For what it’s worth, Italian scholars of fascism are generally far less rigid and check-list hog-tied about how to define fascism than Anglo-American theorists like Robin, and tend to be quite comfortable framing Trumpist/Meloni-style movements as a continuum of fascist politics. https://ilbolive.unipd.it/it/fascismo-italiano-interpretazioni
My view is that Trump himself won't provide the real evidence for whether his fascist instincts and yearnings represent an incipient fascism in the country. Even the devotion of the MAGA base, although significant, doesn't tell us for sure (many may be enjoying it all as entertainment more than a will to power).
The pivotal evidence is whether Republican office holders and party officials––the people who (mostly) understand the difference between fascism and liberal democracy––are willing to embrace the fascist strains of Trumpism. And we have our answer on that, don't we?
For me the weather vane is JD Vance. He knows from fascism. He knows the difference between facts about international finance (whether framed via critiques from the left or defenses from the right) and the "globalist" conspiracies of the Trump right. But he is still all in on the MAGA project. He has consciously decided to spread Russian disinformation; has asserted he would have refused to do what Pence did and certify the 2020 election; he hasn't denounced the post-Jan. 6th legitimizing of political violence; the list goes on.
The GOP operatives unwilling to open the gates to fascism have been booted or have left the stage. The ones who remain hold a very large aggregation of political power in the US and they are prepared to exert it in favor of Trump and Trumpism.
The smartest people in the Republican leadership have co-signed Trump's transformation of the party structure and his fascist blueprint for his second administration. That's a "qualitative" change for sure.
Perhaps I'm reaching too much, but there are strong resonances for me between this post and my experience in the labor movement. You've got a whole host of relative newcomers onto the labor stage - Shawn Fain, the Starbucks workers, the Amazon Labor Union, grad student organizers, Sara Nelson, and more - who are taking on fights that the distinguished elders of the movement (those who have put in the time over years and decades, who have learned What Works and What Is Foolishness) said weren't possible. While, overall, movement elders are coming around to things (and some, like Richard Bensinger, have thrown themselves into helping the new generation), you still see a lot of union leaders who are very hesitant to believe the moment we're in is really different. Their criticisms, like the Corey Robin-types John talks about in this post, often take little account of facts on the ground, but instead rely upon pre-existing notions of how things do and don't happen. The reluctance of those leaders to see what's before their own eyes is potentially imperiling the movement.
Bluntness seems to strike Ivy League types as inherently a mark of stupidity—I run into a lot of ‘em here at Umich, and they really bristle if you tell the truth in words of two or three syllables tops. It’s weird. (One time I was urged— by a person who was, I am certain, not remotely sympathetic to the cause of the Confederate States of America—to take out a reference, in my book on the Midwest, to the South as being on the “wrong” side of the Civil War. She couldn’t believe I’d just say it like that.) “Trump is a fascist” is a simpler, blunter statement than “nggghhhhhh, welllll, you seeeeee, Trumpism shares certain features with the ur-ur-fascism of the early Italian Astro-Hungryalists, but a closer analogue can be found in the ethno- religio- populism (classic form) of the Viennese Rigorists, etc etc.” Therefore the second thing must be truer. ISTG for some people that’s all it is.
“You probably do not get yourself included in such collections after you’ve direct messaged the editor and called him an ‘asshole’” lol
Great piece, it brings to mind a thread on BlueSky-please John bring your crankiness there-from Seth Cotlar, a scholar in Oregon. He pointed out that Rubin et al are in elite, relatively “blue” spaces where they don’t see the fascist right. In Oregon however he sees it constantly and it is part of the GOP there.
“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.”
Someone should remind this person that Hitler used the German Constitutional order to further his aims — the entirety of his reign was carried out under emergency powers, the very ones that Trump is threatening to use (and that he threatened to use during the George Floyd summer) if he wins and there are protests by the left.
I brought this up before, but a word I like to use to describe this movement and moment in time is fashoid. It's Creative Commons-licensed to be used freely and generously.
Fashoid, purpose and use: Think of opioid in contrast to opium. Both produce narcotic and anesthetic effects in users, and have great potential for addiction and other harm. Opium is a plant, while opioids are chemical syntheses of the molecular structure of opium. Both do the same thing and have the same side effects.
Fascism is a 20th century ideology reacting to the traumas of World War I and the Great Depression and the spread of Communism, with the response being palingenetic (rebirth -- no connection to the Alaska wingnut) ultranationalism. Unlike other ideologies rooted in textual philosophy, like Liberalism, Conservatism or Marxism, fascism's animating forces are syncretism (haphazard mixing of fact and fiction, myth and reality, etc.) and eclecticism (not rooted in text, fascism is formless and allows its participants to project their own ideals onto the movement to achieve their ideal state). The fundamental unit of organization of fascism is nationhood.
Fashoid is 21st century, with movements mimicking all of the characteristics of 21st century except the fundamental organizing principle is something else besides nation. Theocracy is fashoid. White supremacy is fashoid -- in this case, White is taking the American colorist definition of racism and applying it to a people who are the European races (i.e., ethnostates) and their descendants who have settled in the Americas, Australia and South Africa as a collective identity. Israel complicates this frame with Israeli Jews playing the role of "Schrodinger's Whites"; loathed because of their Jewishness yet admired for a common enemy in Muslims and emulated for Israel's rightwing militant ethnostate governance.
The third is masculinism, a misogynistic and queerphobic nationalism of men. This tent covers MRAs, the Jordan Peterson fandom, the Andrew Tate fandom, the Mike Cernovich fandom, the Joe Rogan/MMA community, pick-up and seduction artists, and even incels. Masculinism boils down to frame-flipped feminism, where all of these communities see women and feminism as the cause of all their frustrations. Women's progress came at the expense of men, and furthermore, LGBTQ progress is a plot by women to further marginalize men by sexuality and gender. They believe feminism is the tool of women's dominance and their oppression.
Fashoid also has advantages over fascism as a descriptive. For one, the utterance of fascism requires expending bandwidth to argue and prove through tedious debate with near 100% certainty required to have something be classified as fascism. It seems kind of funny that this process leads to an outcome that concludes, no this ain't fascism. All reasoning is motivated reasoning, so we ought to debate the motivations of the debaters.
Plus, labels exists to stick. Fashoid doesn't need or have patience for intellectual performativity. Fashoid is not an intellectual curiosity. It's the people's word. And once fashoid labels stick, it's up to the person to get the rubbing alcohol and the scraper to remove it. Let them play defense for a change. They're afraid to play defense because that's where they lose.
If it smells like chicken, looks like chicken, and tastes like chicken, it is probably chicken. Or at least turkey (or maybe goose, as in "our goose is cooked ..."?) That New Yorker article, or at least as much of it as I could handle before becoming terminally bored, struck me as primarily highlighting the divide between those trying to use F-word as an analytic tool, and those trying to protect their academic turf. For those of us out here in the real world it is certainly useful when you compare MAGA to the fascist movements of the 1930s, even if the comparison, and perhaps even the definition of fascism itself, is imperfect. Proto-fascist, semi-fascist, or, my favorite, "fash-curious" ... who cares? It seems crystal clear that Trump and MAGA are yes, yes, yes to all of the above, even if they aren't fully conscious of it.
Robin is such a strange character. His book on the Right is...pretty good? And largely with only a few minor friendly amendments or whatever can be made to offer a more robust understanding of what is up with the GOP and Trump these days. But instead he's pot committed to his bizarre takes you list here for whatever reason. Its quite odd.
Thanks. For people who find themselves materially on wrong end ot the "semi-fascist" right, the debate is condescending and worse -- useless for constructing defense against a movement that literally would eradicate our existence. I took a swing at Moyn a few years back; I'm just a plebian, but pushy. https://happening-here.blogspot.com/2019/04/of-human-rights-and-social-rights.html
Your writing on the feudal & smarmy intellectual industrial complex deserves its own book. I can envision something like Lilla’s ’The Reckless Mind’ but with more depth and intrigue, necessary for understanding this political intellectual conjuncture. These characters make Heidegger’s politics seem plebeian. After all, I can understand why Moyn is the way he is, since he interned on Clinton’s National Security Council. The paradoxical esoteric guilt and nepotistic rot runs so deep that liberalism and pretenders to its academic heights must be marginalized to atone
I dig the Mel Brooks reference, but I was thinking of a Jackie Mason routine complete with the shoulder shrugs and his whole panoply of mannerisms when I read this part
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?”
For what it’s worth, Italian scholars of fascism are generally far less rigid and check-list hog-tied about how to define fascism than Anglo-American theorists like Robin, and tend to be quite comfortable framing Trumpist/Meloni-style movements as a continuum of fascist politics. https://ilbolive.unipd.it/it/fascismo-italiano-interpretazioni
My view is that Trump himself won't provide the real evidence for whether his fascist instincts and yearnings represent an incipient fascism in the country. Even the devotion of the MAGA base, although significant, doesn't tell us for sure (many may be enjoying it all as entertainment more than a will to power).
The pivotal evidence is whether Republican office holders and party officials––the people who (mostly) understand the difference between fascism and liberal democracy––are willing to embrace the fascist strains of Trumpism. And we have our answer on that, don't we?
For me the weather vane is JD Vance. He knows from fascism. He knows the difference between facts about international finance (whether framed via critiques from the left or defenses from the right) and the "globalist" conspiracies of the Trump right. But he is still all in on the MAGA project. He has consciously decided to spread Russian disinformation; has asserted he would have refused to do what Pence did and certify the 2020 election; he hasn't denounced the post-Jan. 6th legitimizing of political violence; the list goes on.
The GOP operatives unwilling to open the gates to fascism have been booted or have left the stage. The ones who remain hold a very large aggregation of political power in the US and they are prepared to exert it in favor of Trump and Trumpism.
The smartest people in the Republican leadership have co-signed Trump's transformation of the party structure and his fascist blueprint for his second administration. That's a "qualitative" change for sure.
Perhaps I'm reaching too much, but there are strong resonances for me between this post and my experience in the labor movement. You've got a whole host of relative newcomers onto the labor stage - Shawn Fain, the Starbucks workers, the Amazon Labor Union, grad student organizers, Sara Nelson, and more - who are taking on fights that the distinguished elders of the movement (those who have put in the time over years and decades, who have learned What Works and What Is Foolishness) said weren't possible. While, overall, movement elders are coming around to things (and some, like Richard Bensinger, have thrown themselves into helping the new generation), you still see a lot of union leaders who are very hesitant to believe the moment we're in is really different. Their criticisms, like the Corey Robin-types John talks about in this post, often take little account of facts on the ground, but instead rely upon pre-existing notions of how things do and don't happen. The reluctance of those leaders to see what's before their own eyes is potentially imperiling the movement.
Glad lakatos came up, quintessential example of a degenerative research program
Bluntness seems to strike Ivy League types as inherently a mark of stupidity—I run into a lot of ‘em here at Umich, and they really bristle if you tell the truth in words of two or three syllables tops. It’s weird. (One time I was urged— by a person who was, I am certain, not remotely sympathetic to the cause of the Confederate States of America—to take out a reference, in my book on the Midwest, to the South as being on the “wrong” side of the Civil War. She couldn’t believe I’d just say it like that.) “Trump is a fascist” is a simpler, blunter statement than “nggghhhhhh, welllll, you seeeeee, Trumpism shares certain features with the ur-ur-fascism of the early Italian Astro-Hungryalists, but a closer analogue can be found in the ethno- religio- populism (classic form) of the Viennese Rigorists, etc etc.” Therefore the second thing must be truer. ISTG for some people that’s all it is.
As the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted and Josh Marshall amplified about January 6th: We all saw it.
“You probably do not get yourself included in such collections after you’ve direct messaged the editor and called him an ‘asshole’” lol
Great piece, it brings to mind a thread on BlueSky-please John bring your crankiness there-from Seth Cotlar, a scholar in Oregon. He pointed out that Rubin et al are in elite, relatively “blue” spaces where they don’t see the fascist right. In Oregon however he sees it constantly and it is part of the GOP there.
https://bsky.app/profile/sethcotlar.bsky.social/post/3koyxxw4n4l2r
“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.”
Someone should remind this person that Hitler used the German Constitutional order to further his aims — the entirety of his reign was carried out under emergency powers, the very ones that Trump is threatening to use (and that he threatened to use during the George Floyd summer) if he wins and there are protests by the left.
I brought this up before, but a word I like to use to describe this movement and moment in time is fashoid. It's Creative Commons-licensed to be used freely and generously.
Fashoid, purpose and use: Think of opioid in contrast to opium. Both produce narcotic and anesthetic effects in users, and have great potential for addiction and other harm. Opium is a plant, while opioids are chemical syntheses of the molecular structure of opium. Both do the same thing and have the same side effects.
Fascism is a 20th century ideology reacting to the traumas of World War I and the Great Depression and the spread of Communism, with the response being palingenetic (rebirth -- no connection to the Alaska wingnut) ultranationalism. Unlike other ideologies rooted in textual philosophy, like Liberalism, Conservatism or Marxism, fascism's animating forces are syncretism (haphazard mixing of fact and fiction, myth and reality, etc.) and eclecticism (not rooted in text, fascism is formless and allows its participants to project their own ideals onto the movement to achieve their ideal state). The fundamental unit of organization of fascism is nationhood.
Fashoid is 21st century, with movements mimicking all of the characteristics of 21st century except the fundamental organizing principle is something else besides nation. Theocracy is fashoid. White supremacy is fashoid -- in this case, White is taking the American colorist definition of racism and applying it to a people who are the European races (i.e., ethnostates) and their descendants who have settled in the Americas, Australia and South Africa as a collective identity. Israel complicates this frame with Israeli Jews playing the role of "Schrodinger's Whites"; loathed because of their Jewishness yet admired for a common enemy in Muslims and emulated for Israel's rightwing militant ethnostate governance.
The third is masculinism, a misogynistic and queerphobic nationalism of men. This tent covers MRAs, the Jordan Peterson fandom, the Andrew Tate fandom, the Mike Cernovich fandom, the Joe Rogan/MMA community, pick-up and seduction artists, and even incels. Masculinism boils down to frame-flipped feminism, where all of these communities see women and feminism as the cause of all their frustrations. Women's progress came at the expense of men, and furthermore, LGBTQ progress is a plot by women to further marginalize men by sexuality and gender. They believe feminism is the tool of women's dominance and their oppression.
Fashoid also has advantages over fascism as a descriptive. For one, the utterance of fascism requires expending bandwidth to argue and prove through tedious debate with near 100% certainty required to have something be classified as fascism. It seems kind of funny that this process leads to an outcome that concludes, no this ain't fascism. All reasoning is motivated reasoning, so we ought to debate the motivations of the debaters.
Plus, labels exists to stick. Fashoid doesn't need or have patience for intellectual performativity. Fashoid is not an intellectual curiosity. It's the people's word. And once fashoid labels stick, it's up to the person to get the rubbing alcohol and the scraper to remove it. Let them play defense for a change. They're afraid to play defense because that's where they lose.
If it smells like chicken, looks like chicken, and tastes like chicken, it is probably chicken. Or at least turkey (or maybe goose, as in "our goose is cooked ..."?) That New Yorker article, or at least as much of it as I could handle before becoming terminally bored, struck me as primarily highlighting the divide between those trying to use F-word as an analytic tool, and those trying to protect their academic turf. For those of us out here in the real world it is certainly useful when you compare MAGA to the fascist movements of the 1930s, even if the comparison, and perhaps even the definition of fascism itself, is imperfect. Proto-fascist, semi-fascist, or, my favorite, "fash-curious" ... who cares? It seems crystal clear that Trump and MAGA are yes, yes, yes to all of the above, even if they aren't fully conscious of it.
Robin is such a strange character. His book on the Right is...pretty good? And largely with only a few minor friendly amendments or whatever can be made to offer a more robust understanding of what is up with the GOP and Trump these days. But instead he's pot committed to his bizarre takes you list here for whatever reason. Its quite odd.
have yet to see a single "trump's not fascist" person who's not a reflexive "well ACKSHUALLY" nerd and or a thinly-veiled rightwing sympathizer
Thanks. For people who find themselves materially on wrong end ot the "semi-fascist" right, the debate is condescending and worse -- useless for constructing defense against a movement that literally would eradicate our existence. I took a swing at Moyn a few years back; I'm just a plebian, but pushy. https://happening-here.blogspot.com/2019/04/of-human-rights-and-social-rights.html
Your writing on the feudal & smarmy intellectual industrial complex deserves its own book. I can envision something like Lilla’s ’The Reckless Mind’ but with more depth and intrigue, necessary for understanding this political intellectual conjuncture. These characters make Heidegger’s politics seem plebeian. After all, I can understand why Moyn is the way he is, since he interned on Clinton’s National Security Council. The paradoxical esoteric guilt and nepotistic rot runs so deep that liberalism and pretenders to its academic heights must be marginalized to atone
Very good read. Thanks.
I dig the Mel Brooks reference, but I was thinking of a Jackie Mason routine complete with the shoulder shrugs and his whole panoply of mannerisms when I read this part
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?”
I have started saying "increasingly fascistic" which highlights the danger while avoiding the argument over the fuzzy boundary.