For several days in mid-August, Donald Trump found himself ensnared in a bizarre controversy over the “very fine people” marching alongside neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va. It was a stupid thing to say—he said it several times, of course—and he was roundly criticized for his failure to condemn Nazi-sympathizing troublemakers. It brought to mind, once again, all those panicky predictions of an impending fascist insurgency in the wake of Trump’s victory.
Before and especially after last November’s presidential election, many liberals and progressives openly assigned the words “fascist” and “Nazi” to Donald Trump and “brownshirts” to his supporters. Sales of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about the rise of fascism in America, increased dramatically, as did those of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (though the latter targeted Marxist communism rather than fascism).
Many liberals and progressives could see only one thing in Trump’s rise: the return of fascism. Several lefty entertainers used the term early and without nuance. “The guy is Hitler,” wrote the comedian Louis C.K. in an email to his fans. “And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the ’30s.” In an interview, the actor George Clooney called Trump “a fascist; a xenophobic fascist.”
A number of accomplished journalists said largely the same, though with a little more sophistication. Carl Bernstein, for instance, suggested in March 2016 that we think of Trump as a “neo-fascist.” “It’s a peculiarly American kind of fascism,” he said on CNN. “Fascism is about a maximum leader, who is contemptuous of real democracy, of real democratic institutions, contemptuous of the press and a free press, who extols torture and violence, who incites hatreds.” Bernstein also recommended Lewis’s novel. “Well, maybe it could happen here.”
Michael Kinsley began a column in the Washington Post in December by stating flatly: “Donald Trump is a fascist.” The word gets thrown around a lot, Kinsley explained, but Trump has many of the characteristics of fascists in the 1920s and ’30s. “Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.”
Robert Kuttner, editor of the American Prospect, similarly needed no convincing that America had elected its first fascist president. “Fascism, classically, includes a charismatic strongman who speaks directly to the mystical People, over the heads of the squabbling politicians who ruined the Nation. Or as Donald Trump put it at the Republican National Convention, ‘I am your voice. . . . I alone can fix it.’ Check. Fascism scapegoats some demonized other, or sets of others. Check.” And so on.
Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, is certain that we’re witnessing the onset of a fascist government. A week after Trump was elected, he posted on his Facebook page 20 “lessons” drawn from his study of Nazism and Stalinism. He wasn’t arguing that Trump was a fascist; he was assuming it, and counseling Americans to respond well. “Do not obey in advance,” he began imperiously. “Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop.”
After his Facebook post went viral, Snyder turned it into a slim book, On Tyranny, in which he warned readers to watch out for some version of a Reichstag fire—a reference to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building, falsely blamed by the Nazis on Communist insurrectionists and employed as a pretext for gaining the emergency police powers that Hitler’s government used to crush its opponents. “Watch for the Reichstag fire” has become a common refrain among liberal academics and journalists on social media.
More recently, in an essay in the New York Review of Books, Snyder considered the possibility of the Trump administration faking a terrorist disaster: “If we face again a terrorist attack—or what seems to be a terrorist attack, or what the government calls a terrorist attack—we must hold the Trump administration responsible for our security.” Asked by an interviewer at Salon if in fact a fascist is now in charge of the U.S. government, Snyder said, in essence, yes. “Whether he realizes it or not is a different question, but that’s what fascists did. They said, ‘Don’t worry about the facts; don’t worry about logic. Think instead in terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader and the people.’ That’s fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we forget, that is fascism.”
For a dismaying number of preeminent liberal commentators, fascism is everywhere—almost as communism was for John Birchers in the 1960s. “Let’s call things by their proper names here,” wrote Paul Krugman in his August 28 New York Times column on the subject of President Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio. “What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.”
Whether these critics are interpreting Donald Trump correctly is a question worth debating. Trump is a bully and a demagogue. He is a nationalist who appears to regard all other nations as vaguely despicable. He loves the adoration of the masses. And, of course, he feels little obligation to verify what he says before saying it.
On the other hand, Trump lacks any kind of internally coherent ideology. Occasional outbursts aside, he seems less inclined to remake America into some new order than to return it to what it used to be (make America great again). Unlike a fascist dictator, he is inclined to defer to his subordinates: His military advisers have talked him into reversing his entire approach to Afghanistan and his secretary of state persuaded him to okay the recertification of the Iran nuclear deal. Progressives are convinced that Trump makes a scapegoat of an entire ethnicity, namely Mexicans, the way fascists did. But there is a vast difference between common bigotry—the kind of bigotry that exists in any society anywhere—and the sort of visceral loathing that grew into a worldview and led to the Final Solution.
The trouble with the belief that Trump is a fascist, however, isn’t so much that it gets Trump right or wrong. The trouble with it is that it gets America itself wrong. The accusation is based on a gross misinterpretation of America and its political culture. The United States might generate many evils, but fascism is not one of them.
Consider as evidence the events in Charlottesville in mid-August. There is no official estimate of the crowd’s size, but the Associated Press estimated 500 people in the white nationalist or “alt right” group and 1,000 in the counter-protesting group. Jason Kessler, a white nationalist and sometime University of Virginia student, spent weeks organizing this “Unite the Right” rally on Facebook and various alt-right websites; the famed former Klansman David Duke was advertising the event on social media in early June. Yet with all this planning and the boost in confidence the movement has supposedly received from the election of an allegedly sympathetic president, the white nationalists could only muster half the number of people who showed up to protest it.
Consider, too, the nature of fascism itself. The term fascism is notoriously difficult to define—George Orwell memorably complained that the word “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’ ”—but its most crucial characteristic, the thing without which it’s not fascism, is the tendency to dominate every part of life from the center: economic activity, intellectual debate, religion, art, music, language.
Fascism failed in America for the same reason communism did. Both systems assume a political worldview in which power is held by a rational elite at the center. The American governmental system, despite centripetal tendencies in the first half of the 20th century, has an essentially centrifugal quality—a quality reflected in America’s politics no less than its culture. That quality manifests itself sometimes as independent-mindedness and sometimes as anti-intellectualism, and perhaps the two are not always distinct attitudes, but they amount to the same thing: Americans as a rule don’t like to be told what to think by people who purport to be smarter than they are.
The case was vastly different in continental Europe 90 years ago. For fascist parties to conquer Italy and Germany, the movement’s functionaries and propagandists had to persuade a great many intellectuals and cultural arbiters to go along with it—and they succeeded. The list of intellectuals and artists and scientists who either acceded to fascist ideology or enthusiastically contributed to it is a long and depressing one. Even taking the worst possible interpretation of the Trump movement, does anyone seriously think it could produce such a list?
American liberal intellectuals think of this nation as the sort of centripetal society that once allowed real fascism to flourish and dominate. They don’t understand the country they’re paid to interpret—thank God.
Barton Swaim is the opinion editor of The Weekly Standard.
