There are two fundamental requirements for the rise of fascism: the normalization of violent political language, and the existence of figures who can be scapegoated for all the troubles citizens face.
Donald Trump has set the stage for a radical change in U.S. democracy by making abusive language and hateful speech acceptable at the highest levels of American politics. Sadly, he has several imitators.
Consider just a part of the catalogue of his violent public statements that have now become “normal”: Grabbing women by their genitals; calling his political opponents “vermin”; characterizing the press as “enemies of the people”; denouncing immigrants as “drug-dealers” and “rapists”; traducing a judge for being of “Mexican” heritage; telling immigrants to “go back where you came from”; describing the current president of the United States as a “moron”; and calling Canada’s prime minister a “leftwing lunatic.”
Not so long ago, any politician who used that language would be out of business. But over the eight years he has been on the political scene, Trump has so desensitized his audience with his routine exhibitions of racism and bigotry that his outrageous words seem not to register. How bad is it? Just last week, Trump posted on his website that the country needed a “unified Reich.”
Although the post was blamed on an underling, the unmistakable language of Nazi fascism remained up for hours. As Georgia Republican Geoff Duncan told CNN, the normal thing to have done in the circumstances was to fire the staffer, and disavow the post personally and publicly. Duncan noted that neither of those things has happened.
Perhaps Trump’s greatest contribution to the toxic, partisan mud bath that politics has become is the ex-president’s industrial scale lying. Despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, Trump continues to peddle the Big Lie that he really won the 2020 election. According to The Washington Post, in the one term Trump was president, he told 4,000 lies.
It pays to remember that his big whopper that Joe Biden’s presidency is illegitimate, incited a mob to sack the U.S. Capitol, beat police, and go hunting for politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence to deal out some frontier justice.
No one should be surprised that Canadian MPs like Pam Damoff, Charlie Angus, Carol Hughes, Rachel Blaney and others are leaving politics. It has become a toxic arena of threats, misogyny, and disrespectful dialogue. And it all begins, and perhaps ends, with the weaponizing and debasement of language.
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