What Happened Here

The Never Ending Fascism Debate

On The New Yorker website, Andrew Marantz has a very considered and balanced look at the new collection Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. I suggest you check it out. (And not just because he mentions my book.) Needless to say, I have a somewhat more combative take.

Steinmetz-Jenkin’s anthology purports to be a summa of the public debate going on since 2015 over whether there’s some meaningful analogy to be made between Donald Trump’s politics and fascism. It includes essays both for and against that proposition, but, in my opinion, attempts to stack the deck in favor of the “con” side. Steinmetz-Jenkins, a professor at Wesleyan, is Samuel Moyn’s former student. In an arrangement that’s apparently common in academia, DSJ also serves as Moyn’s loyal retainer, his hatamoto—bannerman—as they say on Shogun. The senior scholar Moyn must remain courtly and genteel, untouched by the indignity of arguing with the plebs, but S-J can go out and get a little tougher with his critics. As you might be able to tell by my tone, I’ve been on the receiving end of this a few times. Steinmetz-Jenkins seems to have learned from his master that heavy doses of condescension and smugness can pass for erudition and intelligence.

You may begin to suspect sour grapes and you would be partially right: I was not included in this collection despite writing a great deal about the subject. I was relegated, alas, to a footnote. I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad, though: maybe the best intervention on the anti- side of the debate, Dylan Riley’s What is Trump? is also omitted as are pieces by Adolph Reed and Geoff Eley. You probably do not get yourself included in such collections after you’ve direct messaged the editor and called him an “asshole.” I doubt that I would’ve been put in there even without any such outbursts because the point being made is that I’m beneath consideration. But I do think I have issues here that go beyond personal pique—for me, at least. I’m okay with the status of crank with a Substack, so maybe I really don’t belong, but Eley, for example, really should’ve been included.

As befitting its editor, this collection itself is somewhat is smarmy and disingenuous. The fact is that he does not seem to find this debate to be intellectually serious or interesting at all: he constantly acts as if it’s tedious and a bit lowbrow. This collection was done partly out of feudal service to Moyn and partly just to cynically cash on a subject that he clearly finds somewhat contemptible. Maybe that’s why his introductory essay is so uninspired and lifeless, with trite formulations like this: “Viewed in this light, the fascism debate is a Rorschach test for understanding what is truly ailing American society. It involves a variety of ultimate concerns and competing visions of society, which explains why so much of the dispute centers around the use of historical analogies.” Wow, Daniel: “a Rorschach test for what is truly ailing American society?” That’s so insightful — How did you come up with such an original metaphor? Maybe it’s some sort of proxy or cipher or maybe people actually think it’s true. Also, does it explain that? How? What’s the connection? He just leaves it there.

For Steinmetz-Jenkins, like others on his side of his debate, there’s really no debate at all: this is really just an emotional meltdown by hysterics who need to be put to bed. As he writes, this is all happening largely because “Trump’s victory emotionally and intellectually deregulated a democratic establishment that eight years earlier expressed overwhelming joy over something long thought impossible: the election of the first Black president.” He even goes so far as to say that the entire thing is driven by “neurosis:” “The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest, even as we try to come to terms with the neurosis it has revealed in us—a purpose that this anthology serves.” It’s fine for the editor of such a collection to have a point of view and express it, but he holds one side in such clear contempt that he’s unable to honestly reconstruct their views or even treat them as being worthy of basic respect.

If you think the debate should be put to rest and is barely worth having, then why perpetuate it by writing this essay collection. But this sort of haughty dismissal has been the attitude of most of those on his side of his debate. As junior member of that camp and inveterate ass kisser of the bigger boys, he’s merely copying that affect. A lower bureaucrat apparently unable to provide any original insight or contribution, he does the collating and copying, and writes a summary to please the upper echelons.

The anti- side of the debate used Marantz’s piece to claim victory—typical of their selective and inattentive reading habits—but what he says is much more equivocal:

If we’re going to be intellectually honest about the ways in which the fascism analogy doesn’t hold, then we should also be willing to acknowledge the ways in which it does. A few times last year, Trump repeated the talking point that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” How can we promise to stop making comparisons to Hitler when the leading candidate for President keeps paraphrasing Hitler? (Trump, for his part, claimed to “know nothing about Hitler,” although, according to a piece in Vanity Fair, he once kept the Führer’s collected speeches next to his bed.) In August, 2022, when Biden referred to the Trumpian “philosophy” as “semi-fascist,” he got a lot of pushback for the term, but I’ve come to think that “semi-fascist” might be as apt a description as any. Qualify it how you want: semi-fascist, proto-fascist, would-be authoritarian, “fasc-ish.” Moyn uses the phrase “the stirrings of fascism”—I’m fine with that one, too. What I like about all these qualifications is that they accurately connote instability. To refer to a proto-something, or to the stirrings of something, is to imply that the phenomenon has not reached its final form; it might resolve on its own, or it might get worse. In short, Moyn is right that there is an analytical cost when “the stirrings of fascism are redefined as the thing itself,” but he is wrong that this is the only real question. Another question is whether there is an analytical cost when the stirrings of fascism are redefined as nothing at all, or at least as nothing to worry about.

(By the way, Trump being proto- or semi-fascist has been my position all along.)

Even though this book ought to close the question in their favor, some of the principal figures on the other side are not happy. Corey Robin, given the last word in the book, has been having a temper tantrum on Twitter all week. Robin, citing Robert Paxton as an authority, reproved his opponents not to “drop his name as an authority unless you've read the actual fucking book.” But when it as pointed that Paxton said that Trump was fascist after January 6th, Robin doubles down and dismisses that intervention as “emotional:”

By the way, this characterization of Paxton’s piece is just not right. I re-read it as its reproduced in the collection and its quite level headed. Also, apparently Paxton stands by it: he didn’t feel the need to qualify or retract it to include it in the same collection that Robin writes in.

So what’s really embarrassing here? The fact is Corey Robin has been wrong since the beginning. A good theorist, he has terrible judgment of events. He thought Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he thought Trump would be a right-wing Carter presidency. That he would be toothless and ineffectual in every way. Shortly before January 6th, he said that “Trumpist/GOP politics” was the “almost the complete opposite of fascism.” Since Robin once accused me of twisting his words in this regard, I will reproduce the whole quote:

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.

I don’t think we can honestly say that Trump is dedicated to the constitutional order although he may benefit from certain aspects of it. That’s just not true. But the unwillingness to incorporate novel facts or even provide a comprehensive explanation of all of them is not Robin’s fault alone: it is the hallmark of the entire anti- side of the debate. They are trying to jam what actually happened into epicycles that save their theory but have to ignore or reinterpret into nothing what actually happened. The biggest problem for them, of course, is January 6th. Here’s how Steinmetz-Jenkins rolls his eyes Timothy Snyder: “Snyder doubled down on his use of fascism analogies by predicting that it was ‘pretty much inevitable’ that Trump would try to stage a Reichstag fire to overthrow democracy. Snyder believed that January 6th vindicated his claims. Whether one agrees with him or not, Snyder’s interventions blur the line between history and prophecy.” I also do not care for the rhetoric used by Snyder and many others closer to my side of this question. But even the crudest, most melodramatic version of the “fascism thesis” predicted something like January 6th would take place. And it did! Whether or not it had any hope of succeeding is another question. People on our side said that Trump would turn the January 6th fallen into martyrs and he is. The other side is just uninterested in the facts. They are totally uninterested and unaware in the state of the actually-existing right: its increasing openness to authoritarian ideas, its messianism about Trump the man, and the infiltration of the extreme right into its ranks, etc. No matter how many examples you can show them, they don’t care. They have their theory and they are sticking to it.

With its capacity to predict new facts and give an explanation the old ones, a theory that includes fascism as a key context and touchstone is the better research program, to borrow a concept from the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. Everything the other side says in this debate relies on the hiding or doctoring of evidence: it didn’t happen, and if it did happen, it’s not important: January 6th happened, but it was just silly basically. The militias don’t exist, and if they do exist, they aren’t significant. Sure, Trump’s rhetoric may sound fascist at times, but so what? Even Robin admitted this 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.

Then they go, “Well, okay, but he doesn’t have the necessary organization. He may say he wants to be dictator, but that’s just bluster.” The simple fact is this: Trump would be dictator if he could, but it’s not that easy, and he probably won’t be able to become one. I don’t think anybody can honestly say, “No, he really doesn’t have that aspiration or will at all.”

The other side likes to do armchair sociology and psychoanalyze their opponents, but two can play at that game. I think a lot of this is really about turf and status. Calling things “Fascist” is lowbrow, its for cheap propagandists, not serious scholars. They deflate, they qualify, they complicate. These people disdain the melodrama and vulgarity of the “It’s fascism” camp. And I don’t blame them. So do I often. I’d much rather be on the side of the deflationists: it’s cooler. But the facts being such that they are, I can’t. The other thing is that these people are mostly academics trying to secure their little oligopoly on the production of knowledge and they can’t abide upstarts who would dare have their own ideas. Hence all the condescension. Robin, without a doubt their most able and intelligent guy, seems to view himself as “the right wing knower” and resents the proliferation of amateurs who have dared to offer their own interpretations since the emergence of Trump. He has done the work. They have not. And there’s nothing more to say about the right that’s not already in his book. This is not reading between the lines: he practically just says it. Well, maybe we all wouldn’t be in business if his theory was doing better.

Like Mel Brooks’s 2000 year old man, Robin’s refrain to everything is “Nothing newwwww.” But something different has happened with Trump. Politics has changed. There was plainly a qualitative shift. And fascism is among the phenomena that can help us understand it.