Is Trump a Fascist? Is That Even Important?

What is Trumpism?

We’re obsessed with Donald Trump, and for good reason. He is a clear and present danger who must be removed from power as soon as possible.  

Trump’s cult of personality is so overpowering and relentless that we forget that there is such a thing as Trumpism. 

Trumpism is the bigger and longer-term danger to America, and it will survive, in some form, Trump’s removal from the Oval Office.  

Defeating Trumpism is the challenge of our generation, just as destroying fascism was the challenge for Americans in the 1930s and ‘40s. To defeat Trumpism, we need to understand what it is, what it isn’t, and how it is distinct from Donald Trump the man. 

Is Trumpism a particularly virulent form of conservatism? Garden-variety authoritarianism? A religious movement? A harbinger of a military dictatorship? Full-blown fascism? 

Trumpism is not classic conservatism. Core conservative principles—a small federal government, fear of deficits, free trade, respect for the social hierarchy and social institutions—are not the driving forces behind Trumpism. 

Trumpism is not classic authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes (e.g., Franco’s Spain) have historically accepted that much of society is controlled by semi-independent social entities like economic cartels, the military, the family, and the church. Trumpism does not. And authoritarian regimes want a passive, muted population, whereas Trumpism wants to constantly engage with and excite the public. 

Trumpism is not at its core an evangelical Christian movement. Despite its high level of support among white Christians, Trumpism doesn’t worship Jesus Christ or Christian teachings. It reveres the myth of a once-great, white America.  

Trumpism is not the early stage of a military dictatorship. The military is not calling the shots in Trumpworld. 

Which leads us to fascism, a subject I’ve been steeping myself in recently.  

What Is Fascism, Exactly? 

I grew up in the late 1950s and the ‘60s, when the “communist” epithet was being used recklessly and cluelessly by the right wing. I’ve publicly called Trump a “fascist,” but do I really understand what fascism is? How do I know that I am not acting like a McCarthyite when I throw that term around? 

I used many sources in boning up on fascism, but the most important were Robert O. Paxton’s “The Anatomy of Fascism” (an authoritative but accessible primer that was written in 2004, before the Trump era), which helped me understand what fascism is (and is not) and its history, and Occupy founder Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” which taught me about contemporary anti-fascist movements around the globe and how successful or unsuccessful they have been. 

Fascism first appeared in Europe after the World War I and was a response to that conflict, an armistice that was viewed by the losers as extremely punitive, the failures of capitalism, the rise of Russian Bolshevism, and a new era of mass politics.  

Mussolini’s original Fascists took over Italy in 1922, and Hitler led a fascist takeover of Germany a decade later. The success of Mussolini and Hitler inspired fascist movements in Great Britain (Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists) and the United States (the Black Legion and the pro-Hitler German American Bund). 

It only took seventeen years from Mussolini’s ascent to power for the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany to precipitate World War II. The declaration of war against Germany by Great Britain and the entry of the United States into World War II effectively ended the fascist movements in those countries. The fascist governments in Italy and Germany were dismantled by the Allies in 1945. 

There are two fundamental aspects of fascism: 

• Fascism has only one core precept: that there is a chosen race that is locked in a Darwinian struggle for existence.  

• Fascism is a sensual experience, not a political program. Fascists can bask in the reflective warmth that comes with being a member of a special race with an historic destiny—being part of something big and historic that is based on a noble past. Fascism offers the thrill of being dominant. 

Fascism’s extreme emotionalism liberates the fascist from the frustrations of bourgeois standards. Fascism rejects—violently—social norms, dogma, and the very concept of “truth.” As one fascist leader put it, “We don’t think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne.” In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before the people and make cheap promises.”  

For fascists, the “truth” is whatever helps fulfill those special people to fulfill their natural destiny. In 1933 Thomas Mann saw the rise of fascism in supposedly bourgeois Germany as revolution “without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice.” Mann felt that the “common scum” had taken power. 

(The Stalinist definition of fascism—”Facisim is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital”—was orthodoxy for the left for fifty years. This definition, however, misses the mark in overlooking its most important and binding ingredient: an intensely emotional brand of nationalism.) 

Paxton defines fascism as “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 legal or ethical restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” 

According to Paxton, these are the key aspects of fascism: 

• 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 people 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. 

Every single one of these attributes is shared by Trumpism. Trumpism is, without a doubt, a Yankee-Doodle brand of fascism and its chosen people are white Americans. 

Understanding Fascism Is the Key to Fighting Trumpism 

Millions of Americans don’t understand the threat that Trump poses or how to counter that threat, because—like Thomas Mann—we viewed him as a politician.  

When Trump announced his candidacy, we felt that professional politician Jeb Bush would make short work of him.  

When Trump won the nomination, we were confident that his lies, his behavior, and his racist message would eventually bring him down. 

When Trump was elected, we hoped that the realities of the office and our system of government would quickly change him. 

Even now, having seen that Trump is immune to the threats faced by politicians, we continue to focus our fight on Trump personally. We spend enormous time and resources on fact-checking the endless torrent of blatant lies (the Washington Post employs people who painstakingly document a running total of Trump’s falsehoods), contradictory statements, disgraceful behavior, corruption, and collusion. We marvel at the infuriating ignorance of Trump’s followers, and look to Robert Mueller to bring Trump to justice. Most delusional of all, we console ourselves with the notion that the national nightmare will end once Trump is out of office. 

The all-powerful dictator is the image of fascism (Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of fascism), and this has also helped to create the false impression that we can understand Trumpism by focusing on Donald Trump, and that we can destroy it by destroying him.  Our relentless focus on his bizarre personality and actions diverts our attention from the actions of the persons, groups, and institutions who have helped him, who work for him, and who will survive him.  

Trumpism is much more than Trump. It is the American fascist genie that has been unleashed from its bottle and that won’t easily be put back inside it.  

Only two generations after 400,000 Americans died to kill fascism overseas, fascist Trumpists occupy the White House. They run the Departments of Justice, State, Treasury. Commerce, Interior, Homeland Security, Energy, Education, Labor, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services. They direct the Environmental Protection Agency. They have made the Republican Party and its apparatus completely subservient to them. 

Because the basis of their fascist movement is emotional and because the truth is so problematic for their narrative, the Trumpists are bent on demolishing our most fundamental truisms by: 

• Systematically destroying longstanding data-collection and analytical practices within all government agencies in order to make it impossible to even determine what impact their fascist policies are having compared to historical efforts. 

• Rendering the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, which we fund to the tune of $60 billion a year, utterly powerless in terms of helping shape our identification of, and response to, real threats. The intelligence community is constantly ridiculed. Intelligence briefings have become rare and their content is ignored—which the people who mean to do us harm understand all too well.  

• Systematically destroying the American system of justice by completely politicizing the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the courts. 

• Declaring war on the media by explicitly branding them “the enemy of the people,” insisting that critical reporting is “fake,” encouraging violence against reporters, and partnering with Fox News to complete its transformation into a fascist propaganda network. 

• Adopting an isolationist, nationalist view of the role of the United States in the world and claiming that longstanding, successful alliances (e.g., NATO) are no longer relevant. 

The fascist evil that our grandparents fought and died to keep from our shores is no longer outside. He’s watching television for six hours a day in the White House residence. He’s running the show. He has enormous powers. He may be our first fascist President, but our challenge is to make him our last one, and to do that we need to understand the non-rational core of Trumpist fascism.

The most important—and the most terrifying—lesson we must take from a study of history is the one pointed to by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in 1936, even before the calamities unleased by Mussolini and Hitler. The ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, the place where fascist Trumpism will take us unless it is stopped, is war. 

In a later post I'll look at whether the study of the history of fascism and of recent anti-fascist movements can point to successful models for resistance that we can apply to the fascist movement that is currently in control of our country.