The Latest and Greatest Trump=Fascist Book.

I am in the middle of a book which has gotten all kinds of huzzahs because it claims to be a compilation of diverse views and arguments about whether Trump is a Fascist, and if not, what he represents. The book, Did It Happen Here — Perspectives on Fascism and America, is the work of a young faculty member at Wesleyan University, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, who has done a pretty good job of collecting published writings about Fascism from both sides of the current debate, as well as throwing in some long-standing arguments about the rise of Fascism at other times and in other nation-states.

I have published perhaps a dozen columns on my Medium blog about the ‘Trump is a Fascist’ discussion and I happen to be squarely in the camp of people who believe that he doesn’t represent any kind of real threat to American democracy at all.

Part of my belief stems from reading the standard works on German Fascism which were published long before Trump ever appeared. In this respect, I could list books by Shirer, Bracher, Bullock, et. al., a pretty definitive list of such works can be found right here.

I also had a personal experience with Fascism, having lived and worked in Spain from 1969 through 1971, which were some of the most repressive years of the Franco Fascist regime. I’ll leave those impressions for another time, but…