Why Trump is NOT a fascist – and why it matters

David Horsey, LA Times

by Daniel Lazare

Have you heard?  Donald Trump is a fascist.  Lots of people say so – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, gender theorist Judith Butler, even Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly (“he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators ... so he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist for sure”).

On the neocon side, there are pundits like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, both of whom agree that Trump is worthy of the f-word.  On the left, there’s Maoist guru Bob Avakian, who heads up a group called “Refuse Fascism”; radical icon Naomi Klein who describes MAGA as “end times fascism,” and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, who recently published a 9,000-word article declaring that Trump must be a fascist because so many rightwing forces are lining up behind him, e.g. the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, an anti-democratic Silicon Valley pundit named Curtis Yarvin, etc.  The more bad guys on your side, the more fascist you become.  Right?

Not quite.  Although labeling Trump a fascist may sound militant, it’s not.  If rightwing warmongers like Cheney are reinventing themselves as anti-fascists, it’s not in order to solve the problem of Trumpism, but to disguise how it arose.  They are promoting a false diagnosis whose purpose is to conceal their own contribution – and certain disoriented leftwing forces are going along.

Contrary to such forces, fascism is not just authoritarianism, but a form of ultra-dictatorship that arose in specific historical circumstances, in this case the revolutionary upsurge that began in the final days of World War I.  The Russian Revolution is the most obvious example, but other countries also saw revolutionary eruptions around this time such as Hungary, Germany, Austria, Spain, and even the United States where a five-day general strike shut down the port of Seattle in February 1919.

Northern Italy was another a hot spot. The biennio rosso saw factory councils, or workers’ soviets, in Milan and Turin while the Po Valley, the northern Italian bread basket, came under the control of militant farmworkers and peasants.  The movement peaked in August-September 1920 when half a million workers occupied factories across the “industrial triangle” of northwestern Italy.

But then came the reaction.  As one historian said of Mussolini, the socialist turned rightwing adventurer:

During the winter of 1920-21, his Fascist movement gained enormous support as a result of the successful deployment of counter-revolutionary terror.  With the connivance of the government and the active backing of industrialists and landowners, Mussolini’s black-shirted squads raided the political headquarters of their opponents, destroyed trade union offices, burned down cooperative institutions, smashed left-wing presses, assaulted Socialists with knuckledusters and coshes, and forcibly fed Communists on castor oil.  Hundreds were killed and thousands injured.  By July 1921 Mussolini could proclaim, ‘Bolshevism is vanquished.’^[1]

What distinguished Mussolini’s movement from white terror elsewhere were politics and ideology.  After the suppression of Hungary’s short-lived soviet republic in 1919, the aristocrat Miklos Horthy was able to restore order by cracking down on the ultra-right while restoring the old Hungarian monarchy (but without a king, strangely enough).  Mussolini did the opposite.  He launched a “revolution of reaction” that declared war not just on Bolshevism but on stodgy old conservatism too.^[2]  The Freudian Marxist Wilhelm Reich emphasized the difference between the old-style right and the new: “A sharp distinction must be made between ordinary militarism and fascism.  Wilhelmian Germany was militaristic, but it was not fascistic.”^[3]

Trotsky also emphasized the difference.  “If the communist party is the party of revolutionary hope,” he wrote in 1930, “then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair” (emphasis in the original).  He added in 1940:

Both theoretical analysis as well as the rich historical experience of the last quarter of a century have demonstrated with equal force that fascism is each time the final link of a specific political cycle composed of the following: the gravest crisis of capitalist society; the growth of the radicalization of the working class; the growth of sympathy toward the working class, and a yearning for change on the part of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie; the extreme confusion of the big bourgeoisie; its cowardly and treacherous maneuvers aimed at avoiding the revolutionary climax; the exhaustion of the proletariat; growing confusion and indifference; the aggravation of the social crisis; the despair of the petty bourgeoisie, its yearning for change; the collective neurosis of the petty bourgeoisie, its readiness to believe in miracles, its readiness for violent measures; the growth of hostility towards the proletariat, which has deceived its expectations. These are the premises for a swift formation of a fascist party and its victory.^[4]

 

In short, no revolutionary upsurge, no fascist reaction.  But “revolutionary” is the last word to describe the period that has given rise to Trump.  To the contrary, the story since the 1970s and 80s has been one of seemingly endless retreat.  Workers’ states have collapsed or have been bourgeoisified from within while working-class parties of all shapes and descriptions, from social democratic to Trotskyist, have gone into a long-term swoon.  In the United States, union membership has fallen from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10 percent as of 2023, while man-hours on strike relative to total employment have fallen 50 percent over the same period.  The story is the same for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of advanced capitalist nations, as a whole.  From a peak of 38.1 percent in 1972, the OECD unionization rate plunged to 15.8 as of 2020, a decline of nearly 60 percent.

Trump, therefore, is different.  He is not a revolutionary.  Although liberals thunder that he “hates the Constitution,” it’s clear that his aim is not to overthrow America’s holy of holies so much as to use the “imperial presidency” that an antiquated constitutional order has given rise to in order to foster one-man rule.  It is a matter of using the authoritarian aspects of the Constitution to eliminate the few remaining democratic vestiges.

Trump differs in other ways too.  He has flirted with street violence and brawlers.  He told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the 2020 campaign and incited a mob to invade Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.  But like generations of conservative authoritarians before him, he otherwise relies on traditional organs of the state, e.g. the Marines, the National Guard, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the FBI, now under the control of Republican hitman Kash Patel.  The historian Richard J. Evans observes that the MAGA movement:

...bears no comparison to the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed Stormtroopers and squadristi that the Nazi and Fascist leaders deployed onto the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison, and often kill political opponents.  Hitler and Mussolini sought to transform their countries into perma-war states: a combination of education and propaganda on the one hand and street-level violence and intimidation on the other aimed to forge a new kind of citizen, one that was aggressive, regimented, arrogant, decisive, organized, and obedient to the dictates of the state.^[5]

As for militarism, Trump has been all over the map.  Anti-NATO and China, he started out as an isolationist, attacking the neocon hawk Hilary Clinton in 2015-16 and declaring in 2021: “I am especially proud to be the first President in decades who has started no new wars."  But he began his second term by threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama, cheering on the Zionist war of eradication in Gaza, and launching a short-lived war of his own against Yemen’s Houthis.  He has gloated over Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran.  “Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen,” he wrote on Truth Social.  “They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!”  Where once he warned against war with Iran, he now embraces it.

All of which makes him crude, erratic, unpredictable, and increasingly dangerous.  But it doesn’t make him a fascist.  What Trumpism most represents, rather, is a return to the “Big Stick” policies of Teddy Roosevelt, who blustered on about “the white man’s burden,” seized Panama, and established a US protectorate over Cuba as well.

Finally, the Trump personality cult is nothing like the führerprinzip of Nazi Germany, based on a mystical union of a charismatic leader and völk.  Blazing torches, firelight ceremonies, swastikas, mystic runes – all are absent.  Despite the flags and sappy country-and-western ballads about being “proud to be an American,” MAGA rallies do not come close.

So Trump is no more a fascist than Liz Cheney is a pacifist.  But if that’s the case, what is he?  The answer is that he’s an outgrowth not of revolutionary upsurge, but of liberal collapse.  In the process of sending the left into eclipse, neoliberalism set about creating a brave new world based on super-financialization, unprecedented levels of economic inequality, plus corruption, wage stagnation, and a rising tide of war.  The result was a top-heavy political structure that is now disintegrating.  So intolerable has it become for millions of American workers that they have opted to vote for a know-nothing reality-TV star in the hope that whatever he comes up with, it can’t be any worse.

Trump thus benefited from the collapse, but did not cause it.  He did not invent a poisonous “woke” ideology all but guaranteed to alienate working-class voters; that was something Democrats did entirely on their own.  The same goes for DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion, a management program designed to intimidate and harass rank-and-file employees.  Democrats invented that one too.

Although liberals don’t want to talk about it, there is no doubt that liberals took DEI to extraordinary lengths.  Robin DiAngelo, “perhaps the country's most visible expert in anti-bias training” in the words of the New Yorker, proudly tells of driving a female worker to the verge of physical breakdown during a workplace training session:

A cogent example of white fragility occurred during workplace anti-racism training I co-facilitated with an inter-racial team.  One of the white participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving (what appeared to the training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several of the people of color in the room.  At break, several other white participants approached me and my fellow trainers and reported that they had to talked to the woman at her desk, and that she was very upset that her statements had been challenged.  (Of course, ‘challenged’ was not how she phrased her concern.   It was framed as her being ‘falsely accused’ of having a racist impact.)  Her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and ‘might be having a heart-attack.’  Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally.  These coworkers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback.  Of course, when news of the women’s potentially fatal condition reached the rest of the participant group, all attention was immediately focused back onto her and away from engagement with the impact she had had on the people of color.  As professor of social work Rich Vodde states, ‘If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenge to this entitlement.’^[6]

This is the “expert” whom the House Democratic Caucus invited to address it in June 2020 on “the importance of recognizing that white supremacy and racism are at the foundation of our country,” with a personal endorsement by Nancy Pelosi no less.  Needless to say, sadism like this is very the opposite of socialism, which doesn’t bring in management consultants to brutalize workers, but, rather, combats racism in order to mobilize workers against management in a united front.

For workers, the liberal kulturkampf was the crowning indignity after decades of economic regression.  The backsliding is quite real.  Since 1979, real hourly wages have risen just six percent for middle-income workers, while falling five percent for those in the low-income brackets.  Where a typical worker had to work for 2.3 years to buy a home in 1950, 2.6 years in 1960, and 2.4 in 1970,the numbers then began to rise – to 3.8 years in 1980, to 5.4 in 1990, and then to 7.0 in 2000.  Since 2019, the cost of a single-family home has surged another 58 percent, better than two and a half times the rate of inflation, while nearly half of tenants are now officially “cost-burdened,” meaning that they must spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

Adjusted for inflation, college tuition and fees meanwhile tripled on average between 1963 and 2022.  Where black workers saw real progress between 1950 and 1974, with average black income rising 50 percent compared with white incomes, relative growth has since leveled off to six percent or less.  At the same time, CEO compensation has risen from roughly 20 times that of an average worker in the 1970s to 351 times by the year 2020.

This is what made the Trump campaign slogan – “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” – so effective.  Ordinarily, liberal antics over genderless restrooms and the like might raise a few eyebrows.  But now they represented a growing offensive by a self-righteous liberal elite against workers whom Clinton had labeled a “basket of deplorables” back in 2016.  The more economic and social conditions deteriorated, the more extreme the liberal cultural offensive became – and the more Republicans launched a counter-offensive of their own based on “traditional values” such as religion, family, individualism, and opposition to abortion.^[7]  In the end, Democrats even lost ground among blacks and Hispanics, core constituencies that were now none too happy with self-satisfied liberalism as well.

Internationally, neoliberal decay has accelerated to the point where it is beginning to resemble the Soviet collapse of 1989-91.  NATO is in disarray, a growing debt crisis stalks the Third World, and far-right parties are surging from Portugal to Poland.  If Trump feels a certain sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, it’s not because he’s a Russian puppet, as Democrats used to say during his first term.  Rather, it’s because he’s following a similar trajectory.  Putin used authoritarian means to patch together a society on the edge of the abyss thanks to a decade of misrule by the American puppet, Boris Yeltsin.  Once Putting took over, however, per-capita GDP rose more than seven-fold while oligarchs were forced to defer to a neo-czarist state.  Trump 2.0 is not likely to see anything remotely similar; indeed, thanks to tariffs, it is more likely to see the opposite.  Still, Trump sees himself in broadly similar terms as a strongman trying to make up for years of incompetence.

But if Democrats have stopped the Russian-puppet nonsense and are now calling Trump a fascist, the underlying message is the same: they still see him as un-American.  Needless to say, the only thing Democratic politicians know about the struggle against fascism is what they learned from “Saving Private Ryan,” which is that an all-American everyman played by Tom Hanks triumphed over Germany at Omaha Beach.  America is good, therefore, and anyone outside the fold – Nazis, Soviets, Trump, whatever – is bad.  Like MAGA, liberalism is a turn-back-the-clock ideology based on restoring to the high-growth economics of the 1950s and the feel-good civil-rights solidarity of the early 1960s, something that will come about the instant Democrats are returned to power.

But it’s not going to happen.  It’s a dream world that is gone for good.  Democrats know it, and Trump knows it too.  So do workers whose interest is not in turning back the clock, but in going forward.  Instead of exchanging one pack of self-serving “Repocratic” demagogues for another, they need a clean sweep .  They need to do away with a pre-modern constitution that makes a mockery of one person-one vote by allowing profoundly inequitable bodies like the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College to reign unchallenged.  They need to abolish an imperial presidency that was increasingly authoritarian long before Trump took office.  They need to do away with super-rich Wall Street speculators manipulating the economy for their own short-term benefit, and they need decent jobs at decent pay so they can rebuild America’s broken infrastructure from the ground up.  Instead of the know-nothing denialism of Republicans and the do-nothing policies of the Democrats, they need a solution to the climate crisis that is global, comprehensive, and effective.

Most of all, they need to do away with the sort of phony anti-fascism whose only purpose is to return a discredited liberal elite to power.  Instead of the pseudo-resistance of the Democratic Party, they need the real resistance of a united working class.

 

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[1] Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Random House, 2002), 25.

[2] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “What Is Fascism?” in Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed., Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America (New York: WW Norton, 2024), 138-39.

[3] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), xiv.s

[4] Leon Trotsky, “Fascism: What it is and how to fight it,” available at https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/trotsky/fascism-how-to-fight-it/fascism-what-it-is-trotsky.pdf.

[5] Richard J. Evans, “Why Trump Isn’t a Fascist,” in Steinmetz-Jenkins, Did It Happen Here?, 192.

[6] Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 111-12.

[7] Alex Steiner, The American political landscape in 2016: A Marxist interpretation,             http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2016/07/the-american-political-landscape-in_13.html

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