Fascist? Or just tapping into Americas latent fascistic impulses?
Fascist? Or just tapping into America's latent fascistic impulses? Ilya B. Mirman / Shutterstock.com

Local journalist David Neiwert argues in a long blog post that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is not exactly a fascist:

Rather, what he is doing is mustering the latent fascist tendencies in American politics—some of it overtly white supremacist, while the majority of it is the structural racism and white privilege that springs from the nation’s extensive white-supremacist historical foundations—on his own behalf. He is merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even without being himself an overt fascist.

The reality that Trump is not a bona fide fascist himself does not make him any less dangerous. In some ways, it makes him more so.

It's worth reading the whole thing, but the conclusion is sobering. "America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the road," Neiwert writes, "where it must choose down which path its future lies—with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism."