Trump Is an Eerily Perfect Match With a Famous 14-Point Guide to Identify Fascist Leaders

In 1995, Umberto Eco, the late Italian intellectual giant and novelist most famous for The Name of the Rose, wrote a guide describing the primary features of fascism. As a child, Eco was a loyalist of Mussolini, an experience that made him quick to detect the markers of fascism later in life, when he became a revered public intellectual and political voice. Eco noted that fascism looks different in each incarnation, morphing with time and leadership, as “it would be difficult for [it] to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances.” It is a movement without “quintessence." Instead, it’s a sort of “fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions,” he wrote.

Eco's famous 14-point list outlines what the author dubbed “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism”—and it fits hand in glove the political persona created by Donald Trump. Hours after 60 million Americans voted to give the presidency to a dangerously incompetent narcissist whose campaign was based on nativist fear-mongering and racist appeals, British historian Simon Schama lamented that Trump’s newly sealed win would “hearten fascists all over the world.” Sure enough, congratulations poured in from far-right admirers around the world, who recognized Trump as one of their ilk.

Throughout the campaign, comparisons of Trump to fascist leaders have been treated as unserious and even irresponsible. Now, as we watch him assemble a cabinet of frightening far-right nationalists, white supremacists, militarists, and free-marketeers, Eco’s list emerges as a must-read.

1. The cult of tradition...

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-eerily-perfect-match-famous-14-point-guide-identify-fascist-leaders