My opinion: 2017 was the year that fascism was normalised, especially by Trump
or more exactly by Trump and the whole US collection of far right oligarchs and White Supremacists to whom he has given free rein and mainstream status
The EU ref last June gave a morale boost to Trump supporters in a very close fight. It also empowered the hard right on the continent.
However, even in Europe, it has been the change in US policy direction towards the far right that has been crucial - and that only really took off after Trump's inauguration, taking over the reins of power their.
Trump's rise to power has been crucial in the rise of fascism not just in the USA, but in the Uk and some of the E27:
Since WW2, all previous US Presidents, whether Democrat or Republican, were reliable allies against fascism rising again in Europe, because they viewed fascism here as being against US interests
Now, instead of POTUS being part of the European firewall against fascism, Trump is pouring petrol on the flames and praising fascist leaders
and unfortunately, some Brexit Ultras, both politicians and media oligarchs, are doing the same
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-on-2017-the-year-weird-became-the-new-normal-1.3328922
… [Trump’s inauguration] was followed by blatant lying:
Sean Spicer’s brazen claims, as White House spokesman,
not just that Trump had attracted “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”
but also that mainstream media had doctored photographic and film evidence to hide this truth.
At the time these strange moments seemed mostly to function as evidence of gauche amateurism.
But they were in fact harbingers of the arrival of the methodologies of the far right at the centre of global power.
The idea that everything is hellish and that only the great leader can fix it is standard fascist rhetoric.
So is the message that the independent media lies about everything and that the faithful must look to the leader
to provide what Trump’s counsellor Kellyanne Conwayy^, defending Spicer’s claims, called “alternative facts”.
It was a short step from there to Trump’s deliberate normalisation of neo-Nazis.
In August he condemned “both sides” for violence in Charlottesville, Virginia,
in which an anti-fascist demonstrator was murdered,
and claimed that “very fine people” were among the white supremacists.
In November he retweeted faked-up anti-Islam videos concocted by a tiny English neo-Nazi outfit
– and hit out at Theresa May, the British prime minister, when she condemned him for doing so.
^^
All of this had a purpose: to bring far-right extremism in from the cold, to make it part of the normal discourse in which “both sides” take part.
…
The defeat of Roy Moore in Alabama may be remarkable
– but less remarkable than the fact that
48 per cent of voters (and 63 per cent of white women) still backed a man who was credibly accused of sexual assaults on children and teenagers
Moore was so egregiously repellent a candidate that it is not hard for any far-right demagogue to seem more “normal” by comparison.