Shaw could have emphasized even deeper roots. According to âHitlerâs American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,â by James Q. Whitman, the Nazis got some of their worst ideas from us; âCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents,â by Isabel Wilkerson, dilates on the resemblances between the Nuremberg laws and anti-miscegenation laws in Texas and North Carolina; âPrequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,â by Rachel Maddow, quotes Hitler telling an American reporter, in 1931, âI regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.â In âThe Anatomy of Fascism,â Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South could be thought of as a proto-fascist movement; he was echoing a claim laid out years earlier, and more forcefully, by Amiri Baraka. A forthcoming book about conservatism in the early nineties, John Ganzâs lively and kaleidoscopic âWhen the Clock Broke,â also presents fascist sympathies as quintessentially American. (In a chapter on Sam Francis, a proponent of ârespectable racismâ and an influential Washington Times columnist, Francis is quoted, in the late eighties, referring to himself as â âa fascist,â pronounced the Italian way.â) When American politics is compared to European fascism, the standard deflationist impulse is to reduce the analogy to a reductio, lest American readers use it as an excuse to treat Trump as exotic and let the rest of us off the hook. But perhaps the comparison should have the opposite effect, urging us toward deeper self-reflection by linking what is most shameful in our past to what is most galling in our present. âInterpretation is just what historians do,â the Harvard professor Peter Gordon argues in another essay. âThose who say that we must forgo analogies . . . are not defending history; they are condemning it to helpless silence.â
One classic text not anthologized in âDid It Happen Here?â is âWhat Is Fascism?,â the oft-quoted essay published by George Orwell in 1944. âAs used, the word âFascismâ is almost entirely meaningless,â he wrote. âI have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit . . . astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.â (This is as true today as it was then. I have seen the F-word applied to Russia, Ukraine, Hamas, Israel, the Catholic Church, academia, and Londonâs Metropolitan Policeâand that was just from one recent perusal of X, and not a very thorough one.) Orwell later pointed out that many such words, including âdemocracy, socialism, freedom,â had been similarly distorted. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Mitch McConnell have all been maligned as socialists; Sweden calls itself a democracy, but so does North Korea.) Yet Orwell was clear that semantic confusion was no excuse for quietism: âSince you donât know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this.â
Right now, if I had to take a binary position on whether Trump is a fascist, I would lean toward no. Even though his repertoire is still full of what Paxton called âfascist staplesââarguably, the staples grow only more deranged and draconian over timeâI worry that the epithet, as used, often obscures more than it illuminates. But there are plenty of disconcerting labels, such as âcompetitive authoritarianism,â that donât seem like a stretch to me. Besides, history keeps happening, and Iâd be willing to change my mind. By another binary metric, deflationism versus alarmism, I suppose this would make me relatively open to alarmism, or at least not reflexively averse to it. We live in a weird and contingent world, and Iâd prefer to have a wide enough dystopic imagination to be ready for whatever comes next.
Trumpâs bluster is famously unreliable, but, since 2021, he has called for the âtermination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitutionâ; he has referred to his political opponents as âverminâ; and he seems prepared to wield the levers of state more ruthlessly in a second term (including, among many other proposals, potentially using the Insurrection Act and other emergency powers to militarize the border). Doesnât some of this sound a little fascist, at least aspirationally? Alarmists often come off as wild-eyed and silly; deflationists, in contrast, get to seem coolheaded and dignified. But âTyrannophobia,â the law paper Moyn cites, notes that ârational actors should update their risk estimates in the light of experience.â When does a commitment to deflationism risk turning into denialism?
To be clear, Moyn and other skeptics are making a keen and necessary intervention. There certainly are peopleâin the media, in Congress, on the speaking circuitâwho find it convenient to âscapegoat Trump, as if he were an alien in our midst,â as Moyn puts it. Anyone who watches too much cable news might get the impression that weâre always moments away from a brave knight who will finally lance the bronze blimp (James Comey! Robert Mueller! Impeachment! Second impeachment! The Supreme Court! Fani Willis!), at which point the skies will clear, the seraphim will sing, and weâll go back to the good old days of Ronald Reagan and Tip OâNeill. But Moyn is skeptical, both that the MAGA saga will have a tidy deus-ex-machina ending and that our political culture was so healthy before Trump came along. Earlier this month, at a rally in Ohio, Trump, during a riff on import tariffs, used the word âbloodbath,â prompting a flurry of frantic headlines. This, I have to confess, brought out my inner deflationist. It was an admittedly macabre way to talk about trade policy, but I cannot, no matter how many times I rewatch the clip, interpret it as a threat of a guerrilla uprising. Yet it seems to me that Trumpâs flagrant glorifications of vigilante violence are frequent enough that there is no need to puff up new ones. That very rally began with him scowling and saluting sharply while listening to a recording of the national anthem as performed by the J6 Prison Choir, a group of January 6th rioters locked up for insurrection-related charges. Trump called them âhostagesâ and âunbelievable patriots,â and implied that he might pardon them on âthe first day we get into office.â Now thatâs collaboration with committed nationalist militants!
If weâre going to be intellectually honest about the ways in which the fascism analogy doesnât 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 âpoisoning the blood of our country.â 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 âknow nothing about Hitler,â although, according to a piece in Vanity Fair, he once kept the Führerâs collected speeches next to his bed.) In August, 2022, when Biden referred to the Trumpian âphilosophyâ as âsemi-fascist,â he got a lot of pushback for the term, but Iâve come to think that âsemi-fascistâ might be as apt a description as any. Qualify it how you want: semi-fascist, proto-fascist, would-be authoritarian, âfasc-ish.â Moyn uses the phrase âthe stirrings of fascismââIâm 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 âthe stirrings of fascism are redefined as the thing itself,â 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.
In 2021, the podcast âKnow Your Enemyâ conducted its own tour of the fascism meta-debate. One of the co-hosts, Sam Adler-Bell, said that he found a lot of the discourse frustrating because âso much of it is a sublimated conflict over present-day political strategy.â If Trump was just putting a more vulgar face on Republican politics as usual, some pundits argued, then maybe the best way to oppose him was to take a risk on a leftist insurgent such as Bernie Sanders; if Trump truly represented a unique democratic emergency, though, then maybe the left needed to pipe down, join the popular front, and support the establishment Democrat. Second-order considerations like this obscured the first-order question of what was actually happening. They also flattened long-standing policy debates into more immediate markers of factional affiliation. The anti-Trump tent is a big one, and the F-word came to be seen as a dividing line running down the middle. In some circles, emphasizing the discrepancies between Trumpism and fascism became a way to stay safely on the left side of the tent; to emphasize too many similarities was to risk drifting toward the other side, where Bill Kristol and James Comey eat canapés and reminisce about the war on terror. (Madeleine Albright, who served as a Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, published a book titled âFascism: A Warning,â in 2018; several of the writers in âDid It Happen Here?â invoke Albright or her book, brandishing its very existence as their own kind of reductio, although they never say a word about whatâs in it.) At its most petty and oversimplified, the fascism question became yet another way for the left to play one of its oldest parlor games: progressives accusing other progressives of being useful idiots for centrism. Or, as Adler-Bell later put it in a semi-ironic tweet, âJust clarifying that Iâm worried about fascism in the cool leftist way not the cringey resistance lib way. ðââ
It does no one any good to distort the facts in service of a hypothetical strategy. You can oppose COVID lockdowns without ignoring the transmission rates; you can abhor the Patriot Act without denying the existence of terrorism. Similarly, you can oppose Biden, or the forever wars, or the liberal establishment, and still think that Trumpism is a democratic emergency. Instead of calibrating your observations to some tactical calculus, you can describe what you see in plain terms, even if, horror of horrors, you risk finding yourself in agreement with Madeleine Albright. One irony of the fascism meta-debate is that, although it became an article of faith that playing up Sandersâs electability required downplaying the severity of the Trumpian menace, the opposite may have been true all along. If part of Trumpâs appeal lay in what Jan-Werner Müller calls âright-wing populism,â then maybe the most pragmatic way to counter that appeal was to nominate a left-wing populist.
Müllerâs definition of far-right populism is idiosyncratic, but, of all the diagnoses on offer, I think itâs the best fit. âRight-wing authoritarian populists ultimately reduce all political questions to questions of belonging,â he writes. In his view, far-right populism âis not so much about antielitism, but about antipluralism: populists hold that they, and only they, represent what they often call âthe real people.â â He sees âfamily resemblances,â therefore, not between Trump and the textbook fascists but between Trump and the current âexamples of a new authoritarian quasi-normalâ: Viktor Orbán, in Hungary; Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan, in Turkey; Narendra Modi, in India. In the end, Müllerâs diagnosis that Trump is not a fascist doesnât come as much of a relief; he delivers the news like a doctor telling you that you donât have cancer, but that what you do have might be terminal. âNone of this should be taken as a reason to be less concerned,â he writes. âFar-right populism really does destroy democracy.â
Analogies are not equivalences. Trump isnât Hitler. Trump isnât Mussolini, or Silvio Berlusconi, or Giorgia Meloni. Trump isnât even Trumpâhe was pro-choice before he was pro-life, he was for the Iraq War before he was against it, and he canât even make up his mind about whether to ban TikTok. To know when we ought to panic, itâs helpful to know what to look out for, and Müllerâs framework gives us a clearer idea of the shape contemporary authoritarianism is likely to take. Donât think armband insignias, tanks in the streets, and martial law; think lawfare, sophisticated cronyism, surveillance, and counter-majoritarian restrictions on reproductive rights and voting access and academic freedom. âTodayâs threats to democracy donât parallel 20th-century experiences,â Müller wrote in the London Review of Books, in 2019. âOne of the reasons we are not witnessing the second coming of a particular anti-democratic past is simply that todayâs anti-democrats have learned from history too.â
If âDid It Happen Here?â gives Moyn the middle seat, then Corey Robin, his fellow-skeptic, gets the last word. In an article titled âTrump and the Trapped Country,â originally published in The New Yorker, Robin, a political scientist at Brooklyn College, presents Trump not as a strongman but as a weak, thwarted President whose tenure, like much of the Obama Presidency, was characterized by âa paralysis of political agency . . . an era in which the call of the voters is answered by the palsy of our institutions.â Robin makes a compelling case: itâs indisputable that much of Trumpâs agenda was blocked by a dysfunctional Congress and a counter-majoritarian Supreme Court. The same could be said of the Biden Administration. Partisan deadlock is one structural impediment to a sudden authoritarian breakthrough; so are the anti-democratic filibuster, the sclerotic two-party system, and the lamentably high bar to amending the Constitution. There are many reasons it may not happen here. An even simpler reason is that Trump is a vain, distractible dilettante. Still, even if he isnât capable of bending the system to his will, his party, now largely reshaped in his image, seems increasingly willing to do it for him. The deflationists play a crucial role, but it would be a mistake to slide from deflationism to quietism. Since we donât have an exemplary democracy, how can we worry about losing it? One need not swallow such absurdities as this.
The sky has not fallen, but, for years, many people have warned that lights are flashing red, or at least yellow. The Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt made a best-selling case for concern in their book âHow Democracies Die,â in 2018, and they updated their argument last year, in âTyranny of the Minority.â Ari Berman, a voting-rights journalist, builds on this literature in âMinority Rule,â which will be published in April. Viktor Orbán, maybe the most adroit of the far-right populists, didnât kill Hungarian democracy the first time he became Prime Minister, in 1998. He lost the first time he ran for reëlection, in 2002, and, although he never fully accepted the legitimacy of that election, he remained in the opposition until 2010. Then he came back, entrenched his power, and worked with his party to chip away at the stateâpatiently, clinically, not like a twentieth-century fascist but like a twenty-first-century authoritarian. âOrbán doesnât need to kill us, he doesnât need to jail us,â Tibor Dessewffy, a Hungarian sociologist, told me, in 2022. âHe just keeps narrowing the space of public life. Itâs whatâs happening in your country, tooâthe frog isnât boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.â I was there to report on CPAC, the American conservative conference, which was being held in Budapest. This February, CPACâthe main one, in Marylandâdenied press credentials to reporters from HuffPost, the Washington Post, and other âpropagandistâ outlets. Earlier this month, Trump invited Orbán to Mar-a-Lago. Orbán posted some highlights on his Instagram: a cover band played a stiff rendition of âGot to Get You Into My Life,â and Trump took the stage to say a few words in his friendâs honor. âThereâs nobody thatâs better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,â Trump declared. âHe said, âThis is the way itâs going to be,â and thatâs the end of it, right? Heâs the boss.â â¦