Is Fascism Back? Is Trump a Fascist?
People are often disappointed that I don’t call Trump (or any living head of state) a Fascist. I prefer to leave that term for the interwar dictatorships because I believe that its use can perpetuate outdated ideas about how authoritarianism works.
When we say the word Fascism, most people think of Hitler, who capitalized on the Reichstag Fire to declare a state of emergency and suspend all freedoms soon after getting into office. Mussolini followed a different route. He degraded democracy bit by bit over 3 years, but once he declared dictatorship in Jan. 1925, the shutdown of elections and opposition parties and media came quickly.
So, calling today's governments, and leaders, Fascists can be misleading, since that's not how things work today. Although military coups and other forms of rapid authoritarian takeover still happen (coups in 2021 Myanmar and Guinea succeeded, coups in 2016 Turkey and 2021 America did not), today authoritarianism develops mostly through evolution, not revolution.
21st century strongmen come into office mostly through elections and then manipulate the electoral process to stay there. Today's leaders may stay in office almost as long as some old-school dictators, but they take years to advance the process of what we call autocratic capture -- when the election machinery, judiciary, media, and more have been cleansed of non-loyalists by the state-- far enough to extinguish democracy.
It took Putin 20 years to get to a position where Parliament approved his quest in 2020 to stay in power until 2036, and Orbán needed 10 years to amass power sufficient to institute rule by decree.
Where democracy still exists, but is endangered, as in America, it may seem necessary to call out the threat in terms that are most familiar to people, to help them to understand the gravity of the situation. The Fascist label would seem to do that.
However, it can be counter-productive, because people may see the fact that democratic parties still operate --or, indeed, are in power, as in the US-- as proof that using the term Fascism is unwarranted. As Kim Scheppele Lane argues in her essay on "autocratic legalism," our "reliance on stick-figure stereotypes about illiberalism" and tendency to use the examples of "catastrophic twentieth-century authoritarianisms" as a measure of what counts as danger can blind us to what is unfolding in front of us.
If we don't see troops marching on the streets, even a violent assault on the US equivalent of the Reichstag can be minimized by many, and its instigators left to circulate, unpunished, in society. The recall to Fascism means that the "standard" for calling out the demise of democracy is impossibly high.
Leaders like Orbán and Erdogan encourage this blindness by claiming that their states are “illiberal democracies” (Orbán's term). “Here we have a ballot box…the democracy gets its power from the people," claimed Erdogan in 2017, during his post-coup attempt crackdown, to refute charges that he was acting like a dictator. "It’s what we call national will.” The hundred thousand-plus Turks who have been detained, imprisoned, kidnapped, fired, or had their assets seized because they have been labeled as state enemies would likely disagree.
All of this is why I use the word authoritarian rather than Fascist to describe today's strongmen. Fascism, after all, was the first stage (along with early Communism) of a larger history of unfreedom that looks different in every place and time.
That said, the premise of my 2020 book, Strongmen, is that there are continuities in the authoritarian playbook first sketched out by Mussolini and his Communist counterparts in the 1920s. To give one example from the area of propaganda, some things have changed, like the addition of social media, but the rules of the personality cults maintained by that media are the same as a century ago.
And it's easy to see Fascism in autocrats' embraces of pro-natalist policies and in their persecution of some of the same enemies targeted for mass imprisonment or death years ago. They include nomadic peoples, LGBTQ+ individuals, non-whites and non-Christians, and migrants. Yet Communists targeted many of these same groups. Putin and Orbán come out of Communism, not Fascism. Nor do Erdogan or Modi bring forth a strictly Fascist lineage. It is something more than Fascism that prevails today.
And so it is with Trump. I started writing about Trump in 2015 because everything about him seemed familiar to me as someone who studies Fascism: the rallies, the lying, the loyalty oaths, the declarations of violent intent, the need to dominate and humiliate. My familiarity with Fascism is what allowed me to predict from 2016 on what Trump would do and how he and his GOP enablers would behave, down to my November 2020 forecast that he would not leave office quietly.
Yet Fascism is too narrow a frame to describe the actions of Trump, who started a process of autocratic capture that resembled those of other autocrats. He created a cabinet of rich cronies; domesticated the GOP; made the press a hate object; gutted the State Department and other federal agencies; appointed more than 300 judges, and much more. He was voted out before he could finish the job.
Nor does Fascism capture the nature of Trump's criminality and his enmeshment in 21st century flows of illicit capital (his real estate business puts him on the supply side of "pro-kleptocratic services," as Casey Michel calls them).
In truth, Trump and Trumpism draw on all periods of illiberal history, from Fascism to the age of military coups to 21st century combinations of plunder, targeted violence, and information warfare. He provided a model for what authoritarianism could look like in America today, one that the GOP is now busy realizing at the state level. Whether or not he returns to office, that will be his place in history.
Another gem of a column by Ruth. Whatever one wishes to call it, fascism, authoritarianism, etc, it must be stopped. I hope the Democratic controlled congress recognizes that passing the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts may be the only thing that can save us from state election nullifications and the loss of our democracy. If not now, when?
The many comments inspired by this piece by RBG on the terms "Fascism" and "Fascist" are extremely interesting. They exhibit an impressive level of concern, knowledge, thought, and insight. At the same time, the viewpoints they express seem bewilderingly heterogeneous (much like the stereotypical debate among any group of Democrats).
RBG begins by explaining why she is addressing this topic: "People are often disappointed that I don't call Trump . . . a Fascist." She then describes her treatment of her topic in respect to its two component parts: the term "Fascist" can "perpetuate outdated ideas about how authoritarianism works." That is, first, the term is intrinsically inappropriate because it does not accurately describe the current form of the phenomenon it is being applied to. Second, the term is rhetorically inappropriate because it is likely to mislead the audience to whom it is addressed.
Insisting on accurate terminology is neither pedantic nor removed from reality. You expect your mechanic to know the names of the parts of your car in order to be able to understand the way they work and the complex ways they interact. You expect your medical doctor to know the complex, arcane terminology required to diagnose and treat what ails you, together with the complex medical realities which that terminology describes. In turn, the terminology in every field depends on a valid taxonomy, or system of classification. The term, or name, for a biological organism means little apart from the complex taxonomy of the plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms. It is impossible for a biologist to work without that taxonomy. Similarly, the work of the astronomer cannot be done without the taxonomy of astral bodies; the work of the chemist cannot be done without the periodic table of the elements. The development of each of these taxonomies, together with their terminologies, has been a major intellectual achievement requiring the cooperation of many brilliant individuals over centuries or millennia.
There is no such single, established taxonomy in the field of history. There is no such taxonomy in the field of "authoritarian," "autocratic," or "Fascist" studies. There is no scientifically settled and rigorous field of knowledge concerning "authoritarian," "autocratic," or "Fascist" rulers based on such a taxonomy. A glance at the scholarship in any field of history shows that a great many schools of historical interpretation exist. Studying any historical phenomenon of any era requires recognizing that there will inevitably be many ways of interpreting it, all of them to a greater or lesser extent mutually contradictory.
Nevertheless, there seems to be an unstated and unrecognized assumption here that there is some "correct" terminology, taxonomy and interpretation, or diagnosis, that will "explain" the contemporary political situation in America, if only we work at it a little longer and a little harder, and also a little longer and a little harder at persuading others that our interpretation is correct. This "correct" diagnosis will lead to a prescription for curing our situation. This is magical thinking. If things were that simple, we would not be in this situation in the first place. This magical thinking is produced by the rising panic caused by the recognition that America is already to a significant extent brutally "authoritarian" or "Fascist," and may soon become almost wholly so. If you're diagnosed with a potentially fatal and not-well-understood disease, you naturally wish for a magical cure. But reality will implacably return the answer to you that there is none.
Mario Cuomo, one of the greatest liberal communicators and orators of the second half of the twentieth century, said that first you have to figure out what policy you want to pursue; then you have to "put it into baby-talk." Unfortunately there is no good term from "baby-talk" for referring to the "authoritarianism" or "Fascism" that is rising in contemporary America. It would be self-indulgent and irresponsible for RBG to use a false but gratifyingly inflammatory terminology employing such baby-talk in order to allay our anxieties. As Orwell taught, abuse of language leads directly to abuse in politics. We turn to RBG for the same reason we see a medical doctor when we are sick with a little-understood disease. We cannot expect her to provide a magical cure, but we understand that she, and others like her, possess knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that we do not, and that we profoundly need.
Instead of anxiously making a fetish of terminology, we need to recognize that our first problem is that our own understanding of what ails us is inadequate. America did not suddenly develop its current political pathology in 2016. Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and other voices, censored for decades from the mainstream in a "democratic" America with a supposedly progressive party, have long been shouting into the wind, trying to warn us that we needed to wake up and take action. We did not. Now we spend a lot of time blaming others for our current situation; we need to look in the mirror. We do not properly understand the current political pathology in America in part because we never understood democracy in the first place. We just took it for granted. In order to understand our political pathology, we need to understand democracy for the first time, because "Fascism" and its congeners are diseases of democracy. Solving our problems requires not winning online debates, but educating first ourselves, and then Americans en masse, about the nature of our situation. It is up to those who of us are aware of our present danger, like those who read Lucid, to learn to understand our situation better and more realistically than we do. Then we can try to educate those who are asleep--not just try to wake them up by shouting inflammatory words at them.
Americans are only now, too slowly and in numbers that are too small, awakening from their decades-long slumber, during which reactionaries have been brilliantly executing their coup-in-slow-motion. We can only start from where we are. We need to remember the negative example of the Arab Spring. The Egyptians got rid of the "fascist" Mubarak only to get the "fascist Islamist" Morsi; then they got rid of the "fascist Islamist" Morsi only to get the "fascist" Sisi. Similarly, the failed coup attempt against Erdogan served only as a Reichstag moment that enabled him to consolidate his power even further. It will do us no good to get rid of Donald Trump only to get Tucker Carlson because we didn't know what we were doing. We must recognize the real possibility, as Sarah Kendzior puts it, that a few "generations of martyrs" may soon be required to restore democracy in America. We need to educate ourselves properly now about a historical situation in which an even greater nightmare than we are currently facing is a genuine possibility.