10/24/2024
UPDATE: In recent days, a number of former officials who worked with or for Donald Trump in his first term have come forward in the press and openly named him a fascist. Most prominent among them are John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s longest chief of staff, and Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Meanwhile, historian Robert Paxton (whom I discuss at length in this post) has given an interview to The New York Times in which he doubles down on his conclusion that Trump and his movement fit the criteria of fascism. Americans have had ample warning. But as Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky explain, we’ve failed to use the tools at our disposal to stop it. Now, we stand on the brink.
I. All-American Fascism
My wife and I listened to Nineteen Eighty-Four recently on a road trip—you know, just for kicks. I hadn’t read it since high school, when it terrified me. It still does. Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece is more disturbing now than when it was published in 1950. From “doublethink” to “telescreens” to facts vanishing down memory holes, his nightmare of totalitarianism cuts ever deeper in our age of smartphones, the Big Lie, and fake news. Many on the Right drop Orwell’s name to panic people about the Left, apparently ignorant of the fact that the writer was a socialist, to the very end. His sci-fi vision of Big Brother and the Thought Police was just as much a depiction of fascism as it was communism. And with the former on the march again, at home and abroad, we’d do well to familiarize ourselves with this deadly ideology.
President Biden’s speech on democracy three weeks ago sparked a round of controversy. The address was a microcosm of our flawed neoliberal governance: stake out a bland center that inflames the opposition but fails to inspire its own base. As Branko Marcetic writes, what’s the point of calling out the far-right if you don’t offer people a new vision of democracy? Instead of unveiling a bold form of self-government—like democracy-by-lottery—the President meekly called on people to vote for the status quo. At the same time, he was pilloried by pundits on the Right as divisive because he labeled “MAGA Republicans” an existential threat. Excuse me? A cult movement assaults the Capitol in an attempted self-coup, and Biden is bad because he calls a spade a spade?
Within this debate, commentators have been fighting yet again over the f-word—that is, fascism. Do Trump and his base constitute a fascist movement? Are all people who voted for and support him fascists? What’s the relationship between fascism and Christian nationalism? In a previous post, I cited Robert O. Paxton’s definition from his synthetic study, The Anatomy of Fascism. It’s worth bringing to the fore now. Paxton pays attention to what fascists actually do, not just what they say. After close analysis of various far-right regimes, he defines the ideology as follows:
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.
Fascism, he goes on, arises from a set of nine “mobilizing passions:”
A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
The right of the chosen group to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
Over on his Substack, The Racket, Jonathan Katz analyzes Trump in light of Paxton’s categories. The MAGA mogul’s movement ticks off many boxes: Cult of personality? Check. Fear of group replacement? Check. Use of violence? Check, check, check. But can this really be fascism, you might ask, given that America played a lead role in the defeat of the Nazis during the Second World War? As Paxton points out, fascism isn’t confined to Hitler’s regime. In fact, at any given moment, nascent fascist movements exist in every country on Earth. They’re not inherently white supremacist, nor even anti-semitic—several of Mussolini’s lieutenants, in fact, were Jewish. But there’s always a superior group that names an enemy both foreign and domestic. Right now, for example, India has a far-right government under Narendra Modi in which Hindus play the nationalists, demonizing its Muslim minority.
When it comes to symbols, then, fascism looks different in every country because it appropriates the familiar trappings of its native culture. “No swastikas in an American fascism,” Paxton says, “but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.” It’s all about context. He paints a prescient picture:
Around such reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.
“The United States itself,” he reminds us, “has never been exempt from fascism.” The America First movement of the 1930s qualified as fascist, many have noted. But Paxton goes even further back, arriving at a conclusion both surprising and obvious: the historical roots of fascism lie in the Ku Klux Klan of the post-Civil War era. “By adopting a uniform,” he explains, “as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group’s destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.” This is partly why Colin Woodard labels the culture of the Deep South fascist in his American Nations.
When it comes to historical evolution, Paxton breaks down fascism into five stages:
The creation of movements.
Their rooting in the political system.
Their seizure of power.
Their exercise of power.
The long duration, during which the fascist regime chooses either radicalization or entropy.
As he makes clear, to date, fascists have never won over the majority of any population. The highest electoral percentage the Nazis received at the polls was 37% in July 1932. To seize power, fascists depend on traditional conservatives making common cause with them and handing over the reins of the state. Mussolini took control only after King Victor Emmanuel III invited him to Rome. German President Paul von Hindenburg chose to enter a coalition with the Nazis and give the chancellorship to Hitler. They did this because elites were more terrified of the Left than the Right—of communists than fascists. And they labored under the delusion that they could control the charismatic leaders once in office. In each case, they might’ve allied with social democrats against both the communists and the far right. But they refused to make any concessions to progressives whatsoever, as Paxton illustrates:
Crises of the political and economic system made a space available to fascism, but it was the unfortunate choices by a few powerful Establishment leaders that actually put the fascists into that space…In each case, it helps to see that political elites make choices that may not be their first preferences. They proceed, from choice to choice, along a path of narrowing options. At each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution.
Paxton published The Anatomy of Fascism in 2004. At the time, he dismissed the potential of the far-right in America. The United States “would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream,” he said. Well, twenty years later, that’s exactly what’s happened. As the author relates, fascism gains momentum under a specific set of conditions. First, some kind of economic disaster (e.g., the Great Depression). Secondly, national humiliation in a foreign conflict (e.g., the Great War) that generates alienated veterans. Thirdly, a rising Left that advocates class struggle (e.g., the USSR). Fourthly, the presence of a minority group (e.g., Slavs, blacks, immigrants, etc.) that’s diabolized as a contagion within the dominant racial body. Fifthly, the gridlock and inability of electoral governments to address social ills. All of these and more amount to compounding crises that discredit liberalism and open the door to a far-right alternative.
Along with these fissures arises fear of cultural decadence—e.g., sexual expressiveness, secularization, an artistic avant-garde—and a temperamental discomfort with modernity. A scan of American history reveals several times when this alchemy has congealed. Paxton half expected a fascist movement to arise in the wake of the Vietnam War, the experimentalism of the Sixties’ counter-culture, and the stagflation of the 1970s. While this didn’t come to pass entirely, you can see the triumph of the nationalist Ronald Reagan in 1980 as channeling reactionary energies: the desire to cleanse the country’s psyche from the shame of Vietnam, the flexing of male political muscles to combat the women’s movement, the reassertion of “traditional” morality, etc. Reagan’s perversion of civil religion attracted many after decades of self-criticism from the anti-war Left.
But this was only a prelude. In the response to mass immigration; the demonization of Muslims after 9/11; the Great Recession in 2008; the military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan; the emergence of a true socialist alternative with Occupy Wall Street; and the first black President in history, full-blown fascism has returned to the United States. As historian Eric Foner has said, the core question of the United States is, “Who is an American?” A nation is an imagined community. When Trump called people to Make America Great Again, the polity he had in mind was one of white Christian nationalists. Everyone who didn’t fit into that mental picture became a contaminant who must be disciplined, punished, and excised. Such a blood-and-soil conception of America pre-dates the Constitution and stands in contrast to the civic nationalism encouraged by more broad-minded leaders.
With the insurrection of January 6, Paxton finally named Trump a fascist. “His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he writes. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.” Lots of folks—especially supporters of Trump—still deny this. But what else can you conclude when you’ve got his acolytes, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, openly calling themselves Christian nationalists and Senate candidate Blake Masters waxing poetic about gun violence in campaign commercials? The Conservative Political Action Conference held an assembly in Hungary this year, which received a shocking write up in The New Yorker. These sycophants are enthralled to Viktor Orban, the country’s president, and make no bones about it. And as a friend who lives in Budapest told me bluntly last month, Orban is a dictator.
Donald Trump is a fascist, whether we say so or not. We probably should say so. Does this mean that everyone who supports Trump is a fascist? If you find yourself at a rally or cheering him on social media or endorsing his views in private conversation, yes, it does. Not a semi-fascist (whatever that is)—a fascist. Is everyone who voted for Trump a fascist? I don’t think so, but only God can search the heart. I’ve got relatives who voted Trump, and they (or at least some of them) don’t ascribe to the ugliest sides of the MAGA movement. They find the man distasteful but held their noses and pulled his lever because they believed the alternative to be worse. I understand that calculus, yet I find it grossly irresponsible. Vote third party or write in someone’s name if you can’t conceive of backing the Democrats.
Many people today, as in Germany during the ‘30s, get behind Trump by engaging in staggering feats of self-deception—they deny or downplay the hateful element of his movement and feign ignorance of its darkest deeds. They can’t or won’t bring themselves to accept—even after four years in the Oval Office—that fascists really mean to act on the cruel, ugly, violent rhetoric they preach. (One person I know, close to my family for years, told me in April—with a straight face—that the Jan. 6 attack was nothing more than a “spontaneous riot.”) Germans supported the Nazi regime to the bitter end and beyond—not because they were forced by a police state, but because they refused to believe they’d ever been in the wrong. As Nicholas Stargardt writes in The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (2015), the generation that brought Hitler to power and launched the Second World War carried their sense of victimhood, superiority, and imperial entitlement to the grave—even after he left their nation in ruins.
II. It’s Happening Here
What does American fascism portend for the future? It’s hard to say. In our case, the five aforementioned stages have been scrambled in chronology. Trump created a fascistic movement in 2016 and, against all odds, found a minoritarian route to the White House. But only after he became President—and especially once he left office—has his movement sunk real tentacles into the political system. Here, like Hitler, he’s been aided and abetted by establishment elders—both active collaborators in the Republican Party (e.g., Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Elise Stefanik) and feckless opponents in the Democratic (e.g., Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi). It’s taken a few years, but the MAGA movement’s caught up to Trump and is poised to cement its grip on government should he win in 2024.
If he does, are we headed to a new abyss, replete with world war, Gestapo, and death camps? Maybe. As Paxton points out, once they seize power, fascist leaders face a choice: either stagnate into entropy or radicalize further. Only one regime, Nazi Germany, has pushed the movement to the extremes of human experience. Franco, in contrast, staged a successful takeover in Spain in alliance with the Falange (a fascist party), but then settled into a stable, ossified dictatorship. Mussolini chose a middle path between them, opting for war late in his reign and then only half-heartedly. Today’s fascists have likewise chosen different roads. With his genocidal assault on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has opted for radicalization, which has backfired spectacularly. Orban, on the other hand, has taken the entropic path. Given the bromance between him, Tucker Carlson, and Trump, odds are his American friends would seek to emulate his style once in office, not Putin’s.
But we can’t be sure. Politics is unpredictable and we don’t know what will happen tomorrow let alone in the next decade. If history’s any guide, America’s fascists would inaugurate a civil war before some kind of colonial land grab, as did their predecessors in 1861 (although the War of Southern Aggression was also about building a global slave empire). The United States already is an imperial power, so it would be difficult to vent aggressive impulses by seeking yet more territory. Instead, they’d likely make it impossible for the opposition to win elections (short of overwhelming majorities), and then rule the existing imperium with greater force—cracking down on immigrants, women, and marginalized groups. The X factor in all of this is the leader of the cult himself, Donald Trump. Unhinged, mentally ill, a sociopath, there’s no telling what evils the mad tyrant will unleash with total power in his grasp.
Whether the MAGA movement will survive without Trump at its head is unclear. As Paxton points out, fascism has no principle of succession, since it identifies directly with its chieftain. Would America’s far right defy this trend and transfer its passions to Ron DeSantis? As his grotesque trafficking of asylum seekers to Massachusetts recently showed, the Florida governor has all the executive command, discipline of will, and intelligence that elude the half-literate Trump. But whether this high-functioning sociopath can replicate the former President’s hypnotic hold on the masses remains to be seen.
The good news is that fascism can be defeated. The bad news is that it often takes undemocratic means to do so. That’s the dilemma would-be tyrants put before open societies. If you tolerate them or try to play fair, they inevitably exploit the opening to destroy the rule of law. But to stop them often requires taking the gloves off and curtailing civil liberties. Romania, for example, crushed its fascist movement—the Iron Guard—in 1941 only via military dictatorship. Same with Brazil in 1938. In Belgium, on the other hand, the conservative establishment did what it didn't do in Germany and Italy: it formed a popular front in 1937 and united everyone from communists to Catholics against Léon Degrelle’s Rexist movement. The fascists were defeated at the ballot box and discredited in the court of public opinion.
Here at home, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War and imprisoned thousands of suspected Copperheads without trial. He even had a third of the members of the Maryland legislature detained, lest they vote to secede. When the Supreme Court ruled that he’d exceeded his authority, he ignored it. “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted,” he said, “and the government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?” Likewise, to combat the Klan in South Carolina, President Grant declared martial law, sent in the 7th Cavalry, and had his Attorney General, Amos Akerman, carry out mass arrests. Suspect were roughed up and subjected to hard treatment, and trials were held before Federal tribunals to circumvent the corrupt local courts. Many convictions were won. It worked—the Klan, for a time, was broken.
At present, there are at least half a dozen investigations being conducted into Trump—his family, his businesses, his presidency. The January 6 Committee has brought to light many damning revelations of his conduct, and last month the FBI seized boxes of classified government files he was hiding at his estate. Yet, despite the suit leveled by the New York Attorney General on Wednesday, still he walks free. Merrick Garland has taken a cautious approach toward bringing charges against him for Jan. 6, which in any case would be difficult to prove. To my mind, the best hope of winning a conviction rests with the Atlanta District Attorney, or the documents case emanating out of Mar-a-Lago.
Even if Trump’s finally brought to justice, his movement endures. And a felony record for the former President wouldn’t, under the Constitution, invalidate him from running again. Are we, then, helpless? No. As Foner argues, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment allows Congress to ban from civil office any person who, “having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States,” has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Though legal scholars differ, it appears that—unlike with impeachment—it would take a simple majority to declare Jan. 6 an insurrection and express the view that anyone who participated and held a triggering position (as defined by Section 3) should be barred from office. Such a resolution wouldn’t have the force of law (the Constitution forbids Congress from passing a bill of attainder), but it could aid state officials who want to disqualify Trump from the ballot in 2024. At the same time, Chicago Law professor Daniel Hemel argues that Congress could pass a Fourth Ku Klux Klan Act that would have real teeth. Building on the Enforcement Act of 1870, the bill would “reestablish a procedure whereby the Justice Department—and potentially private parties—could seek to disqualify insurrectionists in federal court.” The statute could allow for quo warranto and provide three-judge courts to hear cases on an expedited timeline, ensuring that challenges would be resolved before the caucuses and primaries begin.
These are legitimate possibilities. Yet despite enjoying dual-chamber majorities for two years, the Democrats haven’t taken them up, nor passed Rep. Cori Bush’s bill that would expel members of Congress—Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, etc.—who aided, communicated with, or showed support for the mob that day. They don’t need any investigation or help from the Justice Department for such votes—only the moral courage and political will. Though there’s still talk among some, they’ve yet to muster it. To date, only one person—a county commissioner in New Mexico—has been banned from office because of his presence among the assailants (though, as Roger Parloff of Lawfare points out, this sets an important precedent for using the 14th Amendment against other Jan. 6 participants—including Trump). All of this would probably land before the Supreme Court. Given the current composition of that tribunal—and the fact that the wife of Justice Thomas helped plan the rally on Jan. 6 and cheered on the mob—I’m not, shall we say, optimistic.
Meanwhile, at least seven people who joined in the putsch have won elections since Jan. 6. And a full 70% of the 500+ Republican candidates on the ballot this November have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential Election, raised doubts, or refused comment on it. Over 120 of them are likely to win, including five U.S. Senate contenders and a similar number of gubernatorial nominees. Unfortunately, the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to rioters who haven’t previously held office, and spreading the Big Lie isn’t the same as aiding an insurrection. But by not moving firmly against those who engaged in the latter, lawmakers have emboldened others to do the former. If the MAGA movement takes power in the coming years, history will not look back kindly on the Democrats. In the end, Paxton offers a sobering conclusion:
We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, dead lock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.
Which brings us back to Biden’s speech. Among its flaws—which included dark atmospheric lighting and an outdoor setting that required the man to shout angrily—was the core fact that the President laid out neither a bold vision of renewed democracy nor a firm plan to bring the far right to heel. He bent over backwards to placate Republicans and issued patriotic bromides and empty paeans to American greatness.
The problem with his remarks isn’t that he went too far in naming the threat to the republic. It’s that he didn’t go nearly far enough. The spectacle of a frail, hoarse grandfather chiding people to behave—much like his tepid response to the Dobbs decision—did not inspire hope, let alone confidence. Like the Germans and Italians, we’ve had many chances to stop fascism along its march. So far, like them, we’ve failed. As director Ken Burns makes clear in his latest documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust (which I’ll review next week), the consequences of such weakness can be incalculable.
Nick this piece is the most thought-provoking and valuable one, yet. NEVER stop writing!