A course that will be offered by the University of Michigan to consider whether or not President Donald Trump is the “new face of fascism.” Based on the tone of the class description and the political climate of campuses around the country, it is likely the class and its professor will argue that Trump is “fascist.”
According to a
report by Campus Reform, the University of Michigan will offer a course entitled the “History of the American Right,” which will explore various political topics through the recent past. A promotional flyer for the course suggests that President Trump might be the face of a new brand of “fascism.”
We begin with the early nineteenth-century defense of slavery and the political mobilization of nativism; move on to the ideas of race behind immigration restriction and through the twentieth-century ‘red scares’; continue by studying the revival of an anti-labor, anti-welfare-state business ideology of laissez-faire absolutism since the 1980s; and arrive at the ‘MAGA’ rallies of our time. Only with a sense of history can we try to answer the question that has stirred great anxiety in some quarters: Are we seeing what one scholar has called a ‘new face of fascism’?
University of Michigan Professor Howard Brick, who will teach the course, says that it was inspired by his research into American “radicalism.”
Over the last thirty years, it has become common in the everyday language of the press to refer to “left” and “right” as if they describe the Democrats and the Republicans, on “either side of the aisle” in Congress—a practice that responds, perhaps, to the apparently dogmatic “ideological” differences that have arisen between the two. This course, however, adheres to the older discourse where Left and Right referred to “radical” or “extremely conservative” (reactionary) currents, respectively.]
Breitbart News
reported this week that the University of Michigan will offer a class on “media ethics” course in the fall taught by former CNN correspondent Anthony Collings.
