Il fascismo liberale settler di Donald Trump

What explains the emergence of a 21st century American populist movement notorious for its attacks on equal rights, civil liberties, social justice, and basic norms of tolerance and civility? Across the post-World War II era US citizens customarily expected this sort of intolerant and uncivil behavior from the illiberal totalitarian Other against whose mode of fascist governance US liberal democracy was insuperably opposed. The members of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement bear a resemblance to the illiberal political behavior of European fascists. Yet Trump’s movement derives its political and historical efficacy from its revival of a subversively archaic variant of American liberalism practiced by American settler colonists whose ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, slave plantations, and nation-making frontier violence, laid the bedrock foundations for the venerated liberal ideals of self-governance, rule of law, free labor, private property, and the liberal international order. The essay is divided into sections that engage four distinct but related conjunctural moments in the trajectory of Trump’s movement.