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14 March 2025
This was delivered as a guest lecture for Global Labour University alumni on “The Rise of Authoritarian Regimes in Uncertain Times” on February 15th.
The political situation I’m most intimately familiar with is obviously the American one, so that’s where I’ll focus, although I’ll do my best to weave in a few examples from other national contexts here and there, and I hope all that gets considerably supplemented by contributions in the discussion from those of who live and work and politically struggle in various other countries around the world, including some in countries that face far more heavy-handed repression than anything that seems likely in any of the examples that are mostly going to preoccupy me here.
At least starting with the United States, though, this year marks a full decade since Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his first candidacy in 2015. To be honest, some part of me still has a hard time believing or understanding the extent to which American politics has realigned itself around the personality of this strange, spiteful, child-like person, who was, it’s sometimes hard to remember, a reality television host before he was ever a politician, but here we are.
In that decade, a lot of the debate about Trump on the Left, and particularly on the intellectual Left, has been about whether he counts as a “fascist.” So, I want to start by saying a few things about the substance of that debate, and how I’d see its political stakes, before moving on to a broader set of issues.
Whenever you see someone claiming that Example X is an instance of Broader Phenomenon Y, a pretty obvious place to start the discussion is by asking what people mean by Y, so we can see whether X fits that definition. And when it comes to “fascism,” even very smart people often struggle when asked for a definition of this particular term. I often hear phrases like “ultra-nationalism,” for example, but I rarely see much clarity on what’s supposed to make some nationalisms and not others “ultra-.” In World War I, for example, when anti-German hysteria in the United States reached such a fever pitch that German books were systematically removed from libraries, was that an example of regular American nationalism or this special “ultra-“ nationalism? How about World War II, when we went so far as to round up American citizens of Japanese descent and put them in internment camps for the duration of the war? Are European soccer hooligans who go around randomly assaulting people on the streets for being suspected fans of the opposing national team “ultra-“ nationalists even if, when they go home, the hooligans vote for mainstream parties instead of the parties of the far right? These are all examples of nationalism making people cruel and stupid, certainly. But that’s what nationalism does.
Analysts who focus on rhetorical similarities between Trumpism and classical European fascism like to throw around phrases like “nostalgia for an imagined past” and “visions of national greatness.” And it’s true enough that these were central rhetorical tropes of the followers of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. But these have also been rhetorical staples of any number of conservative and reactionary movements both long before and long after classical European fascism. See, for example, Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for president in 1980 and 1984 which were, by the way, the source from which Donald Trump and Steve Bannon lifted the phrase “Make America Great Again” in 2016. It seems to me that all we can learn from the fact that various kinds of right-wingers including but not limited to fascists go to these same rhetorical wells is the uninterestingly obvious fact that fascism is a phenomenon of the Right.
Classical Marxist analyses of fascism focused not on how fascists talked but on what they did. In his brilliant writings on the rise of fascism in Germany, for example, Leon Trotsky emphasized that the unique feature of fascism, as opposed to various other kinds of right-wing authoritarianism, is that fascism starts as a grassroots mass movement that battles socialists and communists and busts up labor unions in bloody street-fighting. When fascist movements achieve state power, they overthrow parliamentary democracy, ban unions and opposition parties, and supplement or even partially replace the traditional repressive machinery of the state with their own forces.
Nothing like that, of course, has come remotely close to happening in the Trump era in the United States. Right-wing paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath-Keepers are microscopically tiny, they’re beset with federal informants, and they have no capacity whatsoever to physically terrorize their enemies. Compared to serious right-wing paramilitaries in a country like Brazil, groups that control territory like drug gangs and sometimes assassinate left-wing politicians like Marielle Franco, armed rightist groups in the United States feel more like Live Action Role-Players. I certainly agree that Trump deserves moral condemnation for his coddling of such elements, for example through his sweeping pardon of even violent Jan. 6th defendants, but honestly, they’re such minor players you could tell the story of Trumpism without them.
And going back to the Brazil analogy, even when Bolsonaro was president, it doesn’t seem to me that fascism had actually been imposed on Brazil, even if the raw materials for it were far more developed than they had been in the United States. Bolsonaro, after all, was deposed not by some equivalent of the Red Army marching on Berlin or Italian partisans hanging Mussolini but because a free press exposed his wrongdoing, he lost a democratic election, and once out of office he was held accountable by an independent judiciary.
On the other side of the divide between Trotskyists and Stalinists, the Comintern’s main theorist of fascism was Georgi Dimitrov, who defined fascism as “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” While Trotsky’s definition has been a bigger influence on my own thinking about fascism over the years, you may prefer Dimitrov’s definition if only because it casts a wider net by emphasizing what fascists do with state power rather than how they achieve it in the first place. Pinochet’s Chile, for example, wouldn’t count on the Trotskyist definition but it might well according to Dimitrov, and perhaps it should. Certainly, if what we were facing under Trump was anything like what happened under Pinochet, the academic debate about whether it counted as “fascism” would be utterly beside the point.
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