Were it most anyone else, I wouldn't take it as seriously;
it wouldn't jolt me. But Rick Perlstein is an accomplished, justifiably
well-regarded student of recent American history*.
When he warns, in a well-argued piece, that Donald Trump is
not like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan or even G.W. Bush, I want to know why. Likewise,
when he says that by dropping the word "fascist," often used after World
War II, from contemporary political parlance, we may be blinding ourselves to key
aspects of the Trump phenomenon.
Pearlstein wants to avoid — undue — alarmism, noting that,
"it is hard to imagine a President Trump turning America into a one-party
state. (Isn’t it?)"
But his conclusion is far from comforting:
"We want to think about Trump using our familiar
categories, according to familiar norms, judging him by familiar rules. But
what Donald Trump is all about is incinerating the existing rules––which are
revealed as all too easy to incinerate. He breaks the system just by his manner
of being. It’s humbling, because the system he breaks is the only one we know
how to understand.
But with Trump, everything requires revision––for me as much
as anyone else.
Rick Perlstein, "Donald Trump, American hustler: The
frightening fascist tendencies of his GOP rise"
* His books are: "The Invisible Bridge,"
"Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America"
and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American
Consensus."
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