As U.S. election nears, ‘fascism’ is in the spotlight again

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As U.S. election nears, ‘fascism’ is in the spotlight again

Though former members of Trump’s administration have called him a fascist, his political prospects have not dimmed. What does that tell us about the term’s power and usefulness?

 Column by Ishaan Tharoor November 4, 2024

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Former president Donald Trump, who could soon return to the White House, is a “fascist to the core,” according to retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump. “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” Milley told legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in a recently published book. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

Trump’s former chief of staff, John F. Kelly

 

Trump’s former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, said in interviews with the New York Times and the Atlantic that Trump openly spoke of his admiration for Nazi-era generals. Trump’s rhetoric tells its own voluminous story: Just in this election cycle, he has warned darkly of migrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation, bemoaned the bad “genes” of foreign arrivals, vowed purges of the government to install ideological loyalists and has suggested unleashing the military on his domestic opponents.

For most of the past decade, analysts and pundits have debated the merits of branding Trump with the f-word. Some argue that his half-baked attempts at imposing a ban on Muslim migration, his racist invective toward non-Western countries of origin for many migrants, his casting of society as one riven by enemies within who must be crushed, his contempt for the press and cultivation of a strongman’s personality cult all draw from the classic fascist playbook from a century ago.

Following

Trump and his campaign team “believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win,” wrote the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum. “The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the ‘bloodbath’ that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents — none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.”

None of this has doomed Trump’s political prospects. An ABC-Ipsos poll last month asked respondents if they saw Trump as a fascist, which it defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents?” Forty-nine percent of those surveyed said yes (while only 22 percent suggested Vice President Kamala Harris fit the definition). But almost a tenth who thought Trump was a fascist said they were still voting for him.

Consider his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who was one of the first public figures to openly liken Trump to Adolf Hitler. “What changed since Vance offered that comparison in 2016 isn’t how Trump approaches politics. It’s how willing Vance has become to acquiesce to that approach,” wrote my colleague Philip Bump. “So it is with the right writ large.”

That’s true outside the United States, as well. A series of national elections delivered victories or conspicuously large vote shares to European political parties once considered beyond the pale. In Sweden, voters turned the country’s far-right Sweden Democrats into political kingmakers in the governing coalition, no matter the consternation of more centrist rivals over their documented neo-fascism and Nazi apologia. In Austria, France, Italy and the Netherlands, the far right has outperformed the center right in recent elections.

This is why some analysts see diminishing returns in the “fascism” charge. What Trump’s opponents are “trying to say is that the candidate is fascist, therefore don’t vote for him,” historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, editor of a recently published collection of essays on fascism in America, told Politico in an interview. “This is why it’s risky, because it seems to be suggesting that maybe the people themselves who are voting for him are fascist, or if they are even thinking about voting for him, they are knowingly and willingly voting for a monster. And that can be alienating … to voters.”

 

Thanks to widespread disquiet over immigration and mounting disaffection with the continent’s liberal status quo, the far right has gone mainstream in much of Europe. Its ascent has mirrored the rise of Trumpism, and both camps have drawn inspiration from each other. “The hard right on both sides of the Atlantic will celebrate each other’s victories, view them as encouragement and validation of their own revolutionary endeavors, and where possible, build alliances,” Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution, told me. 

 

Still, outside of Italy, far-right parties with neo-fascist roots are not leading any government. The nature of parliamentary coalition-building checks their power and forces political compromise. In France’s mixed presidential system, two rounds of voting make it hard for the far-right candidate to win outright. And the volatility of parliamentary politics has made it hard for many far-right factions to retain or deepen their influence after breakthrough elections.

That’s why some analysts think it’s more useful to cast Trump in line with figures such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, rather than some of his Western European fellow travelers. These illiberal demagogues have consolidated power through a ruthless majoritarian approach, counting on winning just enough votes in a polarized political environment over which they have disproportionate influence.

“Trump is similar to far-right populists like Narendra Modi and Viktor Orban who claim uniquely to represent the people, who delegitimize their political opponents as traitors, and who incite hatred against already vulnerable minorities,” wrote German political scientist Jan-Werner Müller. “Such a strategy has authoritarian consequences; those in turn enable crony capitalism, or outright kleptocracy, which has been crucial for the consolidation of regimes like Orban’s.”

Orban, for example, has undermined Hungary’s checks and balances through judicial appointments, the erosion of Hungarian independent media and tactical gerrymandering of elections. The scale of his national power is a source of envy among European counterparts and admiration among the U.S. right.

“A president who has authoritarian tendencies would seek to centralize power,” Zsuzsanna Vegh, a political analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, told Bloomberg News. “A Trump administration could look at the European far right when it comes to creating an ideological justification for why it’s necessary.⍐”