Let's Get Real

I'm going to use the F-word and the C-word

Shortly after the election, I wrote a post titled “Testing the Fascism Thesis,” in which, I said I’d periodically revisit the idea and see where we were on that question. The actual term we use might seem unimportant. Many critics have said that calling whatever this is “fascism” has failed politically so therefore we should abandon it, but my contention has always been that the theory is useful and even predictive at times. The course of historic fascist movements and regimes is highly instructive in understanding the political dynamics of the era. But, of course, it also does not exhaust the possibilities of the present: we live in a different era with different technological, social, and institutional conditions. Today, I’m going to address a few counter-arguments and interpretations and try to make the case why the fascism frame makes better sense of the present than whatever its opponents have to offer.

“Trump is Weak”

This is a common insistence of critics of the fascism thesis, like Corey Robin. This is based on the misguided notion that fascism represents power itself, a notion ironically borrowed from fascist propaganda itself. The story goes that Trump has very little power over Congress, is still not very popular, and therefore his record will be marked by failures more than successes. They point to his difficulty in getting his cabinet picks through. In terms of the Constitutional system, yes, Trump is weak and ought to be checked as such, but that is precisely why he is trying to bend and break the Constitutional system and replace it with rule by decree. He must lean hard on executive power. This is in line with historical fascist movements, none of which ever got close to the popular vote that Trump did, by the way. They had to use force to offset a lack of political consent. Their justification for taking extraordinary action was the sclerotic and corrupt process of parliamentary legislation, hence the need for “a strong hand.”

Corey Robin now calls Trump 2.0 a “hostile takeover” presidency, but commentators have observed this for some time and used it to describe Trump 1.0’s initial success in shaping an agenda through executive actions alone. In their 2020 book, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism by Frank J. Thompson, Kenneth K. Wong, and Barry G. Rabe, the authors applied the very term “hostile takeover” to describe how the first Trump presidency “pushed the envelope of executive action to unprecedented levels in the annals of the administrative presidency.” What we are witnessing now is just the intensification of this use of the executive. The fact that Trump must rely on the idea of an all-powerful executive makes his regime more dictatorial in nature not less.

Another part of the weakness thesis is that the coalition of Trump has significant divisions and contradictions. Again, critics of the fascism thesis are taken in by fascist propaganda that depicts the party as moving in unity with the will of the leader. Historical fascist movements were highly fractious and even incoherent. Both Italian Fascism and Nazism contained a populist “left” that was sidelined—or even destroyed—in the interests of taking power and calming the nerves of an anxious bourgeoisie. Dylan Riley, a major critic of the fascism thesis makes this analogy himself, in the revised preface to The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: “Like Mussolini and Hitler, Trump faces a Fronde under Bannon, who reminds one of Farinacci.”¹ (Roberto Farinacci was chief of the pro-worker “national syndicalist” wing of the party whose power declined as Mussolini grew closer to industrial interests.) This move from “populism” to the frank embrace of capitalists is in keeping with historical fascist movement dynamics.

“Trump still relies on the constitutional order”

I wonder how much that is the case anymore?

Back in 2020, Robin said this in an interview with Jewish Currents:

It’s ironic to me that people would choose this moment, and Trump’s presidency, to assign the label “fascist” to the right, for what fascism is about, above all else, is a politics of strength and will. That’s why fascists traditionally loathe the constitutional order: because they think it constrains the assertion of political will. The irony of Trumpist/GOP politics is that it is completely dependent upon the constitutional order. In that regard, it’s almost the complete opposite of fascism.

The fact of the matter is that no less than Trump, the historical fascists came to power through the existing institutions of a constitutional system, both in the legal and formal sense—they were invited to form government by the head of state—and the political sense—they ruled—initially—in coalition with other parties. It’s true that historical fascisms strained against this framework and sought to undermine it and destroy it, but they had to cooperate with features of the old regime as well, in keeping with the limits of their political power.

It’s often said by critics of the fascism thesis that it’s absurd to compare Trumpism to fascism since we clearly didn’t live under a repressive fascist regime in Trump 1.0. Very few people said we were living under a fascist regime, they said Trump was substantively a fascist, a different stipulation. The critics try to elide the difference between a fascist movement and a fascist regime to ridicule their opponents, but they also ignore what actually—existing fascism looked like. In Italy, Mussolini governed in tandem with the old political system from 1922 until 1925, when the true dictatorship phase started in the wake of the Matteotti crisis, a debacle that seriously threatened his rule. At first, Mussolini tried to avoid a confrontation on the question of dictatorship vs. parliamentary rule even though radical members of his movement demanded a revolutionary move because he was uncertain he had the political strength to force the issue. He attempted to consolidate power and conservatives tried to normalize his movement and channel its energies into conventional political forms. The first years of fascism saw the coexistence of fascist rule and accelerating repression with competitive elections, a free press, and a pluralist public sphere. (Giacomo Matteotti was murdered for publishing a book and giving speeches in parliament, where he was a socialist deputy.) And until a crisis forced Mussolini’s hand, it appeared that the situation had stabilized into a kind of hybrid regime.

“Trump is a hyper-capitalist regime, not a fascist one”

Some are now saying what we are seeing is a version of the collapse of the Soviet Union where the state was stripped of its resources by oligarchs. A positive variation of this “argument” is made via Tweet by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah:

Fascism is associated in the public mind with great endeavors of state planning, nationalization, war industrialism, and mimicry of socialism, but Mussolini’s regime began with a “liberal” economic program, overseen by Alberto de' Stefani. De Stefani favored tax cuts, bureaucratic reductions and reforms, and extensive privatization. As the historian Germa Bél writes: “The government privatised the State monopoly of match sale, eliminated the State monopoly on life insurances, sold most of the State-owned telephone networks and services to private firms, reprivatised the largest metal machinery producer, and awarded concessions to private firms to build and operate motorways. These interventions represent one of the earliest and most decisive privatisation episodes in the Western world.”² De’ Stefani. also pursued and achieved a balanced budget. Bucking the 1930s trend towards nationalization, the Nazis also pursued an initial privatization policy for political reasons.³

Mussolini didn’t give much hint of his socialist roots when he first addressed parliament in June 1921:

On the other hand, to save the State, you must perform a surgical operation. Yesterday the Hon. Orano said that the State is similar to the giant Briareus, which has a hundred arms. I think you should amputate ninety-five of them. I think that it is necessary to reduce the State to its purely juridical and political expression.

The State will give us a police, save the gentleman from the villains, a well-organized justice, an army ready for all eventualities, a foreign policy subjected to national needs. For the rest, and I do not exclude even secondary schools, it should be left to the private individual. If you want to save the State, you have to abolish the collectivist State, as this is a necessity forwarded by the war, and return to the manchesterian State.

Or, in January of 1921, when he wrote, “In short, the position of fascism where the state is concerned is as follows: the struggle against the economic-monopolistic state is indispensable for the development of the forces of the nation. One must return to the political-judicial state, for those are its true functions. In other words, one must strengthen the political state and progressively dismantle the economic state.”⁴ Only with the coming of the depression did the Fascist state experiment with “corporatism,” which also ended up working in favor of industry rather than labor.

As Adam Tooze has written, liberal economists observed the fascist government with a lot of sympathy and interest and believed it could form a buttress of a weakening capitalist world order. As late as 1927, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises could write, “It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.” As I write, the disciples of Von Mises’s disciple
Murray Rothbard are running amok in the federal government.

Technically, a Coup

Trumpism having passed through a failed putschist phase before moving into a legal approach to power that would seem to recommend an analogy with fascism, but again, the critics will not countenance this dynamic. The current seizure of the payments system of the Treasury Department reminds one fascist journalist Curzio Malaparte’s observations in his 1931 book The Technique of Coup d’Etat that the most successful modern coups are not frontal assaults on the institutions of the state, or bold military uprisings, but seizures of the state’s technical “nerve centers:”

…the problem of the modern coup d’ Etat is a technical problem…Not the masses make a revolution, but a mere handful of men, prepared for any emergency, well drilled in the tactics of insurrection, trained to strike hard and quickly at the vital organs of the State’s technical services. These shock troops should be recruited from among specialized workmen : mechanics, electricians, telegraph and radio operators acting under orders of technical engineers who understand the technical working of the State.

I’m not sure Musk’s little groyper squad is a crack force in quite this way, but they are definitely attempting to seize the state's nerve centers. It’s almost as if Trump’s movement learned something and took a different approach.

The Question of Ideology

The critics of the fascism thesis insist on the total continuity of the GOP with its historical antecedents and do not ever deal with the well-documented fact of the spread of highly authoritarian, illiberal thought on all levels of the contemporary right. Contemporary thinkers on the right might openly quote Carl Schmitt or talk about the need for “Caesarism,” but the critics of the fascism thesis just ignored this wholesale or did not take it seriously. Some critics conceded that there was fascist flair to Trump’s ideology, but then dismissed it as bluster. Again, here’s Robin in 2017:

Trump’s extended cry of pain here seems to contain at least some of the elements of “passionate nationalism” that the historian Robert Paxton describes as fascism’s essence: a sense of grievous dishonor and shame, played out across oceans and continents; the stab in the back from cosmopolitan elites (Obama is “economist to the world” who commits “economic treason”); a longing for re-enchantment of the state; a desire for national restoration and global domination.

Okay, then.

The Question of Violence

On his blog yesterday, Robin wrote that the question of violence over the past few years was misplaced because it’s other forms of coercion that are now being used:

And what has been the most persistent, common source of that fear and intimidation, not for political isolated groups but the great mass of society? The power over employment. "In the general course of human nature," wrote Alexander Hamilton, "a power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."

We're now seeing that program in action, from Trump's threats of mass firing and withdrawal of federal funds, to institutions in the nonprofit sector cooperating with his demands for fear that they'll have to lay people off if they don't.

Based on my own work, it should never have come as a surprise to me, though I admit it has, that it wouldn't be Proud Boys roving the streets or Trump throwing people into jail that would generate a tsunami-like wave of politically quiescent fear and intimidation in this country. That—physical violence from below and above—was the model we were arguing about, vainly as it turns out, for eight years now.

For the end has turned out to be at it was at the beginning: Fear, American Style, where millions of people fear that they will be punished by losing their jobs if they dare speak up or or speak out, is the reigning principle of the moment.

That was not the nature of the argument, that was the nature of the argument in so far as Robin framed it. The appearance of Proud Boys and other militia-type groups and their appearance on January 6th were symptomatic of the authoritarian and indeed fascist nature of the movement, a symptom that critics again chose to downplay or ignore. In neither Germany nor Italy did squadrism form the sole or even primary mode of coercion and governance of fascist regimes. Again, the idea that the brownshirts or the blackshirts blackjacked their way into power is a feature of fascist propaganda, not a historical fact: the conservative elite cooperated with the fascists. The level of street violence in the United States does not approach either interwar Italy or Weimar, but that’s because we do not live in those eras: both the technologies of politics and the social conditions are different. They did not have the Internet.

Does Robin really not think Benito Mussolini didn’t also make employment for regime opponents difficult or impossible? Obviously, you don’t need petty street gangs when you have the power of the state in your hands. Threatening employment is a tried and true characteristic of dictatorships the world over. The attack on civil society by regime-friendly oligarchs through economic and legal means is a prominent feature of modern authoritarian regimes like Viktor Orban’s Hungary, again an explicit and open model for Trump’s intellectual supporters. This parallel was also never taken seriously by critics of “tyrannophobia.”

“The Lack of Foreign Expansionism”

Critics of the fascism thesis said Trump was not bellicose and didn’t have an expansionist program. Look how that stands up today.

“The Lack of Revolutionary Threat”

The critics of the fascism thesis said that Trump’s movement could not be fascist because there was no menacing left to push the conservatives into its arms. But this ignores how the right sees the contemporary United States: as under threat by totalitarian far-left “Cultural Marxists” and Wokeism that showed alarming power with the George Floyd protests. It ignores how Covid radicalized many on the right into a paranoid view of left-wing cultural and bureaucratic power over their lives. And it ignores the propaganda dimension of the present push to remove “DEI.” According to exacting left-wing standards, there was no terrifying revolutionary situation, according to right-wing fears, there very much was with countless examples, from cancel culture to vaccine mandates. It might appear to be an overreaction. But so are all reactionary waves.

What Now

Facing these facts doesn’t mean Trump is invincible or that political contestation is over. Far from it. The idea that “fascism = strength” is just a piece of propaganda unwittingly reproduced by critics of the fascism thesis. None of this means Trump will necessarily succeed in his drive for power. Many correctly point out there are serious structural obstacles to consolidating power in the United States. And there is much in politics and life that is totally contingent. Nor do I think Trump is a carbon copy of Mussolini or Hitler or his regime will fully resemble theirs. I don’t think this is as virulent an instantiation. But there is much more to the comparison than has been allowed by otherwise smart and well-read people who just sneer at it. To the critics of the fascism thesis, I’d just quote Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you…think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

1. Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, pg. 35

2. Bel, Germà. “The First Privatisation: Selling SOEs and Privatising Public Monopolies in Fascist Italy (1922–1925).” Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 35, no. 5, 2011, pp. 937–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24232431.

3. BEL, GERMÀ. “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany.” The Economic History Review, vol. 63, no. 1, 2010, pp. 34–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27771569.

4. Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, pg. 228