Pas d'ennemis à gauche, Pas d'ennemis à droite
The most shocking part of the Trump triumph has been the open and unresisted entrance of the hard right, from the Ku Klux Klan to Stormfront, into the ranks of Trump supporters.
I imagine most Trump supporters don't want to argue on this, and that most would say that it has nothing to do with them and that it does not affect them. But that would be wrong. It marks a serious change in political attitudes, with Trump adopting, like Berlusconi before him, the old and bad motto of the left: "No enemies to the left". I have seen it happen before. When Berlusconi set up his new centre-left gathering, he deliberately let in the fascist party - MSI-DN - which had been excluded from all previous parliamentary alliances. Part of this party, which tended to win four or five per cent of votes, was made of decent citizens with a stupid attitude to the Fascist past; but a considerable minority were outright thugs waiting for a chance.
It's not as though those people had lots of votes to offer (if they had, we'd have long been in trouble): it's a kind of perverse principle, which I have already observed at work among American conservatives, that says "It's impossible that right-wingers might be wicked or totalitarian", just like the old socialists found it impossible to say that people who mouthed the word "socialism" might be tyrants and monsters. The stupidest and yet most widespread instance of this refusal to accept that right-wingers might be villains is the idiotic and universal American conservative belief that Hitler and Mussolini were socialists. This is the same as our old socialist friends asserting that, ultimately, Stalin and Mao were nationalists and fascists. When confronted with the facts, they stuttered and changed the subject.
I imagine most Trump supporters don't want to argue on this, and that most would say that it has nothing to do with them and that it does not affect them. But that would be wrong. It marks a serious change in political attitudes, with Trump adopting, like Berlusconi before him, the old and bad motto of the left: "No enemies to the left". I have seen it happen before. When Berlusconi set up his new centre-left gathering, he deliberately let in the fascist party - MSI-DN - which had been excluded from all previous parliamentary alliances. Part of this party, which tended to win four or five per cent of votes, was made of decent citizens with a stupid attitude to the Fascist past; but a considerable minority were outright thugs waiting for a chance.
It's not as though those people had lots of votes to offer (if they had, we'd have long been in trouble): it's a kind of perverse principle, which I have already observed at work among American conservatives, that says "It's impossible that right-wingers might be wicked or totalitarian", just like the old socialists found it impossible to say that people who mouthed the word "socialism" might be tyrants and monsters. The stupidest and yet most widespread instance of this refusal to accept that right-wingers might be villains is the idiotic and universal American conservative belief that Hitler and Mussolini were socialists. This is the same as our old socialist friends asserting that, ultimately, Stalin and Mao were nationalists and fascists. When confronted with the facts, they stuttered and changed the subject.