Fascism and daddy issues

Why the Frankfurt School was so focused on the fascist's relationship with his father.

I’ve always been extremely suspicious of the argument that Donald Trump is a fascist. First because he spent most of his first term governing as a perfectly ordinary right-wing capitalist, and it was only during the January 6 attempted coup that the charge of fascist really became plausible. And second, of course, because Democrats have always called sitting Republican presidents fascists and used that charge to cow the left into submission. At this point, even if Trump were a fascist, you could hardly blame the public for skepticism after so many decades of Democrats crying wolf.

That said, I have to admit — I legit gasped when I saw, among pictures of Trump streetside merch circulating on the internet right now, this t-shirt on sale. Because this is some deeply, profoundly fascist shit.

Among other better known traits of fascism like ethnonationalism and violence on the streets, the tendency to identify one’s leader as a father figure often gets glossed over in modern writing as an odd quirk of history. But particularly in the analysis of the Frankfurt School, this supposed quirk of history expresses a dangerous psychosexual pathology that gives fascism much of its energy and destructive force. And since these daddy issues seem to be running rampant on the right these days, they probably deserve a closer look.