@DetroitDan I think "greedy bastards" can overlap with almost any group! Certainly I think even Donald Trump would admit it characterizes, or at least has in the past characterized, Donald Trump! I'm not sure who you mean by the elite (do you mean us, people like you and me?). Globalists or liberals or humanists have clearer meanings to me, but they certainly don't mean virtue in contrast with greed as a vice. ("economic anxiety" isn't a virtue even if you think "racial resentment" a vice.) 1/

@DetroitDan From a "Trumpian perspective" doesn't require than we analyze a different question. The question isn't an attack. I mean, I'm sure Trumpians would consider "fascist" as epithet for movements like theirs, so okay, for the purpose of analysis we can set that aside and call it "right populism". Many Trumpists (eg early Steve Bannon) emphasized economic grievance as the motivation for their movement, many liberals called bullshit, people like me, maybe you, considered it plausible. 2/

@DetroitDan In other words, this debate isn't an attack on Trumpish people that might be met with a reciprocal counterattack. It's a debate they've acknowledged and participated in, albeit with different normative vibes. "Ordinary Americans are tired of getting robbed and losing their jobs to enrich a rich elites" is an economic-anxiety-necessitated-this-movement claim, openly embraced within the movement. 3/

@DetroitDan Withini the Trumpish right, there are real tensions between what you might call old-school populism (tear down the corrupt elites!) and a more cultural or racial project (America for real Americans, immigrants from shithole countries will make us a shithole country, liberalism, cosmopolitan, miscegenation literal or metaphorical is inherently corrupt and corrupting, only maintaining or restoring a kind of purity and traditionalism can save us). 4/

@DetroitDan It's their debate about themselves as much as ours about them, although again, most (not all!) of them would insist on putting it in more sympathetic terms than "fascist", at least when referring their own faction. 5/

@DetroitDan None of this is to say that "liberals" or "globalists" or "cosmopolitans" are innocent of greed or complicity and participation in misrule over the past few decades. We have been badly misgoverned the last few decades, and any and every faction that has been meaningfully enfranchised during the period and that did well for itself while a broader public suffered and the planet boiled has something to answer for. 6/

@DetroitDan That includes a neoliberal professional class for sure! We (you and me too) have a lot to answer for. But that critique would implicate at least as much a plutocratic class — the Mercers and Kochs and Musks and Thiels — who are somehow absolved, somehow not the object of populist iconoclasm, despite having had more influence over economic life during the period than latte-sipping LGBTQ-sympathetic academics. 7/

@DetroitDan It is this peculiarity, this distinguishing between the elites who are forgotten and forgiven, vs the "woke" ones on whom all the misrule should be blamed, that justifies the word "fascism" not as an epithet but as a descriptor. Because the move here is to name enemies in order to absolve as innocent "patriots" whose sins were at least as great. 8/

@DetroitDan The enemies must be terrible. Pedophiles! So that it is clear we must bind together, we "real Americans", "we patriots", we must unify against the pedophile and Satanists, it would be divisive to note that the Kochs and Mercers and Thiels and Musks are rather important elements of the decades of misrule that have lain us so low. We must overlook that, join together in the existential fight against the woke! 9/

@DetroitDan That precisely (it doesn't have to be the woke, any insidious enemy will do, though sexual minorities are especially effective) is what I call fascism, this move of justifying military-like coordination and single-mindedness at a broad social scale by identifying enemies, especially insidious internal enemies, the defeat of whom must override any lesser or more liberal consideration. /fin