Joe Biden is the 46th president of the US, and everything is back to normal…
Seriously though – it does mark the end of an era. But what era was it? There has, as usual been a lot of noise around exactly what Trump and his regime represented. Is he a fascist? Was his government a fascist government?
This mini series from the brilliant Behind the Bastards podcast, looking at the first successful fascist leader Benito Mussolini and the March on Rome, helps us draw some useful parallels and I would recommend it to anyone trying to make sense of what just happened.
The host Robert Evans of Bellingcat fame, and already referred to on this blog; takes us through a compelling narrative on the build up of the fascist movement in Italy from a few hundred people to nearly half a million in just a few years, covering the open consent of the ruling and middle classes, the failure of anti fascism, and decent strategy and leadership from Mussolini and his fellow fascist leaders.
Now for me the only difference I can see between Trump and Mussolini is that Trump didn’t actually have a plan to establish what we might classically describe as a fascist state (at least not from what we currently know), but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t spent the last four and more years slowly trying to establish at the very least a deeply authoritarian, racist state, that fascists would feel very comfortable in.