One of the many reasons I resist the Trump-as-fascist argument is that it often leads to (or accompanies) an inattention to or eclipse of matters of high politics and elite action: the jockeying for position at the highest levels of state, the coalitions and fractures within the dominant regime, the day-to-day events in which policy gets formed and unformed.

There’s no intrinsic reason that an invocation of fascism should require that inattention; the best historical studies of fascism don’t ignore these questions at all. In the American context, however, the invocation of that parallel — whether to McCarthyism or now to Trump — often does.

The reason for that, I suspect, is that most people tend to think of fascism as primarily a form of mass politics, that most of the action is on the ground and at the grassroots, far away from the centers of elite power, and that fascism is best studied as a question not of events or policy or elite action but as a simple and straightforward reflection of deep, structural changes in culture, psyche, economy, and society. So the Trump parallel leads people to focus on questions of popular mobilization, the circulation of racist ideas and affects among the working class or lower middle class, long-term changes in the economy, and so on.