Increasingly, the Trump diehards resemble something more like Scientology than a political movement. I started noticing back in the 90s that there was a cultural undercurrent that was combining anti-establishment politics with conspiracies, religion, the occult, pseudo-science, science fiction, pseudo-history, mythology, crank economic and legal theories, crank medicine, (sometimes) racism, and all kinds of other general weirdness. This kind of stuff was normally considered to be “far-right” but it seemed to me at the time that it couldn’t really be categorized as any traditional ideology, and it also included some people with a leftist, libertarian, or minority background as well as the usual right-wing subcultures. It seems to have worked its way into the mainstream nowadays with QAnon and other comparable tendencies.
While I certainly don’t agree with the conventional Trumpism=fascism thesis, I agree that a serious demagogue who was actually competent could manipulate this for nefarious ends. On one hand, such radically anti-system attitudes are necessary, and attacks on the Capitol are just as legitimate from a revolutionary perspective as attacks on local police stations, but the direction they are taken in matters as well. What needs to happen is increasing fragmentation that prevents any one faction from gaining concentrated power, whether Trumpists, the far-left, or anyone else. We don’t want the insurrection of the urban lumpenproletariat to be usurped by the far-left and turned toward actual Jacobinism, Marxism, or Maoism, and we don’t want rebellions by the rural/suburban lumpenproletariat to be usurped by the far-right and turned toward actual fascism or right-wing authoritarianism.
