Reading this essay makes me think that the novel 1984 did us a real disservice by conjuring in our minds an unrealistic conception of fascism as totalizing and all-consuming, and by presenting it to us as fully-formed without describing how it came to be. Of course, this is fiction, but I feel fairly confident that more laypeople are familiar with 1984 than with the historical examples cited here and are using that, rather than Mussolini's regime, as their fascism yardstick.
The fascism debate is really useful and informative, but its very existence also kind of reflects not just the essence of fascism, but also its power. The incoherence, contradictions, the ping-ponging between productivism and distributism, modernization and tradition, the constant shifting of euphemisms and metaphors to describe what it is and what it’s doing, the perpetual lying by one part of its coalition to another about what the movement represents - in fundamental ways, not making sense or being incoherent are themselves defining features of fascism and the source of its power. MAGA nativists running suburban car dealerships co-existing in the same movement as Musk’s gamer elves trying to code the state out of existence doesn’t have to make sense - contradiction, misrepresentation, lying, being everything and nothing at the same time - all constitutive of the thing.
I also think resolving the contradictions - or appearing to resolve them - is the main function of the Leader and the root of the fuhrerprinzip. Sometimes the contradictions are simply too much to bear - between corporatism and populism, technocratic functionalism and the semi-controlled rapaciousness and anarchy of the market and shareholder priorities, etc - and here the whole system goes passive and defers to the Leader to make it whole. His very existence is the resolution.
Yeah, it turns out that indoctrination against socialism - of which the mass assignment of 1984 to American schoolchildren is just one example - is pretty close to indoctrination towards fascism. Who knew!
John, for the life of me, the analogous situation would be if you were trying to point out a rhino in the wild to a bunch of folks whose entire concept of a rhino is based on the Duher print.
Great piece. Since I learned a lot from Robin's book on the reactionary nature of conservatism, it is has been puzzling and disappointing to read his work during Trump 1.0 and now 2.0.
After close to 10 years of MAGA, there is a pretty stark pattern, isn't there? In all kinds of sectors, the radicalization has almost always turned out to have been deeper and further advanced than it looked on the surface at the time. The mob spirit has taken a deep hold in evangelicalism, internet culture, grassroots GOP, conspiracy cultures, intellectuals on the right, and in large pockets of the corporate world. And there seems to be a synergy effect whereby they are cross-radicalizing each other.
At what point does it seem a bad idea to keep underestimating the likelihood that there is a snowballing process going on here?
Robin does an odd two-step in his writing about fascism: the GOP is too reliant on exploiting technicalities of the constitutional structure and its institutions to want to tear it down (and therefore this isn't fascism), but also Trump is so weak he can't employ the constitutional structure at all and has to go outside it with Executive Orders (and therefore this isn't fascism). He makes a fundamental mistake in grouping all of the competing factions of the GOP together in his analysis so differences between the parliamentary maneuvering of a Mitch McConnell and the blunt force objects of extralegal EOs penned by Stephen Miller or Russell Vought get elided; they're just both evidence that this isn't fascism. He silos off his major points from one another and posts whenever he finds evidence for one of them, never noting that they exist in a tension that over time grows into outright contradiction. A weak President who fails to get even his own party to pass much of his agenda through legislation and over time seeks, finds and deploys unitary approaches outside of the strictures of the Constitution, escalating to major extralegal power grabs, is a story easily synthesized from the available evidence, but if you isolate the elements and disjoint the actions from narrative sequence it all looks like flailing.
Also, I know Professor Robin doesn't identify as a Marxist but he should be familiar enough with Engels' concept of social murder to understand why (illegally) threatening to deprive somebody of their livelihood is not a distinct enough form of coercion from outright violence to matter.
Striking that Mike Lee twitter post. He should open a history book, but the post is about messaging, not the truth of course. Every fascist movement had a liberal government to kneecap in order to consolidate power in the new fascist vein. Fascist regimes destroy the existing government…in order to build the new autocratic one.
The best argument imo that Trump is not actually fascist is that the kleptocracy is more central, the true guiding principle behind his actions. In this perspective, Trump’s exaltation of the nation is more of a con than anything, in order to consolidate power so he can be enriched, empowered and unaccountable. Maga nation is not the center, rather all that is window dressing for the leader and his cronies to rape the nation blind. I appreciate that Sarah Kendzior has advanced this perspective while noting that the fascism is still present, just not at the core. Given this is most certainly the power structure of Russia Trump is emulating, and Russia is currently an authoritarian hellscape engaged in terroristic invasion of a neighbor, seems the difference may be academic. Name it neofascist kleptocracy and call it a day
My suspicion is that the "Trump is really mostly a cleptocrat rather than an actual fascist"-argument could be kinda right. But those around him are fascist or something close enough. Which is why that argument is kinda irrelevant. Or in other words: I'm not so sure how far Trump is really the core of Maga or if he's just an orange calf for a movement that grew around him
I’ve also heard an interesting perspective that the first gen fascist leadership was similarly opportunistic in terms of ideology its just the fierce nationalism and racial hierarchies and so forth are just what resonated with the decadent populations. In other words, fascist leadership being predatory, opportunistic and manipulative are actually key features of fascism
In Herculaneum, a library of a couple thousand scrolls was buried by Mount Vesuvius. The scrolls are well-preserved, but they are badly burned and can't be unrolled without destroying them. They've just been floating around Europe for a few centuries and most are now in university collections. The library belonged to a philosopher, so the dream is somewhere in there could be some lost classical works, Aristotle's dialogues or whatever.
People were able to scan the inside of the scrolls without opening them. There was a big public competition, and through a combination of smart signal processing and human cleverness, people last year were finally able to start deciphering what had been written on them.
In a strange turn of events, the young guy who was the first to figure out how to read a word of those scrolls ("porphyras"), is now one of Musk's lackeys hanging around at OPM. So unfortunately there is some genuine technical competence.
He was not working solo (most importantly, other people produced the scans in the first place).
But I tried to dig up the articles I read about it at the time, and every source I could find (NYT, neh.gov, university press releases, the "Scroll Prize" website) describes him as the first to decipher a word, for which he won a cash prize. Sometimes the media gets duped by university press releases, but I would think the contest organizers wouldn't make an error like that.
great piece that suggests a counter strategy. Focus on protecting the jobs of the threatened workers. Also support those workers independent of legal defense. Some of those workers may just want to quit and take better jobs elsewhere. They need moral support.
"Name a fascist dictator whose agenda entailed limiting the size, cost, and power of government" - I actually feel like limiting the 'size' of govt. in this way is not even limiting its power, in a couple of senses - the removal of all means of recourse against lawless action, appeals to more limited state capacity as justification for future lawlessness ("we banned the measles vaccine, now our population is susceptible to measles from THE MIGRANTS, now there's no choice but to detain them at the border;" "we're building 30,000 open-air tents in Guantanamo"); also if you read into the state and state action as doing something ... educative, I guess ... there's a clear encouragement that civil society and private individuals pick up the slack w/r/t everyday violence and enforcement of conformity. Your book talks about Ross Perot's way of building an ultraconservative and ultradisciplined state in miniature through the corporation, in this case within a democracy and in the absence of any state coercion, and I think it's a model that will fill in a lot of the 'gaps' and is really no less intrusive on everyday human life.
Mussolini leaned into this "Manchestrian state" rhetoric a lot early on, but I also remember that Chapotout's The Law of Blood has a lot to say about Nazi professed anti-statism - framing it as this rationalistic, mechanical leviathan that was a pallid substitute for the organic and intuitive folkways of the people. And nobody needs to be reminded how 'anti-authoritarian' this anti-statism was in practice: replacing static legal bureaucracies with personal improvisations on the Fuhrerprinzip theme was ofc a huge driver of the Nazis' 'totalitarianization' of the texture of everyday life.
Thanks for all of your unbridled writings on fascism and all of this *waves hands*. While I sometimes agree that the word fascism, literally, describes a phenomenon that was a product of its time, this is no time for quibbling. The parallels with 20th century fascism are too clear to ignore and should be shouted. If focusing on fascism has failed politically, then that's due to a lack of education--a hard problem to solve, but if we don't solve it, we'll be right back here again in a few years or so. (As we now find ourselves after the first Trump term.)
Obviously Mussolini had a very different trajectory than Musk, but what Musk is doing certainly stinks of some horrible technobro-fascism, the 21st century version of fascism.
I’m Canadian, and any discussion of the US politics makes me think of the relationship between our countries these days. But I think that, in your discussion of “The Lack of Revolutionary Threat”, Canada sheds light on the Fascism question (or vie versa?).
The KYE guys made a similar point in their discussion of the fascism question: American conservatives paint liberals, “wokistes”, and the socialist left with the same brush. So any of them could, in the conservative imaginary, act as of the revolutionary left in the capital-F fascism era. KYE made this argument regarding Trump 1.0 (Obama is a Marxist, etc.). As you suggest in your article, the case that progressives broadly function as MAGA’s Left is even stronger for Trump’s second successful bid, after covid & the “peak woke” years of his first term.
Trudeau’s Canada appears to be playing a similar role on the international stage. He is the right’s ur-woke-boogeyman (cosmopolitan, pro-immigration/lgbt/vax, a bit fruity, etc. etc.), and people with Trump’s ear believe him to be running a stalinist regime.
Musk has hated him at least since the convoy, and publicly supports his opponent. One of Vance’s best friends works under that opponent in an incarnation of our Tory party defined by bone-deep hatred of Trudeau & his “socialism”. Fox’s spin in covering the PM is obvious. Tucker was on the “invade woke Canada” tip before it was cool. Trudeau makes Peterson and Rogan, admittedly more peripheral figures, levitate with rage. The groyper/staffer class’ views are doubtless a sewer.
Leftwingers understand Trudeau as a neoliberal. Whether or not that’s true (I’d quibble), your and KYE’s insight is that this is not an obstacle to him (and Canada) being the Spectre of Communism for Trumpism to vanquish.
Trump’s tariff proposals don’t make sense; even he struggles to articulate a rationale. Yes, he has a longtime fixation with tariffs. But starting with the only two countries with which you share a land boarder? Whose economies are extremely integrated with your own? Reneging on your own trade deal? A deranged way to go about it. He hasn’t threatened Denmark/Greenland with tariffs in the short-term, even though his territorial aspirations there seem more serious.
I don’t believe that the MAGA right coincidentally chose to launch the first volley in its trade wars against countries led by a female socialist and, worse yet, the crown prince of wokisme. Trump has smashed the libs at home, and now seeks fresh libs abroad. His choice of target, in the face of all conventional thinking, supports your thesis that MAGA sees itself as a bulwark against the revolutionary left (read: pronouns & vaccines).
Does Trump think in these terms? Probably not, certainly not consciously. But Musk? Vance? Pretty close, I bet.
Thanks for laying this out so clearly. This should be the nail in the argument so that, rather than consuming ourselves in the debate, we can focus on what can be done. That last paragraph should be the jumping off point and I would love to read more of your thoughts in that regard.
“It’s almost as if Trump’s movement learned something and took a different approach.”
I’m more or less sold on your position on the fascism debate. One interesting difference from historical fascist movements, though, is that Il Duce Americano himself is old and visibly fading. His movement might have learned and changed tactics, but I don’t think the man himself is that nimble anymore. Hitler and Mussolini weren’t geniuses or anything, and understanding them as masterminds is again to take fascist propaganda at it’s face. They were sharp politicians in their physical and mental primes at the time they were consolidating power, though, and much more consciously plotting a strategy for their movement than I think Trump is at this point.
That doesn’t contradict tue fascism thesis, it just makes me wonder how this iteration will deviate from previous ones over time. The charismatic leader is still the leader, but he’s more a creation of his close circle of advisors than his antecedents were. Trump is seemingly only intermittently capable of sticking to Stephen Miller et al’s plans these days, let alone successfully plotting a course himself. I’m hopeful that that means the internal factionalism and contradictions of the movement will be harder to paper over. And if his grubby little heart finally gives out, all bets are off. We’ve never seen a fascist movement capable of succeeding lose its figurehead to natural causes mid-struggle before, unless there’s something I’m forgetting.
Reading this essay makes me think that the novel 1984 did us a real disservice by conjuring in our minds an unrealistic conception of fascism as totalizing and all-consuming, and by presenting it to us as fully-formed without describing how it came to be. Of course, this is fiction, but I feel fairly confident that more laypeople are familiar with 1984 than with the historical examples cited here and are using that, rather than Mussolini's regime, as their fascism yardstick.
This is correct.
The fascism debate is really useful and informative, but its very existence also kind of reflects not just the essence of fascism, but also its power. The incoherence, contradictions, the ping-ponging between productivism and distributism, modernization and tradition, the constant shifting of euphemisms and metaphors to describe what it is and what it’s doing, the perpetual lying by one part of its coalition to another about what the movement represents - in fundamental ways, not making sense or being incoherent are themselves defining features of fascism and the source of its power. MAGA nativists running suburban car dealerships co-existing in the same movement as Musk’s gamer elves trying to code the state out of existence doesn’t have to make sense - contradiction, misrepresentation, lying, being everything and nothing at the same time - all constitutive of the thing.
I also think resolving the contradictions - or appearing to resolve them - is the main function of the Leader and the root of the fuhrerprinzip. Sometimes the contradictions are simply too much to bear - between corporatism and populism, technocratic functionalism and the semi-controlled rapaciousness and anarchy of the market and shareholder priorities, etc - and here the whole system goes passive and defers to the Leader to make it whole. His very existence is the resolution.
This is great, you're a good writer. Thanks for sharing
Yeah, it turns out that indoctrination against socialism - of which the mass assignment of 1984 to American schoolchildren is just one example - is pretty close to indoctrination towards fascism. Who knew!
John, for the life of me, the analogous situation would be if you were trying to point out a rhino in the wild to a bunch of folks whose entire concept of a rhino is based on the Duher print.
Great piece. Since I learned a lot from Robin's book on the reactionary nature of conservatism, it is has been puzzling and disappointing to read his work during Trump 1.0 and now 2.0.
After close to 10 years of MAGA, there is a pretty stark pattern, isn't there? In all kinds of sectors, the radicalization has almost always turned out to have been deeper and further advanced than it looked on the surface at the time. The mob spirit has taken a deep hold in evangelicalism, internet culture, grassroots GOP, conspiracy cultures, intellectuals on the right, and in large pockets of the corporate world. And there seems to be a synergy effect whereby they are cross-radicalizing each other.
At what point does it seem a bad idea to keep underestimating the likelihood that there is a snowballing process going on here?
Robin does an odd two-step in his writing about fascism: the GOP is too reliant on exploiting technicalities of the constitutional structure and its institutions to want to tear it down (and therefore this isn't fascism), but also Trump is so weak he can't employ the constitutional structure at all and has to go outside it with Executive Orders (and therefore this isn't fascism). He makes a fundamental mistake in grouping all of the competing factions of the GOP together in his analysis so differences between the parliamentary maneuvering of a Mitch McConnell and the blunt force objects of extralegal EOs penned by Stephen Miller or Russell Vought get elided; they're just both evidence that this isn't fascism. He silos off his major points from one another and posts whenever he finds evidence for one of them, never noting that they exist in a tension that over time grows into outright contradiction. A weak President who fails to get even his own party to pass much of his agenda through legislation and over time seeks, finds and deploys unitary approaches outside of the strictures of the Constitution, escalating to major extralegal power grabs, is a story easily synthesized from the available evidence, but if you isolate the elements and disjoint the actions from narrative sequence it all looks like flailing.
Also, I know Professor Robin doesn't identify as a Marxist but he should be familiar enough with Engels' concept of social murder to understand why (illegally) threatening to deprive somebody of their livelihood is not a distinct enough form of coercion from outright violence to matter.
Excellent post
Striking that Mike Lee twitter post. He should open a history book, but the post is about messaging, not the truth of course. Every fascist movement had a liberal government to kneecap in order to consolidate power in the new fascist vein. Fascist regimes destroy the existing government…in order to build the new autocratic one.
The best argument imo that Trump is not actually fascist is that the kleptocracy is more central, the true guiding principle behind his actions. In this perspective, Trump’s exaltation of the nation is more of a con than anything, in order to consolidate power so he can be enriched, empowered and unaccountable. Maga nation is not the center, rather all that is window dressing for the leader and his cronies to rape the nation blind. I appreciate that Sarah Kendzior has advanced this perspective while noting that the fascism is still present, just not at the core. Given this is most certainly the power structure of Russia Trump is emulating, and Russia is currently an authoritarian hellscape engaged in terroristic invasion of a neighbor, seems the difference may be academic. Name it neofascist kleptocracy and call it a day
My suspicion is that the "Trump is really mostly a cleptocrat rather than an actual fascist"-argument could be kinda right. But those around him are fascist or something close enough. Which is why that argument is kinda irrelevant. Or in other words: I'm not so sure how far Trump is really the core of Maga or if he's just an orange calf for a movement that grew around him
Can’t argue with you on that.
I’ve also heard an interesting perspective that the first gen fascist leadership was similarly opportunistic in terms of ideology its just the fierce nationalism and racial hierarchies and so forth are just what resonated with the decadent populations. In other words, fascist leadership being predatory, opportunistic and manipulative are actually key features of fascism
The original fascisms had a strong kleptocratic streak too, though. Nazism especially: look at the career of Herman Goering.
Fabulous piece. Thanks John.
Another one for the ages.
In Herculaneum, a library of a couple thousand scrolls was buried by Mount Vesuvius. The scrolls are well-preserved, but they are badly burned and can't be unrolled without destroying them. They've just been floating around Europe for a few centuries and most are now in university collections. The library belonged to a philosopher, so the dream is somewhere in there could be some lost classical works, Aristotle's dialogues or whatever.
People were able to scan the inside of the scrolls without opening them. There was a big public competition, and through a combination of smart signal processing and human cleverness, people last year were finally able to start deciphering what had been written on them.
In a strange turn of events, the young guy who was the first to figure out how to read a word of those scrolls ("porphyras"), is now one of Musk's lackeys hanging around at OPM. So unfortunately there is some genuine technical competence.
That's what is frightening: technical competence coupled to an arrogant ignorance.
He was not, in fact, the first to figure out how to read a word of those scrolls. Likely a smart enough kid, but he was not working solo.
He was not working solo (most importantly, other people produced the scans in the first place).
But I tried to dig up the articles I read about it at the time, and every source I could find (NYT, neh.gov, university press releases, the "Scroll Prize" website) describes him as the first to decipher a word, for which he won a cash prize. Sometimes the media gets duped by university press releases, but I would think the contest organizers wouldn't make an error like that.
Fair enough, I'm reacting to less careful tellings of this story and not your own.
great piece that suggests a counter strategy. Focus on protecting the jobs of the threatened workers. Also support those workers independent of legal defense. Some of those workers may just want to quit and take better jobs elsewhere. They need moral support.
You could be lined up against the proverbial wall next to CR and he'd still argue it isn't actually fascism.
"Name a fascist dictator whose agenda entailed limiting the size, cost, and power of government" - I actually feel like limiting the 'size' of govt. in this way is not even limiting its power, in a couple of senses - the removal of all means of recourse against lawless action, appeals to more limited state capacity as justification for future lawlessness ("we banned the measles vaccine, now our population is susceptible to measles from THE MIGRANTS, now there's no choice but to detain them at the border;" "we're building 30,000 open-air tents in Guantanamo"); also if you read into the state and state action as doing something ... educative, I guess ... there's a clear encouragement that civil society and private individuals pick up the slack w/r/t everyday violence and enforcement of conformity. Your book talks about Ross Perot's way of building an ultraconservative and ultradisciplined state in miniature through the corporation, in this case within a democracy and in the absence of any state coercion, and I think it's a model that will fill in a lot of the 'gaps' and is really no less intrusive on everyday human life.
Mussolini leaned into this "Manchestrian state" rhetoric a lot early on, but I also remember that Chapotout's The Law of Blood has a lot to say about Nazi professed anti-statism - framing it as this rationalistic, mechanical leviathan that was a pallid substitute for the organic and intuitive folkways of the people. And nobody needs to be reminded how 'anti-authoritarian' this anti-statism was in practice: replacing static legal bureaucracies with personal improvisations on the Fuhrerprinzip theme was ofc a huge driver of the Nazis' 'totalitarianization' of the texture of everyday life.
I had not read Malaperte's Coup d'Etat until you cited it and now I can't unread it.
Thanks for all of your unbridled writings on fascism and all of this *waves hands*. While I sometimes agree that the word fascism, literally, describes a phenomenon that was a product of its time, this is no time for quibbling. The parallels with 20th century fascism are too clear to ignore and should be shouted. If focusing on fascism has failed politically, then that's due to a lack of education--a hard problem to solve, but if we don't solve it, we'll be right back here again in a few years or so. (As we now find ourselves after the first Trump term.)
I suspect Trump isn't our primary problem, though (obv. still bad). I recently wrote a bit about parallels between Mussolini and Musk: "men of tomorrow". https://www.trackingproject2025.com/p/doge-is-both-awful-and-insidiously
Obviously Mussolini had a very different trajectory than Musk, but what Musk is doing certainly stinks of some horrible technobro-fascism, the 21st century version of fascism.
I’m Canadian, and any discussion of the US politics makes me think of the relationship between our countries these days. But I think that, in your discussion of “The Lack of Revolutionary Threat”, Canada sheds light on the Fascism question (or vie versa?).
The KYE guys made a similar point in their discussion of the fascism question: American conservatives paint liberals, “wokistes”, and the socialist left with the same brush. So any of them could, in the conservative imaginary, act as of the revolutionary left in the capital-F fascism era. KYE made this argument regarding Trump 1.0 (Obama is a Marxist, etc.). As you suggest in your article, the case that progressives broadly function as MAGA’s Left is even stronger for Trump’s second successful bid, after covid & the “peak woke” years of his first term.
Trudeau’s Canada appears to be playing a similar role on the international stage. He is the right’s ur-woke-boogeyman (cosmopolitan, pro-immigration/lgbt/vax, a bit fruity, etc. etc.), and people with Trump’s ear believe him to be running a stalinist regime.
Musk has hated him at least since the convoy, and publicly supports his opponent. One of Vance’s best friends works under that opponent in an incarnation of our Tory party defined by bone-deep hatred of Trudeau & his “socialism”. Fox’s spin in covering the PM is obvious. Tucker was on the “invade woke Canada” tip before it was cool. Trudeau makes Peterson and Rogan, admittedly more peripheral figures, levitate with rage. The groyper/staffer class’ views are doubtless a sewer.
Leftwingers understand Trudeau as a neoliberal. Whether or not that’s true (I’d quibble), your and KYE’s insight is that this is not an obstacle to him (and Canada) being the Spectre of Communism for Trumpism to vanquish.
Trump’s tariff proposals don’t make sense; even he struggles to articulate a rationale. Yes, he has a longtime fixation with tariffs. But starting with the only two countries with which you share a land boarder? Whose economies are extremely integrated with your own? Reneging on your own trade deal? A deranged way to go about it. He hasn’t threatened Denmark/Greenland with tariffs in the short-term, even though his territorial aspirations there seem more serious.
I don’t believe that the MAGA right coincidentally chose to launch the first volley in its trade wars against countries led by a female socialist and, worse yet, the crown prince of wokisme. Trump has smashed the libs at home, and now seeks fresh libs abroad. His choice of target, in the face of all conventional thinking, supports your thesis that MAGA sees itself as a bulwark against the revolutionary left (read: pronouns & vaccines).
Does Trump think in these terms? Probably not, certainly not consciously. But Musk? Vance? Pretty close, I bet.
Thanks for laying this out so clearly. This should be the nail in the argument so that, rather than consuming ourselves in the debate, we can focus on what can be done. That last paragraph should be the jumping off point and I would love to read more of your thoughts in that regard.
“It’s almost as if Trump’s movement learned something and took a different approach.”
I’m more or less sold on your position on the fascism debate. One interesting difference from historical fascist movements, though, is that Il Duce Americano himself is old and visibly fading. His movement might have learned and changed tactics, but I don’t think the man himself is that nimble anymore. Hitler and Mussolini weren’t geniuses or anything, and understanding them as masterminds is again to take fascist propaganda at it’s face. They were sharp politicians in their physical and mental primes at the time they were consolidating power, though, and much more consciously plotting a strategy for their movement than I think Trump is at this point.
That doesn’t contradict tue fascism thesis, it just makes me wonder how this iteration will deviate from previous ones over time. The charismatic leader is still the leader, but he’s more a creation of his close circle of advisors than his antecedents were. Trump is seemingly only intermittently capable of sticking to Stephen Miller et al’s plans these days, let alone successfully plotting a course himself. I’m hopeful that that means the internal factionalism and contradictions of the movement will be harder to paper over. And if his grubby little heart finally gives out, all bets are off. We’ve never seen a fascist movement capable of succeeding lose its figurehead to natural causes mid-struggle before, unless there’s something I’m forgetting.