Source: The UnPopulist
by Matthew McManus
“One of the reasons I’ve hesitated to call Trump a fascist is, following [Richard] Evans, it’s not clear to me that his ambition has ever been to establish the kind of ‘total’ and militarized state lionized by Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher, Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, and Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s ghostwriter. … As Mussolini and Gentile put it in The Doctrine of Fascism, the aim of fascism is ‘totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.’ Contemporary right populists from Trump to Orban sometimes make gestures in that totalizing direction. But they just as frequently aim to negate politics and, simultaneously, do the converse: render it transcendent and all-consuming.” (09/17/24)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/which-variety-of-authoritarianism