Interacting with Trumpista-Americans

David Neiwert encourages pro-democracy Americans to talk to Trump supporters with "humility and empathy. But also not to be dumb about it. His advice: "There's really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump."

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/interacting-with-trumpista-americans

Experts take a closer look at the January 6 insurrectionists

Robert Pape, author of the important study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) and Keven Ruby have an analysis of Capitol attackers in the January 6 insurrection, The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists The Atlantic 02/02/2021.

They present the data in this PowerPoint, The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement 01/28/2021.

Dave Neiwert discusses their article in Profile of Capitol siege arrestees indicates pro-Trump extremists increasingly middle-class, older Daily Kos 02/04/2021. One of his main takeaways is how this shows the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party and the mainstreaming of more ideas and attitudes from the violent radical right. As Pape and Ruby put it:

[A] closer look at the people suspected of taking part in the Capitol riot suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more “normal” Trump supporters —middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.

Neiwert notes, "Compared to far-right extremists who have been arrested for their involvement in previous acts of political violence (such as the 2017 Charlottesville riots), many of the people arrested for their roles in the Capitol siege have a great deal to lose."

From the experience of the 1920s and 1930s, it has been widely assumed conventionally that fascist movement was particularly attractive to a petit bourgeois/middle class base, i.e, shopkeepers, small business owners, farmers. The data on which Pape and Ruby report seem to be consistent with that understanding, although we should be careful not to over-generalize from that. As they write in The Atlantic, "Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants."

For instance, the PowerPoint includes these two bullet points:

Overall, the Biden counties versus the Trump counties that produced insurrectionists are more unemployed, more mixed race, and far more big city.

Telling example is Dallas County, Texas – which produced 4 insurrectionists and had a vote for Trump at 33%, unemployment is just at the national average, and 67% white.

The fact that an urban area with high unemployment may be more likely to produce violent rightwing insurrectionists does not mean that the participants are themselves unemployed or suffering from significant material "economic anxiety", to use the now-notorious lazy journalistic phrase. But it also does not mean that the economic conditions (or "anxieties") in the places where they live had no contributing effect to their political alignments and actions.

The value of this kind of factual database is that it allows people to look at the complexities of causation and prevention, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) to use a risk-management term, based on solid data of a significant incident of political violence.

The PowerPoint also notes, "the more Trump voters in a county – even in counties Biden won – the greater likelihood that county would send an insurrectionist to the US Capitol. This is because there are twice as many people who live in Biden counties compared to those who live in Trump counties." I would take from this that while it's an important data point, it does not necessarily mean that violent seditionist sentiment is relatively weaker in Trump majority areas. It may just reflect that is a place where there are just more people available as a pool from which to draw.

Dave Neiwert provides a review with links to more detailed reports of public events that foreshadowed the January 6 development, and warns: "All of these events set the stage for the January 6 insurrection. Its aftermath, as both the violence and the nature of the people who participated clearly demonstrate, almost certainly foretell a sustained, violent insurgency against not just the Biden administration but democracy itself for the foreseeable future."

The PowerPoint presentation also includes these cautionary observations:

A documentary on the Capitol riot

Mehdi Hasan has a documentar report on the Capitol insurrection of three weeks ago, Capitol Crimes: Inside the Insurrection 01/28/2021:

Dave Neiwert gives us an idea of the direction far-right terrorism will go over the next few months (Far right reeling from Capitol siege consequences, so it returns to ‘leaderless resistance’ tactics Daily Kos 01/27/2021):

Radical-right organizing works in cycles: There’s an initial buildup and recruitment phase, followed by preplanned direct action in escalating levels of violence, eventually resulting in an explosion of public violence that exposes them both to public approbation and prosecution by authorities. These bursts of violence tend to scatter their forces as they dissolve into factional squabbling. At this point, they begin to reorganize under a “leaderless resistance” strategy deploying small action cells and “lone wolf” terrorists, and begin rebuilding. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The most recent far-right explosion of violence—the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—has had its predictable effect, particularly due to the stern law-enforcement response involving multiple arrests of participants as well as the subsequent bans on their presence in social media, dispersing their organizers and followers to the far dark reaches of the internet and inspiring internecine warfare. Moreover, as Ben Makuch reports for Vice, white-supremacist ideologues are now responding by preparing a fresh round of domestic terrorism deploying both paramilitary “action squads” and unaffiliated extremists capable of extreme violence.

He goes on to explain how this approach reinforces the media narrative of rightwing terrorist acts as being "isolated incidents," when often they are very much part of a broader network of fanaticism and hatred. When in reality, when the media report "that such events are committed by 'lone wolves,' without any recognition that such a designation actually indicates the opposite of an 'isolated' event."

Part of the larger political environment for the radical right is the Christian Right movement. While most of their leaders and ministers don't directly promote violence, they often do promote an apocalyptic attitude toward polices (the claimed war on Christianity), an anti-science bias (creationism), and general moral fanaticism, especially around abortion. And the obscure theology of Christian Reconstruction has played a major role in the formation of today's Radical Right.

As Chrissy Stroop notes (Where Were They Radicalized? Religion Dispatches 01/19/2021):

As I like to say, however, the Christian Right has been doing “alternative facts” since before it was cool. It would be remiss of us to approach the “where were they radicalized” question without addressing how the Christian schooling and homeschooling movement, along with many white churches and other evangelical, LDS, and ‘trad’ Catholic institutions, fostered the subcultures that created the demand for hyper-partisan “news” outlets like Fox News.

Any serious answer to the question of radicalization will have to address Christian nationalism’s own longstanding (dis)information and political ecosystem, taking into account the feedback loops between it; overt white supremacist and right-wing extremist groups; elite right-wing lobbies like the Council for National Policy; digital technology; and the rise of talk radio and right-wing cable “news.”

Law enforcement needs to take far-right terrorism more seriously - but not with a failed "War on Terror" framework

"A War on Terror modeled after the post-9/11 response would probably be not just ineffective but disastrous," writes Dave Neiwert. (As Biden tries to tackle white-supremacist terrorism, he should steer clear of any ‘War on Terror’ Daily Kos 01/22/2021)

Dave has been an advocate for more serious attention to the problems of far-right terrorism for years. But as he explains again in this piece, even after years of far-right, non-Islamic terrorism being far more of a problem than "radical Islamic terrorism," to use one of the Republicans' favorite magic conjuring phrases, law enforcement is still plagued by the problem of being blind in the right eye, not least because some in law enforcement as active sympathizers of the far right. And, of course, the obvious white racism in law enforcement nationwide means that many of them are unlikely to regard the white supremacy that is a core orientation for the far right.

This piece draws heavily on two other recent articles: Spencer Ackerman's Biden Taps a War on Terror Veteran to Stop White Supremacists Daily Beast 01/21/2021 and No, We Do Not Need New Anti-Terrorism Laws to Combat Right-Wing Extremists 01/11/2021.

What they all stress is that the central problem of fighting far-right terrorism has not been the lack of laws, but the lack of focus on the problem. Bayoumi writes:

While the USA Patriot Act did redefine terrorism to include its domestic variety, it did not create a specific set of penalties for such acts. Instead, prosecutors can use many of the broad terrorism laws that are on the books to prosecute acts of domestic terror (the majority of which have been committed by far-right actors). The problem is, they simply don’t. (my emphasis)

The milieu of domestic white-supremacist terrorism is very different from that of Islamist terrorism, including the nature of foreign connections that may be involved. To use Democrats' current favorite foreign enemy Russia as an example, Russia does encourage and subsidize far-right movements and groups in foreign countries, but aren't so likely to subsidize radical Islamic jihadist groups. Although our common terminology that distinguishes "far-right" from "Islamic" terrorism is a bit murky, because in terms of political ideology, jihadist Islamism can also legitimately be described as far right in terms of its authoritarianism and cultural politics.

For that matter, if there actually are far-left terrorist groups active in the US (if there are any, they are staying well concealed!), that would also be a distinct political and cultural environment than those of white-supremacist far-right or violent Islamist groups.

But the nearly 20-year-long War on Terror has been almost exclusively focused in practice on Islamist groups. And in the real world, there is a lot of ideological and organizational inertia to do more of what they've been doing in the past. As Bayoumi puts it:

[A] terrorism double standard exists. And the double standard is deeply entrenched both in our laws and in our broader culture. Left unexamined, this same double standard feeds off of its own bigoted limitations and assumptions and grows like yeast in a warm oven. One result of this is the discourse we’re now all familiar with: White guy shooters get labeled as angry or desperate or losers, while Muslim shooters are defined as terrorists. The former are examined as troubled individuals. The latter no longer belong to humanity.

Ackerman's report focused on a key Biden appointee, Russ Travers, as deputy Homeland Security adviser in the White House. Travers "has marinated in the War on Terror," he writes.

But some worry that it will be natural—indeed, human—for Travers to apply his post-9/11 experience to far-right and white-supremacist terror. That would be a disaster, they warn, both for the Constitution and for success. With debate underway amongst Democrats over new domestic terrorism statutes, the path Biden chooses is likely to define his early tenure as president.

“War-on-terrorism tactics aren't the solution to our current problems. In many ways, they are a cause of them,” said Michael German, a retired FBI special agent who arrested white supremacists in the 1990s, and who spoke generically and not about Travers particularly.

Dave Neiwert makes the following key pointss: (1) US law-enforcment needs to take far-right domestic terrorism much more seriously; (2) there is a vigorous legal framework already in place to investigate and prosecute far-right terrorist groups, though the statutes on domestic terrorism may be murky in some ways; (3) the central problem is that white supremacist attitudes are deeply ingrained in law enforcement agencies, a bias that strongly favors permissive treatment for far-right criminals; and, (4) "the War on Terror has in fact failed."

I don't know if there may be some changes to the law that might be needed to combat the kind of insurrectionist groups behind the January 6 Capitol riot. But it's the responsibility of our representatives in Congress to scrutinize laws carefully for necessity, effectiveness, and protection of civil liberties and due process. Congress and the Biden-Harris Administration should definitely not use this as an opportunity to pass a wishlist of new measures without regard to the actual problems.

And, new laws or not, what Dave Neiwert writes here is critically important:

It’s not credible to expect our national law-enforcement apparatus to respond effectively to far-right domestic terrorism when its ranks are full of people sympathetic to their cause. So any effective solution to dealing with the spread of domestic terrorism will necessarily be wrapped up in the similarly major issue of larger police reform, which should probably begin with a focused effort on weeding out extremists within their ranks.

It also should emphasize providing training for officers to recognize, investigate, and prevent both hate crimes and domestic-terrorist acts — which has long been recognized as a significant factor in the ongoing problem of under-enforcement of hate-crimes laws. In the process, it is likely to create forces that are more attuned to the challenges facing communities of color and vulnerable minorities.

In general, an effective response to domestic terrorism will need to emphasize a ground-level response that engages local and state forces in the work, rather than placing the enforcement eggs in a top-heavy federal apparatus that responds slowly to conditions on the ground and usually becomes bureaucratically calcified in very little time. A War on Terror modeled after the post-9/11 response would probably be not just ineffective but disastrous. [my emphasis]

He also cites these two articles by Michael German, both prior to the Capitol attack: Why New Laws Aren't Needed to Take Domestic Terrorism More Seriously Just Security 12/14/2020 and Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center 08/27/2020.

How the far right is meddling in the BLM protests

Dave Neiwert has been reporting at Daily Kos on the sinister role that far-right extremists have been playing in relation to the Blck Lives Matter protest uprising that has been going on for weeks.

In 'White supremacists' arrested while trying to amplify protest violence, Richmond mayor says Daily Kos 07/27/2020, he writes:

We’ve had evidence for some time that right-wing extremists have been lurking at anti-police protests around the nation, amplifying the violence by engaging in vandalism, assaults, and attacks on police — often while pretending to be there to support Black Lives Matter and antifascists leading the protests.

This weekend in Richmond, Virginia, police arrested several such saboteurs during a Black Lives Matter protest, according to city Mayor Levar Stoney. “White supremacists” were carrying pro-BLM signs and breaking windows at downtown businesses, Stoney said, but were stopped when BLM protesters pointed them out to police.

"We've spoken on many occasions about those who've chosen a more violent route to express their discontent, and what that does for the overall movement towards social justice," Stoney told reporters Sunday. "Last night that reared its ugly head right here in the City of Richmond ... We saw some violent actions, violent protests, spearheaded by white supremacists. And frankly, it was disgusting. Disgusting. As they held plywood shields that read, BLM, these folks toured areas of damage downtown, The Fan, breaking windows, tagging private property with hateful language." [my emphasis]

See also his pieces:

• Militiamen's reactionary presence at protests threatens democracy, and police appear on their side Daily Kos 07/31/2020
• Don't be fooled: 'Boogaloo' may attract all kinds of fans, but it's a violent far-right movement Daily Kos 07/14/2020

When we're dealing with anything so complex as the current uprising set off by the sadistic murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis cops, we need to be able to walk and talk at the same time. A small demonstration, like a picket line in front of a store, is relatively easy for the organizers to keep orderly and focused. The same is true for most union protests, even larger ones, not least because unions have practice in organizing protests.

It's always possible for passions to run high and for individuals to get rowdy even at those kinds of protests. And there can be genuine bad actors like the Bougaloo Bois at work whose goal is specifically to discredit the protests.

Large protests like the big antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s, the marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the civil-rights March on Washington in 1963, the Women's March after Bunker Boy's inauguration in 2017, or today's Black Lives Matter marches, are more complicated phenomena. Even a large march or protest can be well-organized. But they inevitably attract people with a wide range of ages and motivations, including people who are mainly attracted by the excitement. And some of them may cause trouble against the wishes of the organizers.

Jerry Brown has some relevant remarks in this Facebook video, Trump is so bizarre and so deviant in so many ways ... 07/27/2020. Referring to his years as Mayor of Oakland (1999-2007), he says, "Look, Oakland, I was there, they've got several hundred anarchists that like to break windows, light fires, and protest. But local people can handle it." He's referring to a local group of "black box" anarchists there. But Jerry is capable of making practical judgments about real situations, and he could hardly be more critical of Trump's use of paramilitary goon squads against local protesters:

See also, Former CA Gov. Jerry Brown on COVID-19 and Protests Amanpour and Company 07/29/2020:

But the weeks of the nationwide BLM protests have been for the most part peaceful. Republicans and white supremacists are quick to condemn any protests that disturbs their own comfort even momentarily as "violent." But that's not a definition the rest of us should accept. I'm not inclined to split theoretical hairs over whether breaking a window during a demonstration qualifies as "violence". But anyone with a brain or a conscience should be able to distinguish between violence against property and violence against people. And when it comes to toppled statues, I'm not going to cry over them or spend a lot of energy moralizing about an unauthorized toppling versus a procedurally correct one. Especially since American culture makes a fetish about the nobility of toppling statues related to regimes of which the American government disapproves.

Here's a tenth-anniversary reposting of the famous toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad in 2003, April 9, 2003: Saddam Hussein's statue falls 04/09/2013:

Commentator Lara Logan was giving it an enthusiastic propaganda commentary. The footage was frequently used in introducing news reports on the war and in retrospective accounts. Often the footage was shown edited to make it appear that the statue toppled immediately off the pedestal, which we see in that footage actually happened in two stages, which doesn't have exactly the same theatrical affect. Shots from a longer distance showed that the crowd attending the event was only a couple of hundred people at most, although that clip shows people walking by the scene as though it was no big deal. It was also the very next day that massive looting broke out in Baghdad - and I mean massive, not just a few broken windows - which most accounts of the Iraq War identify as an extremely important moment that discredited the occupation in an important way at an early moment.

But that statue-toppling became an iconic moment, especially for Iraq War fans. It's worth remembering that the Confederate armies commanded by Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson killed far more soldiers of the United States armed forces than the Iraqi army of the guerrilla fighters during the long disaster that followed the statue-topping ever did.

Video series on rightwing extremism, featuring David Neiwert, Daryl Johnson, and Heidi Beirich

Aljaeera's AJ+ YouTube channel has done a three-part series on far-right extremism in the United States. The second and third installments feature an interview with an interview with David Neiwert, a leading journalistic authority on far-right extremism. The first and second include an interview with Daryl Johnson, a former terrorism analyst with the Department of Homeland Security. Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is featured in the first episode.

What’s Fueling Far-Right Hate in America? 02/19/2019:

How One Act Of Violence Forever Changed The U.S. 02/26/2019:

Why People Become Neo-Nazis 03/05/2019:

See also: 2018 saw most killings linked to US far right since 1995: ADL Aljazeera 01/24/2019; David Neiwert, White supremacist propaganda is surging, along with everything else hate-related Daily Kos 03/08/2019.

How do we identify "illiberal democracies"? And define "liberal democracy"?

Defining political systems can be tricky. But not impossible.

Historian Christopher Browning wrote a piece that is helpful in understanding the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, The Suffocation of Democracy NYBooks 10/25/2018.

Browning makes some well-grounded points about the process in Germany that led to Hitler taking power and sees some broad parallels for US isolationism in the interwar period to the situation that could develop from Trump's program of thoughtlessly trashing the existing international order.

But Browning also argues "that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s." He writes:

The fascist movements of that time [the interwar period] prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and selfenrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies. [my emphasis]

If we put these into a PowerPoint type list, it would be something like this:

• Have elections with functioning opposition parties but rig the system so that the ruling party retains decisive control even when a solid majority votes for other parties
• Establish effective control of the press without overtly bringing them under government control and censorship, including intimidation or acts of violence against journalists
• Use extensive corruption to favor allied oligarchs and to insure that the ruling party's policies are established even when they are unpopular
• Neutralize, exile, or kill prominent critics
• Use Carl Schmitt-ian polarization and demagoguery to generate support for the ruling party Explicitly encourage authoritarian attitudes through fear of crime and other themes

I'll stipulate here that none of Browning's points or my bullet-point elaboration of them are not immune to nit-picking criticism from sophomore political-science students or FOX News commentators.

But we're not talking mathematical rules of logic or religious dogmas here. These issues are about forms of government in the real world. Browning refers in particular to the current governments of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and the Phillipines.

For Americans, making these distinctions has special twists. If we start from a viewpoint like that of, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016, that America is "the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history," it would be natural to measure how democratic another country is by how much its government looks like that of the United States. (Quote from Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National Convention Telegraph 07/25/2016, just after 1:10 in the video)

But there are also other measures, including centuries of history, political theory, and legal reasoning. One of the best known set of standards are provided by the European Union. Most of whose governments are some form of parliamentary system, by the way, which looks significantly different than the American government. To qualify for admission to the EU, a country has to demonstrate its compliance with a range of democratic standards: representative government with democratic elections and universal suffrage; separation of powers (executive, legislative, judicial); competitive and independent political parties; a free press; an established legal system with effective rule of law; control on corruption; minimal standards on human rights - including having no death penalty - and compliance with international law.

The sophomore poli-sci student, or a graduate student in philosophy, might stress that ultimately all this implies some minimum level of agreement on what all those things mean. The graduate student might bring some particular Wittgensteinian or Habermasian insights to the argument. And it's true. That's why the EU has elaborate procedures and established decision-making processes to reach effective determinations on this. (The Bannonites would say, "Hey, man, George Soros and the globalists just call whatever they want "democracy," everybody knows dat.")

A couple of thoughts, here. One is that the United States obviously doesn't meet the EU's minimum standards just by having the death penalty alone. And whether our Citizen's United system of campaign financing would pass the EU's corruption standards, I don't know.

Currently, the EU has formal reviews under way for Hungary and Poland for not maintaining the minimum democratic standards. Just three months ago there was an important court decision on judicial independence in Poland: Jon Stone, European Court of Justice orders Poland to stop purging its supreme court judges Independent 10/19/2018.

The general public assumption right now is that Hungary has gone the farthest of all the EU countries in the direction of "illiberal democracy," a term that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán uses with approval. Poland is considered the next most concerning example. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are known as the Visegrad countries, and the latter two have also have some troubling developments in the same direction as Hungary and Poland. Far-right parties are part of the governing coalitions in Italy (the Lega) and Austria (Freedom Party, FPÖ). The same is also true for EU members Bulgaria, Denmark, Greece, and Latvia, and for non-EU countries Switzerland and Norway. (Caelainn Barr et al, Vom Flackern zum Feuer Der Freitag 01/2019, 04.01.2019)

Latin America's largest and most populous country Brazil recently elected a rightwing authoritarian President, Jair Bolsonaro, after years of the Brazilian oligarchs pursuing their version of Browning's point, "Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another." One of the main tools was a highly politicized anti-corruption investigation called Operation Car Wash, with which former center-left President Lula da Silva was imprisoned on dubious charges. And his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was removed from office in 2016 by a "soft coup" under charges that were transparently frivolous.

Bolsinaro is often and understandably described as a fascist. (Jair Bolsonaro: Brazil's firebrand leader dubbed the Trump of the Tropics BBC News 12/31/2019; Federico Finchelstein, Jair Bolsonaro’s Model Isn’t Berlusconi. It’s Goebbels. Foreign Policy 10/05/2018; Fascist? Populist? Debate Over Describing Brazil's Bolsonaro VOA 10/24/2018; Paul Mason, Brazil shows how the elite responds when forced to choose between fascism and the left New Statesman 10/30/2018)

Among historians and other students of far right political movements, defining "fascism" in a rigorous way is a notoriously aggravating problem. Sometimes it can make you feel like adapting a version of Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964): "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

That would mean: I don't know how to define fascism, but I know it when I see it!

One approach to the historical question that I find helpful is to look at the actual international connections between governments and movements. For instance, since Mussolini headed the Fascist Party, there's not really any dispute about calling them fascist. Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss established authoritarian rule in 1933 and formalized it into a dictatorship in 1934, one modeled explicitly on Italy's at the encouragement of Mussolini's government and the Catholic hierarchy. Its own self-description was Standestaat, or corporate state. ("Corporate state" in the sense of "estates" or social classes, not business corporations). But it was and is referred to as the Austro-fascist or clerical-fascist regime.

Similar associations and similarities can be applied to contemporary cases of "illiberal democracy."

A final comment on defining fascism. As Frederico Finchelstein notes in the article linked above:

In Brazil and elsewhere, right-wing populists are increasingly acting as the Nazis did and, at the same time, disavowing this Nazi legacy or even blaming the left for it. For post-fascist members of the alt-right, acting like a Nazi and accusing your opponent of being so is not a contradiction at all. Indeed, the idea of a leftist Nazism is a political myth that draws directly on the methods of Nazi propaganda.

According to Brazilian right-wingers and Holocaust deniers, it is the left that threatens to revive Nazism. This is, of course, a falsehood that comes straight out of the Nazi playbook. Fascists always deny what they are and ascribe their own features and their own totalitarian politics to their enemies. ...

... Fascists have always replaced reality with ideological fantasies. This is why Bolsonaro presents the left’s leaders as latter-day emulators of Hitler when in fact he is the only candidate close to the Führer in style and substance. [my emphasis]

For American rightwingers and Republicans making a similar charge against the Democrats (not just against people who could legitimately be considered far left), Jonah Goldberg's tendentious propaganda tract, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (2008) provides a template for this nonsense. Dave Neiwert organized a set of reality-based responses to that book, or slogan in the form of a book, for History News Network (2010).

Pipe bomb attacks, the far right, and "stochastic" terrorism

Dave Neiwert analyzes the Republican and far-right tactic of launching a "false flag" conspiracy theory when confronting evidence that a rightwing terrorist was at work in an incident like the pipe bombs this week: Mail-bomber 'false flag' theories overwhelm discourse on terrorismSPLC Hatewatch 10/26/2018.

This is one point he emphasizes:

Just for the record: Explosive devices like the pipe bombs sent in the mail have long been favored weapons of the radical right in the United States, reflecting its propensity for weapons of mass destruction generally. The use of pipe bombs by right-wing domestic terrorists dates back at least to the 1984 rampage of the neo-Nazi gang The Order, as well as subsequent terrorist plots that emanated from the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho in the ‘80s and ‘90s. These included pipe-bomb attacks on the Spokane Spokesman-Review newspaper and a Planned Parenthood clinic in 1996. The man who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Eric Rudolph, used pipe bombs in his attacks on abortion providers and gay bars.

More recently, homemade bombs turned up in a spate of cases involving radical-right extremists in 2009-10. These included an older case, from 2004, when neo-Nazis sent a bomb in the mail to the director of the Office of Diversity for the city of Scottsdale, Arizona, and nearly killed him.

Eyal Press talks about this string of pipe bombs sent to figures identified with left or center-left politics in the context of "stochastic terrorism" ( New York Times 10/25/2018):

In recent years, a term has begun to circulate to capture this phenomenon — “stochastic terrorism,” in which mass communications, including social media, inspire random acts of violence that according to one description “are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, every act and actor is different, and no one knows by whom or where an act will happen - but it’s a good bet that something will.

The examples in his article relate to the extreme antiabortionists. As he notes in the article, he was writing before a suspect had been arrested in the letter-bomb series.

Heather Timmons updated this story to include some information about the arrest, Stochastic terror and the cycle of hate that pushes unstable Americans to violence Quartz 10/26/2018.

Juan Cole applies the concept to the pipe bombs in Suggestive Terrorism: Trump, Pipe Bomber and the ISIL Technique Informed Comment 10/27/2018, noting it#s one that ISIL has used to incite terrorist attacks in Europe and the US:

This free-floating willingness to fall under the influence of a charismatic leader calling for violence, is common between Trumpism and ISIL.

Trump has asked his crowds to beat up journalists in attendance. He has threatened o jail former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. His fantasies inhabited the dreams of his followers. Just as Trump didn’t actually ask anyone to bomb for him, neither did ISIL.

Those Republicans who point out that there are dangerous crazy people in both major parties are right. But in only one party is the leader actively calling for people to be beaten up or otherwise attacked. That’s the difference. [my emphasis]