynamics might take place, it prevents the formation of such analysis. It answers the question “Who is fighting who?” in advance of the question being asked, in order to prevent it being asked.

    —snip—

    What we’re experiencing throughout the West at present is a neo-nationalist insurrection against Globalism. An “insurrection” because global Capitalism is a global-hegemonic system. It has no viable external enemies. People, unhappy with how Capitalism has been restructuring their lives since the end of the Cold War, and aware that power has been gradually shifting from sovereign nations to supranational entities, multinational corporations, international institutions, and so on, are reaching for the only alternative on offer, Neo-nationalism, in one form or another. Which is what the Trumpians and the Brexit gang are promising, a halt of the spread of global Capitalism and the restoration of national sovereignty.

    The neoliberal ruling classes, naturally, would like to prevent this from happening. Which, make no mistake, they are going to do (although they may let Trump, Bannon, et al. go ahead and have their War on Islam to finish destabilizing the Middle East first). What is being marketed to us as the “resistance to Trump,” technically, is a counter-insurgency operation … the global neoliberal establishment quashing the neo-nationalist uprising. But that kind of thing doesn’t sell very well. What sells much better is Hitler hysteria, neo-McCarthyite propaganda, and emotionally loaded trigger words that short circuit any kind of critical thinking, words like “love,” “hate,” “racism,” “fascism,” “normal,” and of course “resistance.”

    The irony is, the actual resistance (if the word “resistance” still has any meaning) is the one being waged by the neo-nationalists, who are in fact resisting something, namely Neoliberalism, which is clearly the dominant force in this equation. This doesn’t make them any more righteous, unless you’re in favor of racism, sexism, theocracy, and other such despotic values. “Resistance” is not a virtue in itself. Its virtue depends on who is doing the resisting, and what they’re resisting, and on various other sociopolitical and historical factors that won’t fit into a tweet or a sound bite.

    In any event, the quandary folks on the Left are currently facing is twofold: (1) how to oppose the Trumpians, and other neo-nationalist insurgencies, without serving the interests of Neoliberalism; and (2) how to oppose Neoliberalism without serving the interests of the Neo-nationalists. Which is more or less a classic Zen koan designed to make one’s head explode.

    —snip—

    In a nutshell?

    Sure.

    Yup.

    AG

    1. AG–
      I get it that Counterpunch, your source, hates neoliberalism and neoliberals, however one wishes to define them.But how many of the millions who marched in the so-called Women’s March even know the term “neoliberal”? Basically the item you excerpted here has called those millions “useful idiots” in so many words.

      2. The big giveaway in that Counterpunch piece is that the writer feels the need to spend a token paragraph or two explaining “But I’m not a Trump supporter!” If you’re a decent progressive who is writing about what to do now, it should be apparent that you find Trump reprehensible. But that isn’t apparent in the writings of some people who claim the progressive mantle these days.

        Unsurprisingly, these “progressives” are not the ones leading the fight against Trump. In fact, as seen here, many of them are openly unsupportive of those who are leading the fight. It’s a revealing display.  

    2. LMAO – a headache for CIA people at McLean, VA.  😉

      Political satire

      Russian Propaganda

      In addition to his literary activities, CJ Hopkins is a Washington Post-certified “peddler of Russian propaganda”.
      For details on CJ’s propaganda services, or to schedule a personal consultation to discuss a specific propaganda project,
      please contact the Propaganda Office, Kremlin, Moscow, 103073, Russia.
      To obtain a copy of the entire blacklist of Washington Post-certified treasonous publications, contact the McCarthyite
      Smear Department, Washington Post, 1150 15th Street NW, Washington DC, 20017, the United States of America.

      Thx for the laugh Arthur! NY resident, musician, never stops to mock members of the human race. Mao’s reign and artists … Be careful out there, stay safe!

      ○ A Marxist View of Trumpism

  12. Well, reading some of the comments in this thread and others, I can confidently announce the Real Lesson to be learned about the Trump cabal:

    Donald Trump may be a vicious, vindictive, ignorant kleptomaniac advised by similarly minded people, but the more important thing is that that b*tch Hillary Clinton is DONE earning speaking fees from Goldman Sachs.

  13. Fascism has been pretty much set in place since 1947. I mean, can you seriously read that list and believe that pretty much all of them aren’t enshrined in modern US society/government already?

    Anarchy(classical) <— Communism <— Socialism <— Democratic Socialism || Capitalism —> Fascism —> Oligarchy —> Neo-feudalism (Aristocracy)

    What we have are literal oligarchs attempting to permanently reshape the government enough to create the neo-feudalism that they want. It won’t happen by 2020 regardless of how effective and efficient Strongman Trump and Friends are, but they’ve picked up the can and are making deliberate strides to the right.

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