The Fascist Underpinnings of Trumps Speech
Trump’s State of the Union address had all the elements of fascism except brownshirts marching in the street beating people up (and he veered toward even that in his praise of the Klan and neo-Nazis at Charlottesville).
Fascism pretends to incorporate the good of the masses (hence the phony Nazi claim on the word “socialism”) while in fact acting in barracuda fashion solely for the benefit of the corporations and elite. It is plutocracy dressed up as a mass movement. Its rhetoric separates out the good workers (white, native-born) from the bad workers (brown or black or Semite, immigrant) in hopes of setting them against one another, for the benefit of the rich spectators. Fascism separates out the poor (about 15 percent of Americans) as lazy burdens on the other workers and enacts punitive policies toward them. Thus, Trump portrays taking away health care insurance from 26 million people as a triumph for workers.
Trump said, “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They have allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans. Most tragically, they have caused the loss of many innocent lives.”
But the borders haven’t been open. Obama deported an average of 400,000 people a year (more than Trump did in 2017). There was a problem with border monitoring in the 1980s and 1990s, but that has largely been rectified. More Mexicans have been going to Mexico from the US than have been coming here in the past decade. Immigrants have lower rates of crime than the native-born because they don’t want to risk deportation. Most immigrants do not compete with low wage American workers because they occupy different niches and immigrants often lack English language skills.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/fascist-underpinnings-trumps-state-union/
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