I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald
Trump is a fascist. Here's what they said.
Is Donald Trump a fascist?
It's becoming a common question, with figures like neoconservative columnist Robert Kagan lobbing the accusation, declaring, "This is how fascism comes
to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes,
and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a
textbook egomaniac 'tapping into' popular resentments and insecurities, and
with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party
loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him."
Kagan is wrong. Donald Trump is not a fascist. "Fascism" has
been an all-purpose insult for many years now, but it has a real definition,
and according to scholars of historical fascism, Trump doesn't qualify. Rather,
he's a right-wing populist, or perhaps an "apartheid liberal" in the
words of Roger Griffin, author of The
Nature of Fascism. He doesn't want to overthrow the
existing democratic system. He doesn't want to scrap the Constitution. He
doesn't romanticize violence itself as a vital cleansing agent of society. He's
simply a racist who wants to keep the current system but deny its benefits to
groups he's interested in oppressing.
Griffin, who is a professor of history and political theory at Oxford
Brookes University, puts it best: "You can be a total xenophobic racist
male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist."
Fascism requires the rejection of democracy
Defining fascism is a
notoriously difficult scholarly task. There are enough differences between the
relevant fascist regimes — Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, perhaps Francoist
Spain — that identifying commonalities that do not in turn implicate plenty of
clearly non-fascist regimes is tricky. But there is general
agreement about some requirements.
Every expert I spoke to
identified support for the revolutionary overthrow — ideally through violence —
of the state's entire system of government as a necessary characteristic of
fascism. Griffin's preferred
definition of fascism is:
Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic
core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist
ultra-nationalism.
The word "palingenetic" means rebirth, reflecting Griffin's
view that fascism must involve calling for the "rebirth" of the
nation. That might at first glance sound like Trump's promise to "make
America great again," but Griffin insists on a distinction. Rebirth, in
his theory, actually requires the dramatic abandonment of the existing
political order. "There has to be a longing for a new order, a new nation,
not just a reformed old nation," he told me. "As long as Trump does
not advocate the abolition of America's democratic institutions, and their
replacement by some sort of post-liberal new order, he's not technically a
fascist."
Matthew
Feldman, a fascism expert at Teesside University in the UK, agrees. "He's
still in the democratic family," he says. "Trump is calling for
ethnocratic small-l liberalism. It's liberalism that's racially tinged. If you
were white in apartheid South Africa, you had all the rights and benefits of a
liberal state. For you it was a democracy. But it didn't feel that way for
blacks in South Africa."
Columbia's Robert Paxton lays
out a slightly different definition from Griffin's in his book The
Anatomy of Fascism, focusing more on
the behaviors of fascist governments than on the nature of fascism as a
doctrine. Still, he too identifies an anti-democratic core to fascism:
Fascism may be defined 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 ethical or legal restraints
goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (p. 218)
"Democratic liberties" here means not just individual civil
liberties — which Trump is clearly interested in tampering with — but the
democratic process itself. When the original fascist regimes emerged, "the
existing governments seemed to be incapable of providing leadership, providing
what was needed for this wounded country," Paxton tells me, "and so
fascists were in favor of totally overthrowing the existing constitution, which
was usually democratic and perceived as weak. This was wildly popular. We are
not in that position today."
Trump definitely attacks the current government as "weak,"
which Paxton says might be termed a "borrowing" from fascism. But
it's a far cry from the outright support for ending democracy that characterizes
true fascists.
The University of Wisconsin's Stanley
Payne, author of Fascism:
Comparison and Definition and A
History of Fascism, 1914–1945, emphasizes
that fascism is a "revolutionary nationalist project. Not just a
nationalist project, but a nationalist project that is revolutionary and breaks
down all the standards and the barriers." Trump and other far-right
populists don't count.
"It's what you'd call a right-wing populist movement," he says
of the Trump campaign. "They take conservative positions that were very
common, say, 75 years ago or 100 years ago, and not at all common now. … You
can call them more genuinely reactionary in their discourse. They go back to
older kinds of political and social values that have been discarded. That would
be a more accurate characterization than calling them fascist."
Fascism emphasizes violence for its own sake
Payne also notes that
Trump lacks a connection to the pro-violence philosophy at the heart of
fascism. This dates back to Georges Sorel, a French syndicalist philosopher who
was revered by Mussolini and the Italian fascists. Sorel praised violence as a
necessary tool of the class struggle. "Proletarian violence … appears thus
as a very fine and heroic thing," he writes. "It is at the service of
the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate
method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world
from barbarism." King's College London's Jeremy Jennings, in an introduction to a recent edition of Sorel's Reflections
on Violence, writes that Sorel
is "prepared to equate [violence] with life, creativity, and virtue."
While fascists obviously don't share Sorel's interest in the class
struggle, this valorization of violence carried over. Fascism, Payne says,
requires "a philosophical valuing of violence, of Sorelian violence.
[Fascists believe] that violence is really good for you, that it's the sort of
thing that makes you a vital, alive, dedicated person, that it creates
commitment. You make violence not just a political strategy but a philosophical
principle. That's unique to fascism."
Fascists were certainly never shy about using military
power to inflict violence. As Mussolini put it in his 1932 essay "The
Doctrine of Fascism," "Fascism …
discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in
contradistinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to
their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have
the courage to face it."
Trump's views on violence simply don't follow in that tradition.
"Trump is inciting prejudice. He really is; words do have
consequences," Feldman says. "But that doesn't mean he's a
fascist."
Fascism is anti-individualist — and Donald Trump is an
arch-individualist
Whatever else can be said
about Donald Trump, he is fiercely individualistic. Indeed, a major part of his
appeal comes from the fact that he's untethered to any movement or party or
even financial interests besides himself. The Republican establishment hates
him. He has no affiliated politicians at other levels of government. He runs no
party organization or really any political organization with any goal other
than promoting himself, personally. And his arguments about how to make America
great generally rely on his own skills — his prowess at making deals, his
personal strength, etc.
This runs in sharp contrast to the fascist tradition, which, while
emphasizing cults of personality for leaders, is nonetheless fundamentally
concerned with the collective, with the state being redeemed and the fascist
political organization being built to redeem it. That aspect is foreign not
just to Trump but to 21st century American society in general. "People are
extremely individualistic. No one would dream of putting them in identically
colored shirts and putting them in regimented youth movements, action
squads," Paxton says. "If someone were proposing that I'd take the
parallel more seriously."
Feldman concurs, arguing that fascism builds a kind of "political
religion" in which the nation is considered a real, living, and yet sacred
thing to be revered and protected. This goes well beyond mere nationalism.
"It's a difference between someone who's patriotic versus someone who sees
the nation as a living, breathing organic entity," he says. "Not, 'I
want my soccer team to win this match,' but, 'Jews and Muslims are like a
festering appendix that must be cut out.' The 300 million Americans are like
300 million cells in the body. The individual is worth nothing. It's one cell in
the body."
Compare that with the ways Trump talks about improving America:
·
"Our highspeed
Internet access is only 16th best in the world … The World Economic Forum ranks
the US infrastructure as only the 12th best in the world."
These statements are much closer to the "I want my soccer team to
win" version of patriotism — and much more concerned with the qualities of
Donald Trump the individual than America the nation.
Fascism doesn't really have much to do with economics
One might think that the
relative comfort Trump displays with state intervention in the economy,
relative to his rivals, flirts with fascism, especially when this takes the
form of nationalist policies like massive tariffs and immigration restriction. This, fascism experts
agree, is an inference too far. "You have left-wing movements that have
been anti-immigration," Payne says. "Fascists did tend to have a
nationalist and kind of statist and corporatist economic policy, but all kinds
of other movements have had statist and corporatist policies."
In fact, most experts think that it's hard to identify a
characteristically "fascist" economic policy. It was all secondary to
other goals, notably preparation for war. "Of all the policy areas, the
economic one is the one where classical historic fascist parties were most
flexible," Paxton says. "They did what was expedient in the moment.
They were defending war veterans and attacking big corporations but quickly
dropped that when they discovered they needed the money. … It's hard to link
those people to any one kind of economic idea. They would do anything to make
their country militarily ready for war."
That, incidentally, is a big reason why National Review writer Jonah Goldberg's Liberal
Fascism — which tries to tie American
progressivism to historical fascism — is something of a running joke among
people who actually know stuff about fascism. Paxton, Griffin, and Feldman have all published pieces attacking and/or mocking it. Griffin
described it to me as "a really scurrilous work of revisionism, like David
Irving, who uses revisionism to deny the Holocaust and rehabilitate Hitler.
It's used to attack anyone attempting to introduce a welfare state as a
fascist."
There aren't that many real fascists left
There's an argument to be
made that we should only use "fascist" to refer to a cluster of
movements in developed countries in the 1930s and 1940s, and not try to apply
it to present-day politics at all, the same way we don't make regular use of
the now-defunct "Chartist" or "Carlist" movements as present-day political terminology.
But there are definitely some movements nowadays that draw direct
inspiration from '30/'40s fascists, and which fascism scholars are comfortable
labeling as fascist. However, they tend to be quite small and fringe, and they
all go way, way further than Donald Trump.
I found wide agreement among scholars that Golden
Dawn, the far-right party in Greece that draws
direct inspiration from the Nazis, is fairly described as fascist. "The
emergence of Golden Dawn was interesting to me, because in economic breakdown
and the feeling of national humiliation, you get a clear specimen of interwar
fascism," Griffin says. "There's a racial purity myth, a rebirth
myth, the political ritual, the cryptic symbols. The symbol of Golden Dawn is
the Greek symbol of eternity. It's dressed up to look like a swastika.
Beautiful. If it didn't exist you'd have to make it up."
"Golden Dawn in Greece is openly drawn on the Nazi model,"
Paxton concurs. "If they think they're fascist, perhaps there's something
to be said for calling them fascist."
But beyond that, the researchers argue for limiting the term to fringe
white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who are present in most societies but who
outside Greece have little political influence. "To be a fascist in
America, you have to be on a website talking about how the presidential system
is controlled by the Zionist Occupied Government," Griffin says. Feldman
cites the British National Party as a nontrivial force with clear fascist
roots, but emphasizes that it's still quite small in real terms. It has no members
of parliament. It is widely loathed throughout the UK.
Of course, many fringe fascists themselves like Donald
Trump and view him as the best they're
going to get on a national scale. They argue he's sparking a big spike in
activity around and interest in white nationalism. "Demoralization has
been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that," Stormfront founder
Don Black told Politico recently. But that does not make Trump himself a fascist.
Far-right populism is much more common, and much more
dangerous, than neo-fascism
So if Donald Trump isn't
a fascist, what is he?
Well, he's a right-wing populist. And while fascists are rare in 2015,
right-wing populists are not. In fact, it's kind of weird that America hasn't
had a real one before now. The UK has the UK Independence Party (UKIP); France
has Marine Le Pen and the Front National; Germany has Alternative for Germany
(AfD) and the anti-Muslim Pegida movement; Sweden has the Sweden Democrats; the
Netherlands has the Party for Freedom and its leader, Geert Wilders.
These parties have
a lot in common with Trump. They're fiercely
anti-immigration and particularly critical of Islam, couching their bigotry as
a reasonable precaution and stoking fear about homegrown terrorism. They draw
support away from more establishmentarian, business-friendly right-wing
parties. They tend to be led by individual, charismatic figures without whom
they'd be substantially weakened. They tend to be more sympathetic to welfare
programs and the safety net than traditional conservatives, much as Trump has
vocally defended Social Security against more traditional candidates like Chris
Christie who would cut it.
But they are not fascists. They still
believe in democracy, and they want traditional liberal democratic protections
for their white base. "They're still at bottom democrats rather than
fascists," Feldman says. "I think the fitting term is 'illiberal
democrats.' They would give full democratic rights for white Christians, or
perhaps Jews, but exclude the outgroups of the 21st century: mostly Muslims but
also Mexicans. It's really prejudice against them. We're congratulating
ourselves to say that anyone who engages in that prejudice is fascist."
Paxton agrees: "I don't think it helps very much to use this
inflammatory term [fascism] about Trump. 'Populist demagogue' works fine."
So does Payne: "The Sweden Democrats and Le Pen movement in France really
are just right-wing movements, in the sense of being conservative movements.
There's nothing categorically fascist about them. They are outside the general
consensus of center-left politics in these countries, and people want to find
special pejoratives to apply to them."
Griffin notes that you don't even have to look to Europe for examples of
this brand of right-wing, ethnocentric populism in action. Just look at the
long, distinguished history of populist white politicians in America exploiting
anti-black prejudice and white ethnic grievances. Those figures weren't
fascists; they were small-l liberal democrats who "wanted liberal
democracy to be for a very small group of Americans," in Griffin's words.
Again, fascism requires stepping outside the system and attacking the
democratic structure. As long as that structure itself is handling illiberal
attitudes on race, those attitudes don't themselves constitute a fascist trend.
But the views are still illiberal. To be very, very clear: Donald Trump
is a bigot. He is a racist. He is an Islamophobe and a xenophobe. He profits
off the hatred and stigmatization of traditionally oppressed groups in American
society. That makes him, and his European peers, and racists in other eras in
American history, a threat to crucial values of equality and fair treatment,
and a threat to the actual human beings he's targeting and demonizing. And he's
in particular mainstreaming Islamophobia, which is on the rise in recent months,
as seen in a recent incident in which a Muslim engineer was harassed at a Fredericksburg,
Virginia, civic meeting. "I’m really
not sure those views in Fredricksburg would be aired were it not for Trump’s
‘mainstreaming’ of these prejudices," Feldman says.
Kevin
Passmore, a historian at the University of Cardiff and author of Fascism:
a Very Short Introduction, puts it
well: "For me, the point about Trump’s proposals is not whether or not
they are ‘fascist,' but whether or not they are moral." And they very
clearly are not.
Dylan Matthews
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism
