Discussions of whether Trumpism is fascist often lose sight of the political stakes of the issue. But like Italian and German fascism, MAGA reflects a political system failing to address capitalist crisis.
In one respect it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump and the other MAGA leaders in charge of the federal government are fascists or simply corrupt authoritarian oligarchs — it’s bad either way, and we need to get rid of them and their policies and turn around the social forces that gave rise to them.
But to assert, as Daniel Bessner does in “This Is America,” an article published in in this magazine on March 27, that the “use of the term obscures both the nature and stakes of the present moment” is wrong. The meaning of fascism may be debated, and as Bessner notes, there is a long tradition of scholarly argument around its definition. But to deny that Trumpism is a contemporary form of fascism one must put forward at least one of those plausible definitions and provide evidence of how MAGA fails to fit. This Bessner does not do.
And it is precisely what he calls “the nature and the stakes of the present moment” that demand understanding that a fascist movement is taking power in our country.
It’s American
Bessner writes that:
There is a fundamental truth at the heart of Trumpism that makes comparisons to European fascism difficult to sustain. Put simply, Trump and his hangers-on are building on long-standing American traditions and using the normal tools of the American government to dismantle democracy. Trumpism is not a foreign importation. It is distinctly homegrown.
The unargued-for assumption here is that it is only by comparison to its prewar European variant that Trump’s program can be properly considered fascist. That may be part of the story, but fascism, according to the standard work in the field, Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, has common features wherever and whenever it appears.
It consists of five stages (although they do not need to arise in the same sequence each time), including the creation of a movement; its rooting in the political system; seizure of power; exercise of power; and a choice of either radicalization or entropy. Paxton describes fascism as:
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
If one accepts this definition, it’s hard to miss the overall connections with Trump and the current moment. I think it’s short a few key elements: class dynamics in place of the weaker sociological notion of “elites”; the role of the charismatic, all-knowing leader; and the destruction, once in power, of the helping parts of the state apparatus while bulking up the repressive apparatus.
Paxton also allows for differences based upon variations in national conditions and cultures. In other words, to be a form of fascism, Trumpism does not have to be “a foreign importation.” To use Bessner’s words, “It is distinctly homegrown.”
One need not be entirely swayed by Paxton’s definition to see it as a good starting point for understanding what is a target in motion every time it appears. Bessner offers us no definition of comparable analytic power.
One of the arguments that he makes is that analogies between today and the 1920s and ’30s do not hold up. Germany and Italy during those years were suffering through the postwar crises of social dislocation. This crisis bred gangs of young veterans with combat experience roaming the streets, a powerful communist movement, and hyperinflation. Because the United States does not have these preconditions, Trumpism is therefore not fascist.
Bessner is correct that superficial analogies are insufficient to prove that the US is experiencing fascism. But what if the conditions he focuses on as evidence of the difference between then and now are not adequate markers of fascism? For instance, in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s there was a polarized, blocked democracy in which neither the traditional center-left nor center-right coalition forces were able to vanquish the other. This led to an inability to decisively address the most important challenges afflicting the society through the usual political mechanisms.
Key to fascism is the blockage, not the particular time- and place-bound issues. Fascism represents a breakthrough solution (in the wrong direction, toward the most reactionary sectors of capital) to resolve fundamental issues around capitalist development. In Italy, fascism was a solution to the modernization of the rural economy; in Germany, a response to the crushing burden of war debt; and here in the United States, the antiquated political structures bequeathed by the founders’ concessions to the slavocracy, and the death grip of fossil fuel capital over our planet’s future.
Bessner’s second point, to my mind, makes the case for his opponents. He correctly notes their explorations of some examples of what is arguably homegrown American fascism from the revolution to the present day: slavery; removal and genocide of native peoples; the Ku Klux Klan; Jim Crow; Japanese incarceration during World War II; militarist policing practices; and so on. (I’d argue these are more protofascist than fascist, since each displays but also misses some elements that usually appear in a full-blown fascist society; but close enough.) He admits that in this regard “there are deep continuities between the present moment and US history.”
But he then says that “for advocates of the American fascism thesis, these developments all prove that there’s an unbroken line of fascism stretching back to the nation’s founding.” I don’t know to whom he is ascribing this overreaching position; he doesn’t identify anyone. Scholars who argue for fascist precedents in American history, like the rise of the first KKK during Reconstruction, are pretty careful to avoid sweeping statements of this nature. In his paper “Fascism Has an American History, Too,” published in 2021 in the journal Reviews in American History, Olivier Burtin cites Paxton, who makes a compelling argument that the Klan offered “a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe.” This is not argumentation for “an unbroken line” of American fascism from the beginning. Rather it highlights singular movements or events that undermine the traditional American exceptionalist view that there have been no native fascisms in US history.
Bessner’s third argument is targeted at people who think that using the term is politically useful and who believe that calling Trump “fascist” motivates resistance to him. He refers to Kamala Harris’s attempt to rally support during the waning days of her presidential campaign. He thinks that this was her “closing argument.” This is a strange claim. Is Bessner saying that we shouldn’t talk about fascism because Kamala Harris lost her campaign? Does he think this is the central reason why she lost? And does this mean that people who use the term think that fascism is just a label?
No doubt some do. Most serious investigators into fascism do not. Paxton, in a New York Times interview before the election, recounted how after Trump’s first election he refrained from using the term to describe Trump’s politics. He felt that it had been degraded by its popular usage as a synonym for “bully” or anyone who acts badly. But in the 2024 interview, he had to admit he had been wrong.
Trump and especially his movement — because that’s one of the key ingredients of the phenomenon — qualify. What convinced Paxton to publicly change his mind? The January 2021 insurrection sealed the deal for him; he no longer thought that academic quibbling about labels or reservations based on popular usage outweighed the danger of the reality.
While dismissing “extreme far-right ideology” as too baggy a definition, nowhere does Bessner offer a replacement of his own or someone else’s that he agrees with. Instead, he seemingly views fascism mostly as a misguided analogy for three reasons: its analogs are Italy and Germany; it is a foreign ideology only; and because Trumpism is American born and bred, therefore it can’t be fascism. These arguments are tautological and unconvincing.
The fourth argument he makes is that “some of those who embrace the analogy” think “the framework of fascism” can predict Trump’s behavior. Bessner dismisses this position on the grounds that neither social science nor history can predict anything; what these disciplines can do, he says, is “identify structures, processes, discourses and patterns.”
Fascism presents us with a history from which we can learn and teach ourselves where our society should and shouldn’t go. Can we definitively predict that Trump’s trade wars are going to lead to actual war, as trade wars have in the past? No, but that history does indicate that’s a strong possibility, just as pulling communists and Jews off the street and whisking them away in unmarked cars to concentration camps warns us that when far-right governments target immigrants and trans people today, it probably won’t stop with them. Why? Because the “structures, processes, discourses and patterns” show us the pathways history can take — not so we can peer into our crystal balls and foretell the precise duplication of past events in the present, but so that we can master the critical capacity to see what the man behind the curtain is attempting to put over on us and stop it from happening.
The last argument Bessner takes issue with is, he says, the most politically significant. Proponents of the view that Trump is a fascist overstate “the degree to which Trumpism reflects a genuinely novel innovation in American politics.” It’s important, he claims, because along with liberals and leftists it moved Republicans like Liz Cheney into the Never Trumper column. He asserts that if labeling Trump a fascist allows people like her to pose as small-“d” democratic then it obscures their role in defending the worst crimes of American imperial power and neoliberalism. Which is true, but I’m struggling to see how this makes fascism the wrong category to describe Trump.
Straw Men
Throughout the article Bessner sets up one straw man after another and knocks them down. He tells us, “The powers that Trump is deploying, and the laws and theories that he is building his attempt to reshape the US state and society upon, are not fascist. They are American…” This assumption, that “fascism” and “American” are nonoverlapping categories, is one Bessner, at no point, proves or even argues for. To the contrary, my argument is that they combine: American fascism.
Fascism is an ideology, a type of mass movement and a form of capitalist governmental power. It does not follow a predetermined path, because it appears in different places in different times and adjusts to those circumstances. But it has common features and understanding them aids us in determining how we fight it. I wouldn’t use the term in every situation in which I find myself talking about it. Depending on who I’m talking to I might say “authoritarian” or “oligarchical” or “white supremacist” or simply “wrongheaded.” Political argumentation and its rhetoric depend in part on context. But that doesn’t change the nature of the beast we are discussing.
I appreciate Bessner’s opposition to Trump and Trumpism and his desire to combat them through clarification of what they mean. In that sense, we are certainly on the same side of this battle. On the practical level of how we defeat the enemy, arguing Trump is not a fascist doesn’t get us very far. Once people understand what fascism is — and every day they are receiving the data — an anti-fascist coalition will be big and broad, as the demonstrations of April 5 and others since then have begun to show. We have a teachable moment, and we should be using it to teach.
In most places, and for anyone who knows much about World War II, the analog with Italy and Germany can be helpful in demonstrating parallels; that doesn’t mean we are reducing American fascism to the analogs. Protofascist precedents in American history don’t mean that American history marches in goose-step with fascism, but that those tendencies have existed for a long time in capitalism, and at times and for some groups of people those tendencies come to the fore.
Is calling Trump a fascist politically useful? I wouldn’t start there with a pro-Trump individual, but if I’m talking with someone scared of what’s happening and looking for action to take to do their part to prevent things from getting worse, it provides a common — and accurate — understanding of what we’re up against.