I largely agree, and have been saying for years that people are drastically underestimating what a second Trump term will look like. The only counter I would say is that, while Trump is immensely powerful, and the opposition complete chickenshit, Germany and Italy are not the norm. There were unique historical conditions that made the fascist conquest of those countries so complete so quickly. Generally the country falls into some inbetween.
There are a lot of different interests at play in the US, a lot of institutional inertia, a lot of capital that does not support Trump yet(although capital will follow fascists if they think it the best way to crush workers).
Trump does have a genius at understanding postmodern media, and is himself sorta the incarnation of postmodern, which means an ability to feed desire and fear in his followers. But he looks woefully incompetent at the present moment, which is not inspiring for people to commit a fascist coup. He is also incredibly ill disciplined and fickle. The Nazis at least felt the need to deliver some material returns for workers with vacations to Spain and such. Doing everything you can to tank the economy and put yourself in an incredibly weak bargaining position with foreign nations as your economy collapses is the opposite of inevitable, indomitable strength.
Trump wants to mimic Hitler by sacrificing the longterm stability of the economy for shorterm growth(it's what every Republican does), but he has perhaps irreperably annihilated his greatest assett, faith in US credit, finance, and the petro dollar. He was in a situation unprecedented outside the modern US, being able to print huge amounts of money without the risk of hyperinflation. Hitler instituted huge deficit spending(and wealth robbed from those persecuted), to fund a boom in industrial production that lowered the unemployment rate. It was like a sugar rush, to continue required the use of massive pools of slave labor and the constant influx of stolen wealth.
The reason he paused tarriffs when the bind market became unstable is because the bomd market generally improves when stocks are unstable. People move their money into seemingly bedrock stable assets, US bonds. Those slipping, and the risk of foreign holders offloading huge amounts, would cause rates the US can borrow at to increase. With the tarriffs, this could further erode faith in US debt, which could enter a doom loop of rising interest rates requiring more borrowing to print money leading to further erosion into absolute armageddon until the US can no longer basically print money for nearly free.
The situation Trump is leading us to is closer to Weimar hyperinflation than Nazi sugar rush. Add onto this, if he actually tries to remove Powell for a loyalist, it could destroy 50 years of built trust.
This made seem ancillary, but it is vital to an overt authoritarian move. If doomsday pops off, he will try and use the military to put down unrest. The sheer breadth and lack of accountability of emergency presidential powers should be the front page story of every newspaper right now.
It is worth noting that Hitler never abolished the Weimar Republic. He trotted the Reichstag out every 4 years to reaffirm his Ennabling Act mandate. He never broke the law. He totalized his control of the branches of government, industry, and academia and used his mandate as a permission structure for the middle management to continue serving the Nazis. Trump is currently attempting the same thing, threats of investigation of congress, gutting the deparments, and arresting a judge while not ruling out arresting Supreme Court Justices being the most notable examples.
Trump could use the instability he causes to consolidate control, but I think it would be unlikely. Declare sedition and a national emergency, take control of media, set up road blocks, mass arrests, freezing opposition finances, occupying blue states. But a strongman needs to be seen as the only viable solution to a crisis, not the cause. He has a cult of personality built for around 30-40% of the population. Hitler had institutional backing, from the army, capital(night of the Long Knives was explicitly to gain these), and from the middle class. He lowered unemployment from 30 to 5%.
All to say, the worst thing for an aspiring strongman is to give an order that is disobeyed en masse. And with a tanking economy, instability, chaos, the people opposing Trump will come from a large crosssection of the population. Soldiers will not see a threat to the country in the protestors, they will see their moms, brothers, friends, and sisters. And in the Russian and French Revolutions, soldiers refusing orders against protestors proved pivotal inflection points.
Miller has suggested building a core military group of extreme loyalists from across the government. Terrifying, but America is massive, and during mass protests would be barely noticable outside all but the largest cities.
Masse defections, coupled with chaotic leadership(Trump is incapable of any other kind), a tanking economy, and mass protests would force the institutions Trump had almost cowed to grow a spine. To avert complete chaos they would have to reassume powers they have for decades handed over to the President.
So where does this leave us? Well, probably somewhere inbetween, further erosion and institutional rot, further corruption and capitalist capture. An escalation of the creeping illiberalism without a complete fascistic collapse.
Formerly when the US has reached crisis points caused by capital's evisceration of all life to market forces, waves of reform stabilized the boat. If Bernie would nit snuffed out by Dems, he could've transformed the coalitions, won the working class back, brought back a barely tolerable equilibrium, and removed the material conditions responsible for fascism(capitalism's domination over the government and working class, and thus its complete commodification of land, money and labor- side note, everyone should read The Great Transformation to get a handle on what is happening). But he lost, and we went down the rabbit hole we have avoided prior. But this also dialectically creates the conditions for its own antithesis. Trump will likely cause catastrophy without taking us a the way. The persecutions, deportations, stifling of speech, corruption, destruction of the common good, will open possibilities for radical reform formerly thought impossible. Already there is strong majority support for removing the Dem neoliberal old guard. Schumer would likely get wrecked by AOC. Talk of mass organizing and mutual aid, mainstream democrats calling for general strikes and mass disruption. This could give us a completely transformed democratic party that looks to Blair Mountain rather than the G8 and technocratic finance bros for its inspiration. If the Democrats actually ran on real change to oppose this they could create a generational New New Deal coalition of white and blue collar workers. The Dems held the house with one interruption from '31 to '95. Universal preK, college, healthcare, worker protections, and a litany of other things that could push back the markets from social life.
We could also be looking at the Marius or Sulla to some current 23 year old Caesar. But I think there is a strong argument that Trump would need to radically rethink giving the working class literally nothing besides spectacle and theft in order to consolidate power. Sorry for the length
I think this is correct. Racism didn't start, nor was it exclusive to, the South. The South was a largely fascist style totalitarianism for black people until the 1960's, but this was one instantiation of a worldwixe view. Racialized capitalism has remained with cosmetic facelifts. The South was part of a much wider shift in European thought in the 15th and 16th centuries towards a racial world. Modern conceptions of race arose to justify exploitation, taken from things like "Purity of the Blood" to differentiate Christian converts post Reconquista from older Christians. So they could continue discriminating. When conquering the Americas and enslaving Africans they ran into the same issue. Justifying war and brutality along Christian lines becomes quite muddled after their children grow up having been born and raised Christian. So the idea was that they carried heathenism in their blood. Easy, now perpetual, hereditary bondage has a justification. Capitalism arose concurrently with Imperialism and the Enlightenment. So this racialized worldview, with massive economic incentive, became standardized, secularized, "rationalized", eventually becoming eugenics and Nazi race science.
During this same time, there was mass exploitation and genocide on a global scale. It was not the Confederacy that eradicated entire tribes, forced assimilation, occupied Haiti, opportunistically betrayed the Phillipines by annexing it and brutally putting down the same freedom movement they had fought alongside the year prior- and promised independence. Nor was it the Confederacy nor Jim Crow that annexed Hawaii by force, in the name of fruit companies. The list goes on.
It is very easy to imagine the north as this mercantile utopia of small businessmen, fishing and trading and fiercely defending liberty. There was certainly a real strand of Enlightenment thought througb the Am. Rev. that was actually emancipatory, anti slavery, property, and capital. The Constitution was very much a reactionary document, meant to centralize and consolidate power in the hands of the new elite, North and South. Bourgeois rights to trade and property became instilled as the preeminent rights, any thought of social tranformation died in Shay's Rebellion.
Telling is the fact that Whigs opposed the Bill of Rights out of fear they would be read as exhaustive, and used to delimit the barebones conception of liberty by excluding everything not written. Hell, they even threw in an amendment explicitly stating "dipshits, these aren't the only rights, they are examples". And now those who claim to be defending the original text and intent betray the explicit intent by deferring to state power whenever they possibly can. The only amendment that gets completely written off is the inconvenient one that says the BOR should be a starting point. They call it too vague, funny because that was the entire point. To say "hey, use your judgement to protect liberty, think expansively, we are literally just some guys, we don't even have The Simpsons".
Anyways, the Northern business interests did not particularly care one fuck about slavery, and they brutalized every wave of immigrant labor they could to turn Southern cotton into fabric(so did England, without the massive financial returns of Southern cotton the Industrial Revolution would've been dead in the water).
But the abolitionist movement began to turn the population against the evils of slavery. The progressive middle class and freedmen eventually turned the North to abolition. Now there is an idea that Republicans and Democrats magically "switched positions" after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Well yes and no. The Republicans were always the party of the wealthy. They gained the support of Northern industrialists that saw slavery as inefficient when compared to treating labor like a market- also catastrophically exploitative. The North has been profoundly racist as well, if not so overtly.
Very telling is how immigrants were categorized racially. When they were an oppressed working class, they were segregated and painted as racially inferior. The Irish largely treated like the Jim Crow South. Papist, non Germanic, Celtic, swine. As the Irish gained voting power and moved into the middle class, and the Nativists needed their support to exploit the New Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.. congrats Paddys! You're white now! Now lets oppress the Mongoloid Italians and Russians and of course Jews.
What this demonstrates is racism was not an independent force of spite. It was, and still is, an economic weapon.
When thinking about race in the North, keep in mind they had a muuuch smaller black population than Louisiana. If they so had majority black populations in mist areas I imagine it would've looked largely similar to Jim Crow. During the Great Migration blacks were forced into shitty neighborhoods, could only work specific jobs, and were still subjected to mass violence. The Black Panthers started in Oakland and soread largely to Northern cities. Huey Newton was assassinated by the FBI and Chicago PD. This is the heart of your question, and I think the answer. Imagining capitalism as a non racial system would mean it would be radically different everywhere. As long as wealth is consolidated, exploitation need occur. Where exploitation occurs, the best way to get people to support their own exploitation is through manufactured markers if difference. "What about Nordic countries and Belgium". Well, European countries were largely able to posture Liberty Equality Fraternity because the exploitation was exported, and even then there was still brutal class conflict and if course persecuted minorities(Norway has an indigenous population thst was nearly wiped out).
As the threat of class conflict rise, Russia fell to communism, and the fear of Bolshevism spread reactionary forces of capital allied themselves with their own mutant offspring and used all the technologies of domination, ideological, financial and material, to turn their racialized, imperial domination inward. The violence of fascism would not look a freak occurance to someone from the Belgian Congo, or Jim Crow South, or Vietnam or South Africa.
Fascism is an offspring of the global economic system of domination. No place or people is immune. As the parent comment said, they'd find a new outgroup. Capital needs ideological justification for its theft and domination. Describe the American privatized prisons to someone and ask them what nation is being described.
A final note, as Adorno(see username) points out, this is not opposite the forces of Enlightenment and Progressivism. It is embedded in the logic of Enlightenment. Categorization, quantification, implies grester and lesser values. All morality is reduced to market exchange. Tell people in the "backward" Middle Ages that starvation was needed as an explicit threat to keep people working(something argued in 17th cent England with the Poor's Act and literally echoed today by Neoliberals), and they wouldsay that is the height of barbarity. But human worth is production and consumption, we are in a dog eat dog social world built to consolidate wealth and power. One that was wholly alien to all societies prior to the 15th century. God sorry this got so long. All to say, race is an invented means of differentiation, something else wouldve arisen to replace it had everyone been white.