Portside

The advent of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States has generated an avalanche of interest in fascism. It is the 2016 number one lookup on the Merriam-Webster site. Google reports that searches for fascism-related topics have surged since election day, 2016. Why all the sudden interest? It would not be empty speculation to recognize that people are alarmed by the Trump Presidency and are trying to see where it fits in the political spectrum.

While France teeters on the brink of the far right, left parties elsewhere are showing surprising strength. Predicting election outcomes is tricky these days, the Brexit and the election of Donald Trump being cases in point. The most volatile of the upcoming ballots are in France and Italy. Germany's will certainly be important, but even if Merkel survives, the center-right will be much diminished and the left stronger. And that will have EU-wide implications.

This is a stunning piece of analysis on how Donald Trump will go to war with the planet (just as he essentially suggested he would in his America-First inaugural speech). John Feffer, author of the unforgettable new dystopian novel Splinterlands, the latest Dispatch Book, explores how President Trump plans to blow up the present world order and give birth to a new kind of internationalism led by a global confederacy of oligarchs. (Tom Engelhardt)

The rise of a right-wing nationalist regime in the United States is now a realistic possibility.

Until recently, any proposal to "save" Europe was regarded sympathetically, albeit with skepticism about its feasibility. Today, the skepticism is about whether Europe is worth saving. The European idea is being driven into retreat by the combined force of a denial, an insurgency, and a fallacy. progressives need to ask a straightforward question: Why is the European idea dying? The answers are clear: involuntary unemployment and involuntary intra-EU migration.

Six year's ago, Mohamed Bouazizi's protest inspired millions of others to protest their regimes and the status quo. The protests did not bring the renewal that was promised by the branding phrase "Arab Spring," but rather what followed were more of the old calamities. To say that the old Arab regime is better than the revolt against it is like saying that the accumulation of pus in a boil is better than incising the boil and letting the pus out.

Trump's nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity and an element of populism as well, although it's clearly a misdirection...it's largely about wounded national pride which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a very long time. The reason Trump is now playing the conservative anthem "Proud To Be An American" at his rallies is: Good old fashioned jingoism - the one thing that brings the old right, the new right and the alt-right together.

Across Europe, voters are turning to far-right parties, won over by nationalism, anti-immigrant hysteria and failed economic policies of austerity. In Germany, France, Poland, Hungary and Sweden, far right parties have made gains. Left political parties in these countries have not been as successful as those in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama, and several governors push back against the rising tide of anti-refugee sentiment. Governors Tom Wolf (PA), Kate Brown (OR), Jay Inslee (WA), Jerry Brown (CA), and John Hickenlooper (CO) have voiced their support for refugees from war, economic poverty and religious and political persecution.