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Is Donald Trump a fascist? The question is central to attempts to understand him. He has disappeared migrants into camps, sent troops into Democrat-run cities, “spread a message of violence” to try to overturn an election result, according to a Congressional committee, accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”, expressed contempt for courts and, last week, sent US forces to capture the president of Venezuela.
I’ll focus on expert uses of the concept “fascist”, rather than amateurs wielding the term as an insult. Historians including Robert Paxton (author of The Anatomy of Fascism) and Timothy Snyder have labelled Trump fascist, while Ruth Ben-Ghiat says he deploys “the fascist arsenal”. Over 400 academics, including 31 Nobel laureates, signed a letter warning that today’s far-right movements often bear “unmistakably fascist traits”. Trump’s voters (who overwhelmingly aren’t fascists) tend to mock these accusations as liberal hysteria. The debate is complicated by our association of fascism with the Holocaust and world war — though these were the endpoints of only one brand of fascism.
Two guides I’ve found to answer the question are Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism”, and now a new German collection of academic essays, Wenn das Gestern anklopft (“When Yesterday Knocks”), edited by Philipp Ruch and Thomas Weber. Reading Eco, the parallels between Trump’s methods and fascism become obvious; but the German collection persuaded me that his worldview and aims are distinct from fascism.
Eco, the multi-faceted scholar who spent his childhood in Mussolini’s Italy, drew up a general checklist of features of “Ur-Fascism”. Trump has been ticking them off. He regularly treats disagreement as “treason”, and leads what Eco calls “the cult of action for action’s sake”.
Ur-Fascism, according to Eco, tells supporters “that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country”. Its basic message is “fear of difference . . . an appeal against the intruders”. That means Ur-Fascism’s psychology is rooted in “the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one”.
In Eco’s diagnosis, historical fascism typically appeals “to a frustrated middle-class”. He forecasts that as “old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petty bourgeois . . . the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority”.
Ur-Fascism is macho, continues Eco. It uses “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”. Its leader claims to speak for “the people”; Eco foresees a “TV or internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented . . . as the Voice of the People.”
So much for Trump’s methods. Yet a brilliant essay in the German collection, by Thomas Weber, historian at the University of Aberdeen, illuminates how his ideology differs from Hitler’s.
Hitler valorised the collective “Volk”, which unites for the highest human purpose: war. This required a strong bureaucratic state. Trump, by contrast, thinks war is stupid. The fascist cult of heroic death leaves him cold. He avoids wars, only attacking countries too weak to respond, like Iran, Venezuela and, later perhaps, Greenland.
Weber theorises that Trump believes in neither state nor society, but in an extreme version of American capitalism without rules and that he sees the highest human purpose as self-enrichment. His family’s monetisation of the presidency is unabashed, even proud, because he thinks it’s natural. To him, it seems, a government is a family business, not an army support system.
Trump resembles a premodern patrimonial leader from the era before states, argue Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein in another essay in Wenn das Gestern anklopft. In other words, he is more Iron Age chieftain than a fascist leading a modern state. Indeed, he tasked Elon Musk with axing chunks of the state.
A patrimonial leader deals one on one with leaders of rival clans, observing codes of mutual respect. He rules through an extended family household. Whereas Hitler presented himself as a man without family, even making his sister Paula change her surname to Wolf, Trump entrusts key roles to relatives: his son-in-law Jared Kushner flies around trying to make peace (and money), while Trump’s sons run the family crypto businesses.
The nearest modern equivalent to the patrimonial leader is the mafia boss — a point that Weber connects to Trump’s love of mafia movies. Trump represents a version of political authoritarianism that we’ve barely seen for centuries.
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