Washington Versus Weimar

Eight years later, it’s hard to know who first raised the “fascism” label with Trump, though conservatives surprisingly launched some of the earliest accusations. There was a clear exculpatory character to these arguments: they wanted to show that Trump had “nothing to do with the Republican Party” but was instead the devotee of a foreign creed.

Did It Happen Here? includes a section of essays devoted to the politics of analogy: Did Trump match up to the 1930s? And why look to interwar Europe, rather than something closer to home?

The burden of the pro-fascist-analogy case is to show why Trump is a fascist, but without watering down the term and making it a synonym for something like racism in general. If we focus specifically on interwar fascism, some basic parallels do exist — Trumpism shares racism, nationalism, and antidemocratic tendencies. But Trumpism is missing the core elements of interwar fascism, especially the worship of violence as a means of transformation.

Fascism aimed to “bring the war home,” driven by demobilized soldiers intent on transforming wartime experience into a permanent form of government. Facing military defeat, fascists looked to violence and conquest as engines of social revolution. “The individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists,” as Mussolini put it. This is why, as Jan-Werner Müller points out in his essay, fascists waged an internal guerilla war on socialists and launched programs of domestic revolution and aggressive external conquest. They sought to make war a way of life.

In the United States, groups espousing a fascist politics of regenerative violence and permanent war — especially the White Power movement and militias — do exist, and January 6 claimed a large number of veterans. Trump is disturbingly friendly to these groups (“stand back and stand by”), but they’re not representative of Trump’s modus operandi. Trump has tried to portray himself as a president opposed to forever wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, not begin a project of imperial expansion. “We want a strong and powerful military and ideally, we won’t have to use it,” as he put it. Trump’s calls for violence against protesters and political opponents is also striking, but he’s not waging a guerilla war against them.

One strong point in favor of the fascism interpretation is the antidemocratic paramilitary violence that many Republicans tolerate, if not outright endorse. Previously skeptical historian Robert Paxton, an acclaimed historian of fascism, revised his stance on Trump after January 6, writing an essay (included in the volume) stating that the event removed “his objection to the fascism label.” He compared it to a failed fascist demonstration in Paris during 1934. The French far right leagues unsuccessfully tried to storm the French Chamber of Deputies, similar to the January 6 militias’ dash into Congress.

Even so, it’s not clear that January 6 counts as evidence of Trump being fascist. He is not directly connected to the day’s most dedicated agents; he’s neither a member nor leader of groups like the Proud Boys. What January 6 demonstrates instead is authoritarian conservatives’ willingness to collaborate with extreme forces, especially when they feel politically weakened. This too has an interwar precedent: neither Hitler nor Mussolini seized power in a coup — they were invited by authoritarian-leaning conservatives.

Many observers believed that the analogy’s consequences, not just its accuracy, mattered. Samuel Moyn thus found something pernicious in the analogy to Nazi Germany. “Abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes,” writes Moyn. Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis also warn that labeling Trump as a fascist carries strategic risks, arguing that such alarmism could expand the security state, which would likely target the Left.

Is There an American Fascism?

Did It Happen Here also includes a section titled “Is Fascism as American as Apple Pie?” where essays question the assumption that interwar Europe is the definitive model for fascism. Jason Stanley and Sarah Churchwell in particular argue that fascism has indigenous American roots, what Churchwell terms “American fascism.”

These scholars often draw on the critiques of black anti-colonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, who argued that fascism was a form of colonialism turned back on Europe. Under the yoke of white supremacy at home, these anti-colonial thinkers pointed out the similarities between fascism and Euro-American racism.

Fascist regimes, these scholars argue, were born from the politics of late empire: German and Italian fascists, having missed out on the nineteenth-century land grab, yearned to create international spheres of influence comparable to the British Empire or the United States. They pursued imperial expansion within Europe and the Mediterranean, and they applied colonial methods such as segregation, coerced labor, and ethnic cleansing closer to home. Hitler, for his part, saw countries such as Ukraine as blank slates for German “warrior-farmers.” The Jacksonian-era genocide famously loomed large as a model for him, stating that the Volga would be “our Mississippi.”

As a settler colony that practiced genocide and chattel slavery, aspects of fascism have clear precedents in the United States. Paramilitary groups — such as the KKK and the Red Shirts — during Reconstruction and Jim Crow anticipated some of the basic features of interwar fascist movements, as Robert Paxton points out in his book. The first Klan was a paramilitary group that aspired to function as state within a state, glorified violence, and was started by veterans — all key characteristics of interwar fascism. The Klan and fascists even had parallel class functions. If fascists waged war on socialists and unions, the Reconstruction-era Klan had a counterpart class nemesis: emancipated black workers.

These authors argue that we should recognize the distinctive features of any “American fascism,” which could go unnoticed if we focus solely on interwar Europe. “An American fascism would, by definition, deploy American symbols and American slogans,” writes Sarah Churchwell. She continues: “Fascism’s ultra-nationalism means that it works by normalizing itself, drawing on familiar national customs to insist it is merely conducting business as usual.” As Churchwell points out, the US claims a tradition of anti-interventionist fascist sympathizers — such as the America First Committee — suggesting that American fascism might not be as friendly to imperial expansion as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s regimes.

Historical Change

The relationship between American racism and fascism is maybe the strongest case for applying the term “fascism” to contemporary conservative movements, particularly given the striking similarity between paramilitary violence in the South and fascist movements.

However, the idea of American fascism has its limitations. It tends to overgeneralize — does American fascism mean the KKK? If so, which version? John C. Calhoun or Andrew Jackson? All of the above? It’s not even clear that fascism draws on familiar national customs: the swastika wasn’t German, after all. Furthermore, when we look to uncontroversial cases of “actually existing fascism” in America — think of contemporary neo-Nazis — they do look remarkably like fascists elsewhere. This suggests that the American fascism thesis overstates the point about national variation.

Even if we could resolve these ambiguities, historical parallels between the KKK, Jim Crow, and fascism don’t necessarily show that Trumpism is fascist. Pointing to harbingers of fascism in American history is easy, but the argument needs to account for historical change. Churchwell writes that “American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn’t mean they’re not fascist; it means they’re not European and it’s not the 1930s.” However, if fascist-adjacent groups have moved away from core fascist features and tried to assimilate with more mainstream conservative forces, the “fascism” label becomes questionable.

One set of essays in Did It Happen Here? asks, “Has fascism taken on a new form today?” Today’s conservative movements sometimes borrow ideas from an earlier, pre-WWII phase of conservatism (e.g., “America First), which was more nationalistic, racist, and antisemitic. What these fascist-adjacent movements do is illustrative: they try to adapt fascist politics to a new era, often without success. As Leah Feldman and Aamir Mufti note, “while fascism appears immediate and present in a series of spectacular events” such as Charlottesville, fascism also “remains peripheral, unorganized, ever flailing, and failing.”

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni illustrates this phenomenon well. In her youth, she was a member of Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), an organization founded by former fascists after World War II. There’s a notorious video of a young Meloni describing Mussolini as a “good” leader in 1993. Yet in her current politics, she consciously distances herself from fascism, albeit ambiguously (the Frattelli D’Italia retains MSI symbolism). Meloni today is more a run-of-the-mill conservative than a fascist seeking national regeneration through violence.

In the United States, the institutional connections are even less clear since there were no major fascist parties. But the same dynamic is at work. Groups like the paleoconservatives in the 1990s, associated with Patrick Buchanan, and later the alt-right, have self-consciously pursued something akin to Americanized fascism. But these groups have largely failed: the paleoconservatives are unknown, while Richard Spencer, notorious for his “Heil Trump” salute, was sued into obscurity after Charlottesville. He now apparently describes himself as a “moderate” on Bumble.

The New National Purification Projects

The key dynamic at work here is what’s called “path-dependence.” That’s the idea that choices in the past constrain those in the present: past decisions make possible certain options, while imposing a high cost on others that would’ve been easier otherwise. This isn’t simply about fascism needing interwar conditions like a socialist threat or total war but is instead a point about fascism’s short historical lifespan. In contrast to other “isms” such as liberalism, fascism emerged during the early twentieth century, rose to power, and self-destructed within a few decades. By 1945, there weren’t any more self-described fascist governments.

Groups such as the white power movement remain marginal. Many fascist-friendly figures — such as Alain de Benoist in France — instead try to rebrand, euphemistically emphasizing values such as cultural diversity over race, and minimizing violence. That’s the more rational choice if you want to remain at all viable in contemporary politics. But by stepping away from war and utopian racial ambitions, however disingenuously, these groups part ways with the core elements of fascism. As Müller writes, “one of the reasons we are not witnessing the second coming of a particular anti-democratic past is simply that today’s anti-democrats have learned from history too.” Violence and racism still animate authoritarian movements, but in ways that importantly contrast with fascist rule.

More broadly, post-WWII radical political changes, especially movements for women’s labor-market participation and civil rights, have constrained fascist revival. Fascism, at least in its interwar form, was a product of the period of formal empires and Herrenvolk democracies, and doesn’t fit easily into a world shaped by civil rights and multiracial democracies. Spencer’s rise to prominence was a testament to America’s profound racism, but his decline demonstrates the high price of advocating for an ethno-state.

Trumpism highlights this shift, selectively incorporating the post-civil-rights status quo while blending racism with cultural pluralism. His Madison Square Garden rally was littered with racist rhetoric, but Trump’s 2024 victory nevertheless had exit polls showing increased support amongst black and Latino voters. “They came from all quarters. Union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American,” as Trump stated in his acceptance speech. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful.”

Maybe it’s theoretically possible to have a multiracial fascism. And Trumpism is clearly still a racist project: you can be racist and yet still appeal to a multiracial electorate. But the takeaway is that the contemporary far right treads around racism advisedly, and their projects of national purification aren’t race based in the same way that the herrenvolk democracies of the American South, Nazi Germany, or South Africa were.

Putting the Fascism Debate to Rest

There was always an elephant in the room when it came to the fascism debate: not all racist movements are fascist. So it’s not clear why we should subsume contemporary authoritarian movements under the fascism frame.

Settler colonies, liberal nationalists, capitalists, conservatives — even socialists — have all endorsed or practiced genocide, racism, eugenics, and imperialism at one point or another. Not everything that’s racist is fascist. The contributors to the volume offer competing forms of analysis — “authoritarian right-wing populism” for Jan-Werner Müller, or “Bonapartism” for Anton Jäger — and these more deflationary accounts, while less dramatic, retain analytical clarity.

“Authoritarian right-wing populism” might be the best category for understanding Trumpism, at least for now. Unlike fascists, authoritarians neither seek a revolution nor mass mobilization. They’re instead more “static,” as Müller puts it, and promote hierarchy, order, and antidemocracy without shaking things up too much. The Republican Party, for its part, now espouses a brand of authoritarianism that’s a product of neoliberal capitalism. The repeated desire to “deconstruct the administrative state” or “start a long controlled burn” in government has a precedent in authoritarian-minded neoliberals growing anxious about the compatibility of democracy and capitalism.

While the “fascism” frame invokes an apocalyptic urgency, there is little reason to assume that history will repeat itself in this way. How reactionaries reinvent domination, and not their resemblances with anachronistic social forms, remains the deeper puzzle.