With the increasingly unsettling success of Donald
Trump’s presidential campaign, I am beginning to wonder: Does America have a
fascism problem?
That may sound like an inflammatory question, but the
point isn’t to say Trump is the next coming of Hitler. So what do I mean by
fascism? Robert
Paxton, in an
excellent book about the subject, summed it up this way:
A form of political behavior
marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or
victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist
militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional
elites, abandons democratic liberties and
pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals
of internal cleansing and external expansion. [The
Anatomy of Fascism]
The first half of the definition fits the Trump
movement pretty well. His slogan “Make America Great Again” isn’t too far from the average
political bromide, but its intention is much different than, say, Reagan’s “Morning
in America.” Reagan did deal in his fair share of veiled
race-baiting, but Trump straight-up rants about how non-white foreigners
are ruining the country. From claiming unauthorized Mexican immigrants are drug
dealers and “rapists,” to saying he wants to deport
11 million people, to arguing that China
is “killing us” on trade, Trump’s political message is uncut
xenophobia if not outright
racism — all of which is coupled with how he, as a very masculine tough guy
who will never back down, is going to fix everything. Just watch him give the bum’s
rush to the most
famous Hispanic journalist in the country!
This has been an enormous political success, with
hundreds of thousands of people enthusiastically flocking to the Trump banner
(just look at the people in this
picture). With the exception of Bernie Sanders, Trump is now drawing bigger
crowds than any other candidate. That mass basis is a key foundation of
fascism — without the delirious crowds, the fascist demagogue is little more
than a deranged street preacher. Many of those supporters are out-and-proud
white nationalists, as documented in a fascinating New
Yorker investigation.
So we’ve got the victim complex, the incipient
personality cult, the mass nationalist support, and the obsession with
purifying the polity (like this Trump fan arguing that the government should
pay a $50
bounty to murder people crossing the border).
However, on the second half of the definition, Trump
is clearly not there. Paxton demonstrates that nowhere did fascists come to
power by themselves; instead they relied on support from elite conservatives
who feared left-wing populist movements. But today, there is not much sign that
the Republican establishment is ready to team up with Trump, and neither is
there a socialist party on the verge of electoral victory. On the contrary, the
GOP brass has clearly been trying to get rid of Trump, and the most left-wing
challenger in the presidential race is a moderate social democrat who is far
behind the centrist front-runner.
Trump has also not proposed any wars of aggression,
or the abolition of democratic principles. Cleansing wars of conquest and a
scorn for democracy were both signature fascist ideas.
But I also think it’s fair to
call Trumpism a proto-fascist movement, not in line with Hitler, but with the
likes of Benito Mussolini, who was at the forefront of European fascism. Before the Nazis,
he was regarded as a somewhat clownish dictator with an unusual degree of mass
support. He was a racist, authoritarian warmonger, but nowhere close
to the genocidal maniac that Hitler was.
Who’s to say where we’d be under different
conditions? If the American economy were as bad as it is in the eurozone, and
if Bernie Sanders was cruising to easy victory in the Democratic primary,
loudly promising confiscatory tax rates, Trump might well be a genuinely
terrifying figure.
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