MAGA right's new fascist man-crush: He's been dead for 50 years

MAGA right’s new fascist man-crush: He’s been dead for 50 years
In the early years of SNL, Francisco Franco was "still dead." But to his 21st-century fanboys, he's immortal

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published November 16, 2025 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) There’s a strange circular relationship between the authoritarian movement in America symbolized or spearheaded by Donald Trump — whether or not he is truly its leader — and the European far right. It’s like a malevolent Ouroboros, where we can’t tell which is the head and which the tail, or which end is swallowing the other.

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As I wrote recently, Elon Musk’s fixation with Britain’s current social and political crisis seems to be rooted in misbegotten anglophile nostalgia and a grotesque misreading of “The Lord of the Rings.” His theatrical embrace of the racist hustler known as Tommy Robinson — viewed as a pariah even by Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform UK party — has only made Musk look like a hapless clown to the British public, if an obscenely rich one. Clumsy efforts by JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Musk and other Trump surrogates to meddle in Germany’s national elections on behalf of the almost-fascist AfD party seemed to backfire, as anyone with the remotest understanding of contemporary European politics could have predicted.

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But there’s another European fascist leader of the last century who’s been hovering in the background all this time as a noteworthy exemplar. Although he bears little resemblance to Donald Trump in affect or personality (or competence, for that matter), he may offer a highly instructive model for those behind the Trumpian throne, who hope to seize the MAGA reins whenever and however Trump leaves the stage.

As Dan Kaufman observes in a fascinating essay for the New York Review of Books, Francisco Franco — the pompous, cunning self-appointed “generalissimo” who crushed the democratic-socialist Republic in the Spanish Civil War and ruled unchallenged over a Western European nation for 35 years — has recently become the focus of “renewed admiration” on the American far right. .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/16/maga-rights-new-fascist-man-crush-hes-been-dead-for-50-years/