American Fascism?
The sight of Donald Trump brandishing a bible standing in front of a prominent church in downtown Washington, D.C. in early June, and his militarized response to the historic BLM movement the past several weeks have sparked renewed debate in serious quarters about Trump’s relationship to the ‘f’ word: fascism.
Given what Trump says and does, should we just cut to the chase and call him a fascist, or at the very least acknowledge that his politics and policies bear the hallmark features of one of history’s most destructive political forces?
Yale historian Samuel Moyn thinks not so fast. The trouble with the fascist comparison, Moyn says, is that it risks imparting the wrong lesson from the past. As Moyn sees it, sources for understanding Trump and Trumpism cannot be found in the case of Italy or Germany of the first half of the 20th Century. Instead, they can only be understood properly from within; that is, as phenomena that have their own distinctively and inescapably American roots.
Read Moyn’s essay, The Trouble with Comparisons
By way of response, the University of London’s Sarah Churchwell argues persuasively that the question over the fascist label misses the point insofar as it risk obscuring what Trump and his followers say and do. “In the end,” she writes, “it matters very little whether Trump is a fascist in his heart if he’s a fascist in his actions.” In other words, we should pay attention to the impulses that animate Trump’s rendition of America First, and the popular bases of his appeal among a resolute block of American voters. These, in fact, bear a striking similarity to what historian Robert Paxton calls the ‘mobilizing passions’ of the historical fascist movements. Churchwell sees “classic fascist tropes” at play in the MAGA phenomenon: “nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity…scapegoating groups…attacks on a free press.” The list goes on.
Read Churchwell’s essay, American Fascism: It Has Happened
These two views are not mutually exclusive. The apparent divergence relates back to a basic problem with our understanding and use of the f-word itself. As I tell my students, fascism is a seven-letter, four letter word. It is one of the most widely used political terms of modern times. As Robert Paxton puts it, “everyone is someone’s fascist.” What he means is that the fascist label often gets applied too loosely in today’s language, and almost always as a way of stigmatizing and abnormalizing views, causes and policies at odds with our own.
Although everyone thinks they know what fascism means, it is one of the least understood terms in our political lexicon. As someone who teaches about the history of fascism and its legacies, I encourage my students to embrace the confusion and the complexity of interpretations of fascism. Year in and year out, they find it a challenging, frustrating exercise. In part, that’s because they come to the topic as most of us do – unjustifiably confident that they know what fascism is; that they know who the fascists were – especially Hitler and Mussolini; and of course that they know what the fascists did, most destructively in the Second World War and the Holocaust.
But as my students discover, when it comes to fascism, the matter of definition is immeasurably more complex than the textbooks, Wikipedia and documentaries would have it. Students discover that to talk about fascism as a historical phenomenon and as a reality today is to deal with contradictions, ambiguities, and complexity around what fascists said and did; and about what that means in today’s world.
This gets back to what Moyn sees as the trouble with comparisons, especially comparisons that can be easily manipulated to political ends. Problems arise when we use comparisons in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. True, historical analogies can help us to understand the present. But they can also “compound the confusion,” Moyn insists, especially “if they allow indulging in a melodramatic righteousness and luxuriating in our fears.”
As I see it, the challenge is to get the comparison right; to ask the right questions and apply them coherently in ways that relate to challenges of today. We need to do the hard work of sound, historical reconstruction and understanding. Only then can we use the comparison to think through logically how an understanding of the past can help to inform and orient our judgement and our actions in the present.
One area where the comparison with historical fascism provides useful insights, and a warning even, is to compare how would-be democratic norms and institutions respond to the toxic brew of religious nationalism, racist nativism and populism that, whether one calls it fascist or not, constitute the pillars of Trump’s power and influence.
I am thinking about the role of so-called intermediary powers such as religious institutions, voluntary associations, and universities. Intermediary powers contribute in two main ways to bolster democratic norms and practices. They mobilize the active participation of citizens on social issues, often in ways that are not overtly political. In so doing, they can serve as a kind of bulwark against authoritarianism and extremism by mediating conflict between individuals and communities on the one hand, and the formal structures of power on the other.
We know from history that the relationship between civil society and democracy is more complex than theories or models would have it. To come back to the comparison, in the case of fascism in Italy, for instance, intermediary bodies such as the churches sometimes facilitated the erosion and collapse of democratic institutions. Conversely, intermediary powers offered a crucial firewall against fascism in other countries.
We also know from history that intermediary powers can collapse suddenly, often unexpectedly. The iconic case here is interwar Weimar Germany. The ill-fated Weimar system enjoyed a civil society characterized by a well-developed and deceptively sturdy structure of intermediary bodies. Remarkably, and fatefully, these intermediary bodies all but collapsed within months of Hitler’s formal accession to power. In the case of the German churches, Protestant and Catholic, it was not that they collapsed or retreated from German society. Instead, religious leaders looked for ways to accommodate the regime, which meant attenuating or muting altogether public opposition to the incremental growth and radicalization of Hitler’s power.
So, yes, we should avoid drawing simplistic or untenable comparisons to the unique –and extreme – case of interwar Europe. Nevertheless, the lessons of history may serve as a cautionary tale about the gradual, often imperceptible erosion of the norms and values necessary for robust democratic institutions and the rule of law.