Part I of Three Part Series The Rise Of The Angry White Men

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No this is not about for my dislike of sheep. I have to point out that my disdain for the ruminant wholly mammalian quadrupeds, not noted for intelligence, has nothing to do with sheep per se but an objective loathing for incessant bleating. There, I hope I made that abundantly clear.

Now on to the issue that's not being discussed on CNN et al -- American Fascism: real or unreal? And if its real does Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump embody it as the GOP's standard bearer?

Let me say from the onset that I'm very reluctant to label people, especially political leaders, as fascists. You see, the word Fascism is so politically loaded that it should be used very sparingly when describing the behavior and actions of a certain politician(s) or party. To be sure some, especially on the Progressive Left, have called Trump a fascist, not without some valid justifications.

For example, Trump's fast and loose use of fear-mongering, racist pandering to a narrow uneducated, white male constituency, and his marginalization of immigrants and Muslims, come straight out of the Fascist's "How-To" manual. Crouched in his "Make America Great Again" slogan and intermingled and mixed with loud claims about America's decline, occasioned by the rise of "stupid and weak politicians" invigorates and fires up this angry base.

Fascism and its best proponents like Mussolini and Spain's General Franco were also skillful and shrewd media manipulators and masters at crowd dynamics and mood. Trump has used all of the above, to be sure, and his aggressive, anti-establishment and "outsider" rhetoric and persona also are the tools that infamous fascists used on their road to power. To put this analysis in perspective I'll draw from the work of the late Italian philosopher and thinker Umberto Eco. Writing in is book "Ur-Fascism" this is how he described modern day Fascism:

"Ur-Fascism," he wrote, "derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois" the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority."

Eco also outlined eleven (11) features that define Fascism.

1. A mythologizing of tradition that glories innate virtues and heroic deeds

2. A rejection of Enlightenment ideals with their emphasis on rationality, individualism and the pleasure principle

3. The exalting of action for action's sake -- especially physical action with a penchant for violence

4. Intolerance for criticism from any source -- domestic or foreign

5. A stress on mystic unity that subordinates all particularisms

6. An articulation and amplification of the grievances and frustrations of those social strata that lack power and collective vehicles for effective political action

7. A cultivated sense of status denial or threat from combined internal and external sources

8. A doctrine built on the idea that "life is a struggle" whereby only the strong and resolute prevail

9. Contempt for the weak stigmatized as life's losers and nature's failures

10. Conveying strength and will and superiority in sexual terms personified by the Hero/Leader

11. Elaboration of a special vocabulary built around cultish code words and symbols.

There is absolutely no doubt that ALL of the above can in more than one way, and to a stronger or lesser degree, be linked to the Trump campaign. While I'll discuss and analyze all of these 11 elements in another piece, I do want to do an overall broad analysis of the perceived rise of American Fascism in 2016. While there are those who would reject this characterization and argue that what we're seeing is just the most extreme aspects of American democracy, historical facts demonstrate that fascism as a system can have it roots in a democracy warped, distorted, and corrupted by a political class and Labor Aristocracy grown fat an rich on the backs of the poor and working classes.

Today, in this presidential election cycle, American democracy has been usurped by the financial and corporate oligarchy where millionaires and billionaires rule and have so corrupted the system that the American people have largely opted out of the political system, and don't trust their elected leaders in Washington to do their bidding. But this is not an overnight phenomenon. No, it started under President Ronald Reagan and continues to this very day.

Over the decades, the disenfranchised and marginalized has become angry and angrier as their interests and concerns were ignored by politicians bought and paid for by big corporate businesses and their enablers. Ignored, shoved aside by BOTH the Democratic and Republican Parties, this huge army of unemployed and underemployed labor, now offered little job security and protections by a labor movement gutted and destroyed by Wall Street's insatiable greed, faced the brunt and unintended consequences of a near-complete economic melt-down in 2008. They lost real income, wealth, jobs and their homes -- investments that hitherto would have allowed them to live the American Dream

The college-educated elites in both parties acting on behalf of Wall Street corporations, joined in the sustained assault on the working poor. They became the willing hammer of upper classes eager to do their dirty jobs. Their duplicitous, arrogance in the service of their masters was used to dupe and hoodwink the working class using the language of progressivism and humanity. These elites, denizens of East Coast Ivy League collages, spoke to working class fears and concerns while stabbing them in the back. They sold out the working class struggle and that only served to fuel more anger and distrust.

Today, we're reaping the political whirlwind and it's not pretty. Its backfired on the smug elitism and it frightens the Bejesus out of them. When the Republican Party is actively working against its own presidential front-runner then you know that the chickens have really come home to roost. When the Democratic Party that started its 2016 presidential campaign with a coronation of Hillary Clinton and the snide hypocritical rejection of an unknown challenger to the status quo is now forced to re-examine its policies, then the anger and loathing from the electorate has reached real commanding heights.

The reality is that these policies of deliberate neglect, cozying up to the millionaire and billionaire classes, and looking at the laboring classes with loathing and contempt, has spawned a serious backlash as millions of especially lower-class whites, now enraged and incensed by what has been done to them, their families and their communities, since the Reagan Years are not taking it anymore.

They are pissed off by the political correctness thrust on them by these college-educated elites that have embraced the modern neoliberal socio-economic policies in BOTH political parties. It's into this vortex that Republican Donald Trump walked, embracing and giving voice to this new red hot anger. In true fascist opportunism he's hijacked the justified mass anger and repackaged it to suit his own agenda wrapping it into a subjective, odious brew of rejection of political correctness that allows him to get away with name-calling and insults.

Making the case for "American freedom," -- the freedom to hate - Trump has made this new freedom fashionable and acceptable to use its odious lexicon. Nowadays it's normal to hear the language of discrimination, bigotry and racism now in the national discourse: the "N-word, characterizing gays as "f*ggots", Hispanics as "wetbacks" etc. This angry insecure, anxious mass of suffering Americans, hitherto respectful and considerate, have now shifted to the extreme right, idolizing such things as gun rights, hatred for immigrants, religious intolerance, Black Americans, Mexicans and the "others."

The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and a new-found love of the "Confederacy's glory days," added to an outright rejection of science and technology, serves to brand this amorphous mass as "anti-culture" and "anti-Status quo." They love Donald Trump because he's behaving just as they want to behave -- they don't want East Coast elites telling them how to behave and what is politically correct. Now there's hyper-masculinity (remember Trump's misogynistic attack against Fox 5's Megan Kelly), racism (Mexicans are rapists and criminals), sexism (Carly Fiorina's looks) and white patriarchy.

This is the very foundation of fascism that develops and grows when the ruling classes find great difficulty to rule (or cannot rule) and there is some collapse in various areas of the neoliberal state.

But back to Umberto Eco.

In discussing modern Fascism, he wrote that what was true of Italy (before the Second World War) was true of the general phenomenon of fascism around the world: there is a common form, an "Ur-Fascism," beneath vastly different fascist regimes. While nobody wants to bring back the fascism of old (save for a few oddballs drawn to the taboo: becoming a fascist is the Stuff White People Like version of joining ISIS), Ur-Fascism "is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes". [It] can come back under the most innocent of disguises." (Italics mine)

But let me conclude by analyzing just how weak American democracy and class structure has grown that it is now a perquisite for the development of extreme processes in the economic, social and political systems. All of the presidential hopefuls in both the Democratic and Republican Parties -- except Bernie Sanders on the Democratic Left -- have been bleating (Heck, just can't get sheep out of my head!) about how when elected they'll take care of the Middle Class. And that sounds great and peachy, but what's the reality in 2016?

Well, over the past two decades the middle class has been decimated, gutted, squeezed from above by a rapacious upper class that has concentrated more and more wealth in its greedy hands. There has been no upward mobility for this socially humiliated and maligned class. Many have joined the ranks of the poor and working classes in the aftermath of the financial devastation of 2008. This class has not recovered and its prognosis for the future looks as bleak as ever. In 2016 these anxieties and anger and the failure of neoliberalism has created the socio-economic political populism phenomena of BOTH Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Coming in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the slow pace of economic growth under the Obama Administration, the American social, political, and cultural systems have undergone a series of deep cultural shifts that are the natural consequences of unsteady and wobbly socio-economic foundations. In this climate, long-held canards and old objects of respect and admiration, indeed, pride, are now ridiculed as "politically correct" and wonkish. Traditional values are mocked. And, most alarmingly, the old tried and true American value system built on the foundation of "rewarding hard work" and progressive individualism is now no more. Gone, evaporated and disappeared.

Indeed, the clear and present worry today, for the dwindling American Middle Class, as it gets ready to vote on November 8, is if sending your kids to college will leave you in what state of financial debt peonage -- moderate, severe or extremely severe. And even with this in mind the underlying fear is that even when this enormous sacrifice is made there will be no jobs available after college.

In this context it us useful to remember the following: Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the "losers" who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment."

Fascism creates a seemingly inspired and strong leader who manipulates and molds the genuine anger and frustrations of the people by promising a new moral code, national respect and glory, and redress for real and perceived wrongs. Its not about rationalization or reason. Rather, its about emotion and reaction to the "others." It's the explanation as to why Donald Trump can lie, fabricate, and insult any and everyone and suffer absolutely no negative political consequences from his supporters.

That the ruling classes in BOTH political parties are impotent and seem unable to stop his aggressive march to the Republican nomination underscores the fact that fascism TRANSFORMS politics from the mundane issues of policies and concerns to pure knee-jerk reactive aesthetics. In the Trump context it is not about truth, veracity or doctrine, but on his identifying with "his people," as a "strong leader" who can Make America Great Again.

How do we defeat this? That's for the third part of this three part series.

[Part II Next Week]

Authors Website: http://www.CSG2017.com

Authors Bio:

MICHAEL DERK ROBERTS
Small Business Consultant, Editor, and Social Media & Communications Expert, New York

Over the past 20 years I've been a top SMALL BUSINESS CONSULTANT and POLITICAL CAMPAIGN STRATEGIST in Brooklyn, New York, running successful campaigns at the City, State and Federal levels. I'm a published author and award-winning journalist. I've been honored and recognized for my deep, hard-hitting analytical work on socio-economic and political issues confronting the United States in general and New York City in particular. I'm he Senior Consultant, COMMONSENSE STRATEGIES (www.commonsensestrategies.biz ), a Marketing, Social Media & Communications company based in Brooklyn. I also host two weekly podcasts at www.blogtalkradio.com/shangoking .The first, aired on Saturday mornings is called BTS -- Business, Technology and Social Media and the second, The Roberts Report, is aired on Sundays. You can also follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mdvroberts. (347) 279-6668.