American Fascist
Donald Trump is an American
fascist. About that I have no doubt, but to understand why it is appropriate to
call him such and what it means when we do, we must first understand that both of
the words in the phrase “American fascist” matter. Donald Trump is not a Nazi,
that is, he is not a German fascist. He is not a follower of Benito Mussolini,
that is, he is not an Italian fascist. He is an American fascist. He is a
fascist in the specifically American context in which he lives, speaks, and
works. We need then to start our exploration of what it means to call Donald
Trump an American fascist by understanding what the words of that phrase mean
in this setting.
We start with the word fascist.
Historically speaking the word comes from the political party and movement led
by Benito Mussolini in Italy that began during World War I and grew in the
1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s. The word fascism comes from the Italian word “fascio,” which means only a bundle of
rods. The Italian word comes from the Latin word “fasces,” which also meant a bundle of rods but which referred to a
symbol of official authority in ancient Rome. It is a figure of a bundle of
wooden rods bound together by a cord with an ax head coming out of it to the
viewer’s right. It became the symbol of Italian fascism. Mussolini’s fascism
was the specifically Italian form of a much broader right-wing phenomenon in
Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. Its most powerful and destructive manifestation
was Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Today’s definitions of fascism try to capture
just what that phenomenon was about, what the fascist regimes of Italy,
Germany, and elsewhere stood for and how they operated. One such definition has
as its first meaning of the term fascism
a political philosophy, movement, or regime
(as that of the Fascisti [i.e., Mussolini’s Italian fascists] that exalts
nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized
autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and
social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.[1]
This site’s second definition of fascism is “a tendency
toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control….”
Another online dictionary gives as its first definition of fascism “an
authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social
organization.” This site’s second definition of the term is “(In general use)
extreme right-wing authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices.”[2]
From this brief historical
overview and from both of these sets of definitions we see that the term
fascism has come to have both specific and more general meanings. The most
specific meaning of the term is the party and movement headed by Mussolini in
Italy in the early decades of the 20th century. A more general
understanding of the term says that it applies to any movement or regime that
is more or less like Mussolini’s regime, that is, a regime or movement
characterized by nationalism, often racism, dictatorial control of a society,
and forcible, often violent, suppression of opposition. The most general meaning
of the term is that is applies to any extremist, right-wing, authoritarian
and/or intolerant views and practices. Since Donald Trump is an American and
not an Italian or other sort of fascist, it is this more general understanding
of fascism that applies to him, the more specific definitions of the term less
so.
The other term in our phrase American
fascist is of course American. Donald Trump is after all an American, and it is
in the American context in all of its facets that he operates. American
history, culture, and traditional values and priorities affect what it means to
be an American fascist as opposed to some other sort of fascist. Violence
(other than assassination of presidents or others by isolated individuals) has
never played much of a role in our selection of a president. We have chosen and
changed presidents through an electoral process not through violence for well
over two hundred years now. We have a tragic history of violence against
non-dominant populations such as African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian
Americans, but no president has ever assumed power through the application of
violence. American fascism will then be less violent than European fascism was
or is. European fascist movements had well organized bands of thugs that
terrorized and killed the movement’s opponents or the kinds of people generally
on whom the movement blamed a nation’s problems. Hitler’s use of the so-called
brown shirts against political opponents and the Jews is a prime and tragic
example of that phenomenon. Mussolini and other European fascist leaders had
similar groups. American fascism has no such groups and very probably never
will, the presence of small, white supremacist militia groups to the contrary
notwithstanding. The European countries in which fascist movements came to
power did not have long, well established democratic traditions. The United
States of America does. Yes, Hitler was elected to office, and Mussolini was
appointed by the king of Italy, but neither Hitler, Mussolini, nor any other
European fascist had any qualms about taking power through extra-electoral
processes. Both Hitler and Mussolini soon abolished all pretense at democracy
after they came to power. At least at this stage of our history American
fascist movements have not tried to take political power through force. For the
most part at least, American fascism works through the country’s established
political institutions and processes. After all, today David Duke, a white
supremacist American fascist, is running for election to the US Senate in
Louisiana, not trying violently to overthrow the American government.
Then there is the question of
the group or groups that a fascist movement identifies as the nation’s enemies
or as the source of all of the nation’s ills. Hitler and his Nazis are again
the best example of this aspect of European fascism. Hitler made Europe’s Jews
the target of his hatred and the scapegoat for all of Germany’s economic and
other problems following World War I. American fascism is often strongly
anti-Jewish, but America’s Jews are not the primary targets of the hatred of
American fascism. There are probably two reasons why they are not. One is that
there just aren’t that many American Jews. Yes, New York City has the largest
Jewish population of any city in the world; but relative to America’s large
total population the Jews are a small group among us. The other is that
America’s Jews are well assimilated into American life and the American economic
and political systems. American Jews are not a likely primary target for
American fascists.
The Jews are not that, but
immigrants are. America is of course a nation of immigrants. We often say that
the Native Americans are the exception to that rule, but if you go back far
enough they’re immigrants too, immigrants from Siberia through Alaska.. We are all
either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Despite that obvious
historical reality, American culture has an ambivalent attitude toward
immigrants. Many of us value the diversity that immigration from many different
nations in many different parts of the world has brought to our country. Yet
there have always been populist movements opposed to the people of whatever the
most recent wave of immigration has been at any particular time. We have an
unfortunate history of prejudice and even violence against Irish, Polish,
Italian, Chinese, Hispanic, and other immigrants to our country. That aspect of
American history makes immigrants an appealing target for American fascists.
American history makes one group
of immigrants and their descendants particularly vulnerable to fascist calumny
and a particularly appealing target for people looking for a group to blame for
our country’s real or imagined problems. That group is African Americans.
Racism against Black and Native American people is America’s original sin, one
from which we still suffer so long after the first white people came here. For
the most part African people did not come here voluntarily. They came as the
slaves of white people. They were kidnapped from their homes in Africa, often
by other Africans, and forced into slavery before being transported, under
horrific conditions, to the Americas, both North and South. American culture is
rooted in racism. It reflects racism in virtually every one of its expressions.
It is essentially impossible to grow up American and not be a racist. Even
those of us who reject and condemn racism must admit, if we’re honest, that we
learned racist attitudes toward Black people as we grew up. Black people are an
appealing target for American fascists. They are distinctly “other” than what
fascists think of as the American norm, namely, white. It isn’t quite
politically correct to be overtly racist in most of American society today, so,
except for extremists on the fringes of the movement, American fascists will
not say explicitly racist things. Instead they rail against “the inner cities,”
parts of our country populated primarily by Black people. They rail against
crime and demand law and order, the targets of these demands again being in
reality mostly Black Americans even though most crime is committed by white
Americans.
Then there is the question of
America’s democratic traditions. Our nation differs in significant ways in this
respect from the European nations in which fascism took hold. When Mussolini
came to power in Italy the Italian nation was only a few decades old, and it
did not have a strong democratic tradition. When Hitler came to power in
Germany in 1933 the unified German state was only 63 years old, having been
formed in 1870. That state had at least some democratic structures from the
beginning, but Germany had no longstanding democratic traditions. We do. When
German and Italian fascists did away with meaningful democratic institutions
they were not undoing anything that had firm root in their nation’s soil. Doing
away with democratic institutions in the United States would mean doing away
with a central and deep-seated aspect of our history, identity, and culture. So
American fascists will be cautious about sounding anti-democratic in a way that
European fascists did not need to be.
Then there is the question of
fascism’s relationship to objective reality, to the facts of reality that can
be sufficiently established by observation and research. Fascism tends not to
operate in the world of those facts. Rather, it creates an alternative reality,
one of its own invention. That reality is most likely a mythical place that echoes
aspects of a nation’s history and plays to and reinforces all of the prejudices
and emotions of the group that the fascist leader sees as his base, the people
he sees as actual or potential participants in his movement. To cite one
obvious example, Germany’s Jews were not the cause of that nation’s real and
serious economic woes following World War I. Yet Germany had a long history of
virulent anti-Judaism. Hitler created a reality in which that vulnerable
population became guilty of everything that people thought was wrong in their
lives and in the life of their nation. A German landlady with whom my family
and I lived in 1957-58 in Berlin, when I was 11 years old, whose deceased
husband had been a Nazi, said to us: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the
Jews; but then something did have to be done.” That “something did have to be
done” comes from the alternate reality the Nazis created through their
propaganda, through their lies. That’s how fascism works, by creating an
alternate reality and convincing people that it truly is reality.
There is also the question of a
fascist movement’s target group. I mean here not the group fascism blames for a
nation’s problems, but the one it sees as its target audience, as the group
among which it seeks to find a following and create a movement. That group is
always one in which people feel themselves dismissed, ignored, and
discriminated against. It is usually a group of people who once were dominate
in their land who feel they are losing or have lost that dominance. In Germany
it was a whole nation that was once proud and highly productive that had just
lost a war, been treated horribly by the victors in that war, and had fallen on
extremely hard times economically. In Italy it was a nation that had a proud
heritage going all the way back to the Renaissance and ancient Rome that felt
itself diminished and discredited in the eyes of the world. In both of those
countries the fascist movements promised to restore what people believed they
had lost. Mussolini would reclaim much of the Roman Empire. Hitler would create
the Third Reich, the Third Empire, a glorious and triumphant successor to the
Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Fascism promises to restore what people
think they have lost, and it really doesn’t matter whether what people think
they have lost was ever real. For the most part it probably wasn’t.
Nonetheless, fascists say they can make it real, can create a reality in which
that which never was in a glorious past that can be regained.
Donald Trump is an American
fascist in all of the ways I have outlined here. He imagines an authoritarian
government under his personal, unchallenged leadership. He is using the
American electoral process, but he advocates positions and makes demands that
are solidly authoritarian and anti-democratic. He says his primary opponent in
the current presidential election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
should be in jail and that she should never have been allowed to run for
president in the first place. He threatens to call the election illegitimate
and the results invalid unless he wins. He does not explicitly call his
followers to resort to violence to achieve their ends, but he plays to a crowd
given to violence and does nothing to restrain any violent tendencies that
appear among them. His audience consists mostly though not entirely of
undereducated white men who feel themselves displaced in today’s America and
fear the loss of the only way of life they have ever known. They are men who
once were in many ways privileged in our society who now see themselves losing
that privilege and are afraid of what life without it would be. These Americans
have legitimate interests and concerns, but Trump plays to them in
unconstructive, even destructive, ways. Trump has a target hate group too, or
rather several of them. He represents classic American xenophobia, fear of the
other, fear of the outsider, together with traditional American hatred toward
whoever the latest group of immigrants happen to be. He rails against
Hispanics, calling them all, or mostly, murderers and rapists. He wants to
build a wall all along the US/Mexican border to keep them out. He hates
non-Christian people in a classically American way. His target here are the
Muslims who live among us either as natural Americans or as immigrants and the
Muslims around the world who want to move here. He hasn’t advocated doing to
them what Hitler and his Nazis did to the Jews, but he has advocated profiling
and discrimination directed toward them that at least echo some of the early
stages of Hitler’s campaign against the Jewish minority in Germany.
Donald Trump then is indeed an
American fascist. Calling him a fascist is not mere name-calling. When we truly
understand what the word fascist means and how it can be adapted to our
American context, Donald Trump is indeed an American fascist. To apply that
term to him is merely to give an accurate description of his style and his
actions as a presidential candidate. He is an American fascist, and he is as
dangerous in our context as Mussolini, the original fascist, was in his. I like
to think he’d never be a true Nazi. He panders to white supremacists, who love
him, but I’m not sure he is one himself. I don’t think he would ever create an
American Auschwitz. Still, he is a threat to the best American values. He plays
to the worst angels of our nature not the better ones. He wants to rule as an
authoritarian autocrat, not as a democratic president. He tells his followers
that he will “make America great again,” playing on a popular image of an
America that never was and that cannot now be created. He has no tolerance for
those who disagree with him, saying (as I have already noted) that his primary
political opponent, Hillary Clinton, should be in jail and claiming that the
people who oppose his election have rigged the system against him. He plays to
fear and hatred, not to love and inclusion. He promises disgruntled and fearful
people things he can never deliver. He demonizes Hispanics and Muslims and subtly
procures the support of white racists. He is a true misogynist, having no real
respect for women. He cares not at all about the actual facts of American life.
He doesn’t understand those facts and doesn’t want to. He invents his own
reality, one that plays to his followers who are disenchanted with today’s America
but that bears little resemblance to actual American life. Do we want a true
American fascist like Donald Trump as President of the United States? I pray,
and I trust, not.
