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People hate to hear it but no, Trump is not a fascist. No major historian of classical fascism who has been asked by reporters if Trump is a fascist has answered in the affirmative. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fascism-signs-donald-trump
Paxton, Griffin, Feldman, and all the other guys who actually work on fascism and whose curiosity about it predates 2015 are unanimous on this point. Though many like Paxton and Griffin are quick to note that that doesn't make him less dangerous — which, no, it doesn't.
He's still basically within the democratic family. If Trump were an actual fascist he'd claim not election fraud but that the election should be ignored because the Dems have brainwashed too many voters, and plot a literal coup d'état in order to overthrow the government.
Fascism involves open challenge to the very idea of representative democratic governance. Trump uses some fascist tactics, and in some ways courts the same social base as many of the early fascists did, but ideologically Trumpism is something different.
It would have to be, given that democracy exists in our consciousness in a very different way than it did in the young democracies of interwar Europe.
I'm certainly open to the argument that Trumpism can develop into a genuine functional equivalent to fascism, but we have to be clear what we're talking about here.
Importantly, the fact that Trump isn't a classical fascist did not make him any less dangerous or any less a threat to functional democracy. When historians point out that Trump isn't a fascist, everyone acts like that's cause for relief. It really isn't.
Democracies can do many of the evils that fascist regimes can, under the right conditions. Milosevic was both democratically elected and democratically removed. This would be no comfort to the victims at Srebrenica. And we all know how Jackson's Trail of Tears went.
People don't quite get how much a part of its times Fascism was. During the period between the World Wars, almost every modern country on earth that had a form of mass politics developed a fascist movement, or at least an intellectual and popular ferment akin to fascism.
Lesser-known instances include the National Guard or "Blueshirts" of Ireland, the National Party or "Greyshirts" of Iceland, the Australian New Guard, the Jewish Brit Habirionim in Mandatory Palestine and the American Silver Legion.
Only in a few troubled countries could these movements get entrenched. In fewer still could they make major inroads into the political system. Only in a handful could they achieve any real power, and only in two could they maintain control for very long without outside help.
These movements were important only in young democracies or semi-democratic regimes. Traditionalist authoritarian or autocratic governments, to which communism posed such a threat, could easily neutralize or co-opt them.
They were successful only to the extent that the political system they had to deal with was dysfunctional. Fascism was a peculiar malady of young and sickly democracies.
Marxist-Leninist movements could overthrow dictatorships and monarchies, but —with a few debatable exceptions — have tended to be tempered and absorbed by democracies.
Fascists were better equipped to exploit the weaknesses of a frail democracy to which democratic culture was still felt to be adventitious, to appeal to disillusioned leftists whose politics had taken a nationalist right turn.
Disillusionment with the program on offer from the left was not only an advantage, it was essential to Fascism's success. Trump's rise is to be instructively compared to fascism in that his appeal, and his success, depend upon profound dysfunction.
It is, was, and shall remain an indictment of electoral bankruptcy and administrative brokenness.
Trumpism gained mass support above all else among the materially aggrieved whom the liberal party in particular and the left in general had long ago tossed under the rightward-veering bus, allowing it to fill a niche from which to expand via racialist demagoguery.
But that on its own doesn't constitute fascism, or even a structural equivalent to fascism.
Classical Fascism was a phenomenon peculiar to the inter-war period. It is impossible to imagine its rise without other things, such as that of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. An exact repeat is an impossibility.
The rise of what Robert Paxton calls a "functional equivalent to fascism" in the US is conceivable but only just. Yet the potential for radical ultra-nationalist movements to further etiolate an already ailing democracy remains.
And this is true whether or not they can rightly be called fascist. It becomes ever truer as those on the left succumb to that peculiar species of moral exhaustion with democracy which only disillusioned leftism can instill.
This is an age not of political revolution but of political exasperation. Trump is no revolutionary. Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire has been paraphrased as saying that history proceeds first as tragedy, and repeats itself as farce.
The kind of democratic illiberalism, or illberal democracy, which Trump, Erdogan and others augur may in retrospect prove to be the farcical rerun of a fascist impulse tempered for a politically demobilized era. But we need to be honest about what we're talking about.
