By Henry Giroux:

While there is no perfect fit between Trump and the fascist societies of Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet, “the basic tenets of extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, and a hatred of democracy and the rule of law” are too similar to ignore…

The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalised in a new political formation that I have termed neoliberal fascism…

Democratic Party policies under Clinton and Obama paved the way for Trump. Clinton signed a draconian crime bill in 1994. The bill slavishly indulged the then “national frenzy” for law and order as a form of punishment and enacted policies such as “three strikes,” “truth in sentencing,” and “mandatory minimums…

Clinton signed on to NAFTA, and deregulated the financial industry. The class and racist thread that connects these two bills is shamefully obvious…

Rather than bailing out people who suddenly found themselves in massive debt and prosecuting the financial elite who caused the economic crisis, Obama bailed out the bankers who rewarded themselves with big bonuses and even bigger profits…

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle…

State sponsored lies played a crucial ideological role in pushing the US into wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, legitimated the use of Torture under the Bush administration, and covered up the crimes of the financial elite in producing the economic crisis of 2008…

Coupled with a society that worships celebrity culture, the power of spectacle and the masculinization of the public sphere make it easier for Trump and his associates to rehabilitate fascist ideas, principles, and a fascist political culture…

Truth is no longer merely fragile or problematic; it has become toxic and dysfunctional in a media ecosystem largely controlled by militant conservatives and a financial elite who invest heavily in right-wing media apparatuses such Fox News and white nationalist social media platforms such as Breitbart News…

The disintegration of democratic social bonds promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of a ‘war of all against all’ replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others…

The old is dying, the new cannot be born and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear…

Under such circumstances, the state is remade on the model of finance, all social relations are valued according to economic calculations, and the dual project of ultra-nationalism and right-wing apocalyptic populism merge in an embrace of a toxic and unapologetic defense of white supremacy…

Trump is the necessary outcome of a neoliberal culture of hyper-punitiveness amplified through an ascendant fascist politics that enshrines militarization, privatization, deregulation, manic consumerism, the criminalization of entire groups of people, and the financialization of everything…

We need what Gregory Leffel calls a language of “imagined futures,” one that “can snap us out of present-day socio-political malaise so that we can envision alternatives, build the institutions we need to get there and inspire heroic commitment.