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Monday, October 3, 2016

Happy Hour With Mussolini: The Rise of Donald Trump Explained

This election cycle is unlike anything we've seen on U.S. soil in living memory. The last time we had such a forward-thinking candidate matched up against the rotting remains of last year's compost stash was when The Party of Lincoln was literal; being anti-slavery was the same level of radical as being feminist, pro-climate science, and anti-crony capitalism is today. And by all accounts, Stephen Douglas was just as batshit looney tunes during the debates as Trump was last week.

It's the kind of once-a-century circus on the Island of Misfit Toys that has people on both sides of the red-blue spectrum asking "where the fuck are we and how did we get here?" To answer that question, we'll have to go across the Atlantic and roughly a century back in time, to where and when conditions were very similar.

In the immortal words of Sophia Petrillo: picture it, Sicily, 1916.

Not Sicily proper, but close enough. The middle of World War I. The Italian Socialist Party had declared itself neutral and opposed Italy's involvement in the war. But a prominent member, writer and professor Benito Mussolini was having none of that. A fan of eugenics, who believed that WWI was a golden opportunity for Italians in Austria-Hungary to prove just how superior they were, Mussolini changed his tune from Marxist Socialism to the kind of scary ideology that would make him besties with Hitler later on; that of nationalistic fervor and the mandate that "superior" peoples dominate the "inferior" ones.

WWI was the European version of Iraq and Afghanistan, only it lasted half as long because in those days, countries still used actual declarations of war rather than merely committing troops to an area indefinitely. But it was just as popular-and-then-unpopular an albatross as Iraqi Freedom later became. And Mussolini saw the same kind of opportunities in WWI that conservatives saw in Iraq; profit, and a chance to bomb the shit out of brown people. And just like Iraq, it eventually proved to be more trouble than it was worth for the Italian Socialists when it started to divert money away from important shit like food and infrastructure.

The Italian Socialist Party eventually gave Mussolini the boot over his pro-war stance, and he responded by forming the Italian Fascist Party, which promoted the need for the "elite" to show the rest of those plebes how to live. And that could only happen if everyone in the country united under the banner of superiority and self-determination, and Seriously, Fuck Those Slavs.

If this sounds frighteningly familiar, that's because it's all happening again. Only replace Italian Fascism with the Tea Party and Mussolini with Donald Trump. It's the same zombie ideology wearing a flimsier, made-in-China hat.

Trump is taking advantage of the same kind of people Mussolini did. Uneducated, low-information country folk who miss the Good Old Days when they were the biggest fish in the pond. And he had a cult of personality much the same way Trump does. He "told it like it was." He peddled the idea that Italians were inherently superior, and if only they could stop their petty squabbling and agree on everything, they could bring their country back to its glory days of law and order. "Make Italy Great Again" indeed. What's more, the Italian Socialist Party that had ousted him saw the whole thing as an overly long joke, until the Blackshirt squads started "restoring order" by getting rid of everyone Mussolini didn't like.

Oh yes, the Blackshirts were very much real. WWI veterans who swore an oath to Mussolini and carried out all the ugly stuff like kidnappings, murder, bombings, and general mayhem in the name of scaring people into line. The fascia in fascism; they bound everything together with the promise of swift and scary judgment against those who didn't conform. Today, we'd recognize them as the "sovereign citizen" movement. The Timothy McVeighs and Cliven Bundys of the U.S..

And the years between WWI and WWII were the crucible in which this explosive mixture of nationalist fervor, childish fear and resentment, and the apathy of the opposition cooked and eventually boiled over.

Like Trump supporters today, Mussolini's followers viewed him as a genius, someone whose success meant he was inherently better than everyone below him. Mussolini himself fanned the flames by attributing his wealth and prosperity not to luck or being born into the upper middle-class and thus having more advantages, but to having inherently better attributes than other men. Much like Trump's "very good brain."

And that's not the only similarity. Both men dodged military service themselves while later advocating for war (Mussolini did eventually serve, but only because it was a condition of his pardon for, ironically, falsifying immigration papers in Geneva). Both men cultivated a propaganda machine that associated their names with prestige and value (despite the fact that nearly everything Trump has ever slapped his name on no longer exists). Both men's visions centered on a glorious empire with themselves at the top (Mussolini wanted to reforge the Roman Empire, while Trump merely wants to dominate the airwaves).

The common thread that really ties the two together, though, is that neither man was/is dangerous by himself; on their own, people like Mussolini and Trump are no more concerning than that hardcore conservative relative of yours who ruins Thanksgiving every year. The danger is in their followers. Nobody would've taken Mussolini or his movement seriously without the March on Rome; had it not been for 30,000 pissed-off Blackshirts and the very real threat of an armed communist revolt, Il Duce would've been remembered more like Leon Czolgosz.

Likewise, what makes the prospect of a Trump presidency legitimately terrifying is not the kind of laws he could enact even with a Republican Congress (because frankly even his own party can't stand him), but the fact that being elected president has the potential to embolden his fiercest supporters to translate their hatred into the kind of violence we haven't seen in nearly a century.

And these modern-day Blackshirts have body armor, semi-automatics, and much larger magazines than their 1920s counterparts.

There's a saying in toxicology that the dose makes the poison, and it's true in politics as well. The support makes the movement. Followers are the difference between your hardcore right-wing relative ruining Christmas dinner, and a neo-fascist right-wing lunatic ruining your country.

Still, a charismatic leader who tells angry people precisely what they want to hear isn't quite enough on its own. As I mentioned before, it's the apathy of the opposition that's the final catalyst. And yes, we have that, too.

Like the Italian Socialists, today's Democratic Socialists are not taking the threat of President Trump seriously enough. He's written off as a joke candidate, much the way Mussolini was. To the point that some who supported Bernie Sanders' run for the nomination have declared their intent to either stay home or vote a protest candidate rather than cast a vote for Clinton.

Edmund Burke told us over two centuries ago why this attitude is dangerous:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
The reason I've taken the time and energy to write this is because this exact scenario strikes a very personal chord with me; my grandfather escaped Fascist Italy in the 1930s. He died in 2007, which I'm actually glad for. Because my grandfather loved the United States; he would not have wanted to be alive to witness the rise of the same kind of man he risked death at sea and capture/deportation to get the fuck away from.

It all boils down to this: don't do nothing.

Don't be the apathetic opposition that looks on and lets this happen again because we forgot what happened the last time. Be the generation that remembers. Be the generation that votes, because there is too much at stake here to throw your voice down the gutter or not use it at all.

Be the generation that tells the Angry Fuckhead Movement that this shit will not be tolerated anymore.

Be the the generation that, when the mob and the press and the whole world tell them to move, plants themselves like trees beside the river of truth, and tells the whole world — "No, you move.'