Misdiagnosing the Problem, Misdiagnosing the Solution

At this point, readers might be asking the obvious question: Who cares what we call Trump and Trumpism? Isn’t this all just pointless intra-intellectual fighting?

Indeed, at various points observers have criticized the fascism debate for being little more than a navel-gazing academic exercise, a decadent example of scholarly disconnection in an era when the Trump administration is causing very real human suffering. But this criticism, while understandable, misses the mark. To name something is to diagnose it, and to diagnose a malady is to identify a cure. An incorrect political diagnosis will inevitably lead to ineffective resistance. If a patient suffered from heart disease but a doctor diagnosed them with a hemorrhoid, then eventually the patient might die from their heart disease. A similar thing could be said for democracy.

Defenders of the claim that Trump is a fascist have tended to rely on five arguments. While these have almost always been advanced out of a deep concern for the moral demands of the present, they nevertheless misread our moment and thus militate against the type of politics capable of resisting the Republican assault on democracy.

First, some defenders of the fascism thesis insist that the analogy meaningfully illuminates processes occurring today. But the context of interwar Europe is so different from that of the 2010s and 2020s United States that such analogizing obscures what’s going on. We are not living in the aftermath of a world war in which mass death led to social dislocation and the emergence of novel political orders. Gangs of young veterans with combat experience do not roam our streets. A powerful communist movement does not threaten entrenched capitalist interests. Our various economic downturns do not equate to the hyperinflation experienced throughout postwar Europe.

Second, others maintain that there is no need to look to Europe to make the fascism comparison because the United States has its own fascist traditions upon which Trump and his cohorts rely. To make this argument, people point to the many racist, xenophobic, and even eliminationist aspects of US history, from the “three-fifths compromise” found in the US Constitution, in which enslaved people were counted as “three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation”; to the practice and legacy of chattel slavery; to the forced removal and genocide of indigenous peoples; to the Ku Klux Klan; to Jim Crow; to redlining; to Japanese incarceration during World War II; to militarist policing and beyond. 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.

While there is no doubt that there are deep continuities between the present moment and US history, referring to American fascism ironically undermines the fascism thesis. “Fascism,” in this account, emerges as a uniquely American phenomenon, both preceding and postdating its European variants, to which it has no real connection. In this instance, the term “fascism” stands as a shorthand for “extreme far-right ideology” — a very capacious definition that isn’t especially useful analytically.

A third group affirms that deploying the term “fascism” is politically useful. Calling Trump a fascist, they claim, helps to mobilize mass resistance. Here, empirical analysis suggests otherwise. In the last weeks of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidency, she called Trump a fascist. The message that Trump was a fascist threat to democracy, in fact, became her campaign’s “closing argument,” despite the fact that the most important super PAC supporting Harris warned that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive.” We all know how this story ended: Trump defeated Harris, winning 49.81 percent of the popular vote to Harris’s 48.34 percent, and 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226.

Fourth, some of those who embrace the analogy avow that the framework of fascism can help predict Trump’s behavior. This would be good if it were true, but neither history nor the social sciences are predictive endeavors. Studying history and using the tools of social science allows analysts to accomplish several things: we can identify structures, processes, discourses, and patterns; we can understand the causes of past events; and we can illuminate the origins of the present. But they cannot be used to predict the future. That is simply not what they do.

Finally, a fifth group argues that calling Trump a fascist underlines the degree to which Trumpism reflects a genuinely novel innovation in American politics. This is the most politically significant claim of those who endorse the analogy, because it has been deployed to mobilize not just liberals and leftists but stalwarts of the pre-Trump Republican mainstream.

In the process, those who insist that Trump is a fascist departure from US history have tacitly endorsed the antidemocratic politics of people like Liz Cheney, who have had no problem defending the United States’ unjust and illegal wars; the government’s expansive surveillance of citizens; and neoliberalism and neoconservatism in general. Under the banner of anti-fascism, “Never Trumpers” like Cheney have rebranded themselves as champions of democracy, a grotesquerie for all those who remember the global “war on terror.”

All-American Authoritarianism

The reality is that everything Trump is doing has antecedents in the history of the United States — and that the best way to apprehend Trump’s radicalism and organize to stop it is to place his behavior in the context of this longer history. Trumpism, in other words, is an intensification of long-standing, antidemocratic, and profoundly American trends. There is hardly a need to use the term “fascism” to understand it. This is America, and Trump is nothing if not deeply American.

Let’s begin with Trump’s attempted dismantling of the administrative state. To appreciate what’s going on, one doesn’t have to point to any foreign Führerprinzip; one only has to investigate the actual history of the US presidency.

Since the founding of the American republic in 1776, the presidency has grown in power while Congress, the supposed representative of the people’s will, has abdicated its responsibilities. This is most evident in the realm of foreign policy. The US Congress is constitutionally responsible for declaring war, but it has only done so eleven times, and the last was in 1942.

Since that moment, though, the United States has been in a state of near-constant war. In addition to the well-known Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars, in the decades after World War II, the United States has intervened against foreign societies, according to the political scientists Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, with “the threat, display, or direct usage of force” more than two hundred times. And what is true in foreign policy is true in other issue areas: the president has increasingly become the equivalent of an elected monarch. Put another way, there has been an ongoing, if usually ignored, constitutional crisis since at least the 1940s.

Most dramatically, in the last several decades, a radical and antidemocratic theory of presidential power, dubbed “the theory of the unitary executive,” has gained increasing sway in right-wing legal circles. As the political scientist Richard W. Waterman notes, this theory “posits that the president has sole responsibility for the control and maintenance of the executive branch” and concomitantly claims “that Congress does not have the right to enact laws that limit the president’s powers as chief executive or commander in chief” and “that the president has the same authority as the courts to interpret laws that relate to the executive branch.”

The theory of the unitary executive, which according to Waterman “represents a quantum expansion of the president’s administrative authority,” proved especially useful during the George W. Bush administration, and it is the one upon which many of Trump’s attempts to undo the administrative state rest. In deploying this theory, right-wing jurists have moved beyond the “imperial presidency” to embrace an “autocratic presidency” in which the president has become a kind of dictator.

To construct the argument for the autocratic presidency, jurists like John Yoo did not refer to fascist or Nazi law; they relied on US jurisprudence. The autocratic presidency is a very American invention.

Even the power of the unelected and not-confirmed-by-the-Senate Elon Musk has its precedents. Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of the US system is that presidents are allowed to name people to several influential positions without the Senate’s approval — these are called “non-Senate confirmed presidentially appointed positions.” Here, for instance, are some individuals who served as national security advisor (NSA), a position not confirmed by the Senate: McGeorge Bundy,Walt Whitman Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, W. Anthony Lake, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, John Bolton, and Jake Sullivan.

In various ways, each of these individuals shaped US policy and politics — none had a democratic mandate. Besides the NSA, the president appoints, without Senate confirmation, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the deputy national security advisor, and manifold other positions.

Now let’s turn to the arrests of Badar Khan Suri and Mahmoud Khalil, both of which are disturbing violations of civil liberties and the principles that are theoretically the bedrock of American political life. Tragically, arrests like these have many precedents in US history; the arrest and deportation of legal residents and even citizens — oftentimes for political radicalism — has been a recurring feature of American politics for a long time.

For much of the last century, the United States has made effective use of what the historian Adam Goodman has termed “the deportation machine.” During and after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson, under the authority of the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, and the Immigration Act of 1918, arrested and deported radicals and antiwar activists; as the historian Kim Phillips-Fein recently highlighted, more than 550 people accused of political radicalism were deported as the result of the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919–20.

Then, between 1929 and 1939, as Goodman reports, “as many as half a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans” were “repatriated” to Mexico — at least 60 percent of those compelled to leave the country were US citizens. In the early Cold War, meanwhile, the government arrested and deported political “subversives” under the authority of the Alien Registration Act of 1940, the Internal Security Act of 1950, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

For the remainder of the twentieth century, to quote Goodman, “neighborhood sweeps and expedited deportations had periodically resulted in the removal of U.S. citizens and permanent residents.” In fact, after Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, “all noncitizens, including many long-term, legal permanent residents, found themselves subject to formal deportation.” To take just one example Goodman highlights, “between 2005 and 2010, some 1.4 million people — half of them children born in the United States — returned to Mexico either by choice, coercion, or force.”

And this doesn’t even address the many violations of civil liberties witnessed during the global war on terror, when a citizen named José Padilla, who was accused of working with al-Qaeda “to build and explode a radiological dispersion device,” was held in military detention without charge for over three years, or when a green card holder named Ansar Mahmood “was detained on suspicions of terrorism . . . after he took a photograph near a water-treatment plant.” Beyond the global war on terror, in the late 2010s journalists discovered that “Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents repeatedly target U.S. citizens for deportation by mistake.” In one especially dramatic instance, a citizen named Davino Watson was held by ICE for 1,273 days.

This Is America

Clearly, Trumpism 2.0 intensifies many extant precedents — each horrifying and deeply undemocratic. The second time around, Trump is being more aggressive, more flagrant, and more public in his pursuit of genuinely radical ends than he ever had been before.

But 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, and the danger posed by Trump is a specifically American one. Things can be scary — things are scary — without them being fascist. Indeed, they might even be scarier because they’re homegrown.

If socialists hope to combat Trump and organize a coalition able to prevent autocrats like him from again rising to power, we must appreciate that he emerges from American history and the American system. One of the major problems of the fascism analogy is that it diverts attention from the United States to Europe. But this is not fascist Italy or Nazi Germany.

This is America, with all that implies.