Ever since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential run in June 2015, there has been a vigorous, sometimes even bitter, debate on whether the epithet “fascist” is appropriate to the Apprentice star.
Recently, the “fascism debate” has left the realm of academic theory and entered the political arena. In his new book War, released in October, Bob Woodward quotes Trump’s chosen chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, as saying the former president is “fascist to the core”. Then Trump’s former secretary of homeland security and erstwhile White House chief of staff, the retired Marine Corps general John Kelly, told the New York Times that Trump met the definition of a fascist. At a CNN townhall on 23 October, the vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said she agreed with the assessment of the generals: Trump is a fascist. That same day, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of the great American historian Robert Paxton, describing his post-January 6th change of mind about using the term “fascist” in regards to Trump. “It’s the real thing, it really is,” he’s quoted as saying.
It may be the real thing, but will this all make any difference at this point in the race? Paxton doubts if there is any political use to applying the term to Trump. And pundits are doing their usual thing: worrying if it’s counterproductive to do so. At least one pro-Harris Super PAC is warning the campaign that “fascism” is not a good line of attack, claiming that it is failing to persuade people. Is the public receptive at all? Well, according to a recent poll, nearly half of the American public thinks of Trump as a fascist.
The debate has boiled down to two questions: is Trump really a fascist, and what, if any, are the political advantages of labelling him as such? I have long argued, quite forcefully, that the history of fascism can tell us valuable things about the Trump phenomenon, so my answer to the second question may surprise some: I don’t know.
First, historical analogies are always ipso facto wrong: each historical period is so different from another as to falsify every possible example. We live in much different times than the Weimar Republic or post-World War One Italy. The crises of our society are not on the severe level of the interwar period. The critics of the Trump-as-fascist thesis are perfectly right about this. Does Trump have a highly bureaucratised party apparatus and tightly knit street fighting groups? No. Does he wear a brown uniform or have a little moustache? No. However, these empirical differences are not final refutations of a theory. Anomalies are a given in any comparison. But as the 20th-century Hungarian philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos, once wrote, in judging the worth of theories, “What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions.” And the fascism side of the debate has been by-and-large correct in those dramatic predictions.
We have said that Trump, like fascists in the past, would attempt some kind of extra-legal attempt on power with the use of an organised or semi-organised mob. Our critics said we were absurd hysterics – until it happened. That the attack on the Capitol was a failure or even farcical is immaterial: the history of fascism has many examples of failed putsches or seizures of power that went nowhere.
After 6 January, our critics simply moved the goalposts and tendentiously minimised what took place. Similarly, none of Trump’s rhetoric about “internal enemies” or “mass deportations” or migrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” nor his threats to use the military or justice department on political opponents any shock to those who have been willing to apply the fascism frame to Trump: he is behaving as precisely as we predicted. But how do our critics take these things? They either pass over them in silence or else again minimise their salience.
The critics of the fascism thesis rarely offer a positive theory of their own. Instead, they simply have a set of objections, or rather they have objection itself as a set objective and will cobble together an argument from any number of different, often incompatible sources. When the evidence isn’t advantageous to them, they ignore it, or else turn ad hominem on their opponents, and question our motives and mental fitness.
In his New York Times profile, Paxton says, “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light.” I am loath to disagree with Paxton, but I think it’s the other way around: it may not be an effective political tool, but it remains an important analytical one. Whatever rhetorical strengths or weaknesses it may have as an attack, the fascism thesis, as its opponents often dismissively label it, has proven itself to be a reasonably accurate theory of Trump as a political phenomenon. Critics portray “fascism” as an overly emotive and crude term. But to rule the example out of court as fatuous nonsense does not improve our political judgment but in fact weakens and flattens it.
Will Donald Trump come to rule as a fascist dictator if he wins a second term in the White House? Experience tells us probably not: he has neither the skill nor the strength. But the same experience tells us he will try. No honest person can deny this at this point. He has the will and the desire. And this is what reading and thinking about fascism helps us keep in mind: it is a living possibility.
[See also: The spectre of American fascism]
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