The Bulwark is featuring a fascinating piece today about Trump and fascism, a very urgent topic:
IN THE INITIAL, HEADY DAYS after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Donald Trump, many public commentators played down Trump’s threats of not leaving the White House quietly, with some outright dismissing concerns about his electoral lies.
Others, though, saw Trump for exactly who he was—and his actions for exactly what they were, even from the outset. One of those discerning voices was Federico Finchelstein, a professor at the New School who studies the history and dissemination of fascism. Just a few days into Trump’s refusal to concede, Finchelstein authored an op-ed in the Washington Post linking Trump directly to a series of previous authoritarians who clung to power, helping introduce Americans to the term auto-golpe (self-coup). It was one of the most prescient pieces of analysis of America’s post-election troubles—vindicated especially on January 6th, when Trump helped sic insurrectionists set on violently overturning the election results.
Now, Finchelstein has a new book out on the topic, focusing on what makes Trump, and the other budding autocrats rising alongside him, so dangerous. In so doing, Finchelstein hopes to cut through some of the definitional clutter of what Trump was, and still is. Trump is not, as his supporters would have him, simply a populist. But given his failures on January 6th and afterward to cling to power, he’s also not a classic fascist, at least as popularly understood. He is, rather, something else—something can be found in the title of Finchelstein’s book: The Wannabe Fascists.
[…]
Fascism, for Finchelstein, is “a global ideology with separate national movements and regimes,” an ideology whose “primary aim” is “to destroy democracy from within in order to create a modern dictatorship from above.” Implementing a “divine, messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as organically linked to the people and the nation,” fascism broadly “aimed to create a new and epochal world order through . . . extreme political violence and war.” With four primary characteristics—political violence, propaganda, xenophobia, and ultimate dictatorship—fascism took root around the world throughout the twentieth century, beyond just places like Mussolini’s Rome or Hitler’s Berlin.
Read the whole thing if you can. It’s fascinating. He says that MAGA and Trump fit the criteria in three ways, and I think you can see what they are: political violence, propaganda and xenophobia. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Obviously, the fourth is dictatorship and Trump is just a few votes in a couple of swing states away from achieving that.
There’s much more to this analysis, however, and it’s terrifying.