A leading expert on fascism claims the United States’ slide towards authoritarianism is unlike anything seen in modern times.
Speaking to Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Sunday evening, MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell asked if the current gutting of government programmes and social services by the Trump administration bore any resemblance to the “democratic backsliding” seen when countries transition into authoritarianism.
“If you look at the early Putin or the early Orban or Erdogan, they didn’t move at this speed.
Trump's slide into authoritarianism has outpaced even Vladimir Putin during his rise to power.
So the communists would, you know, use psychiatrists to say that dissidents or journalists who didn’t agree with the regime had to go to psychiatric hospitals.
In a previous interview prior to Trump’s re-election, Ben-Ghiat drew comparisons to Nazi Germany to demonstrate the speed with which an advanced nation can succumb to authoritarianism.
And then he came in, and he did things very quickly,” she told the Guardian last July. »