Too Big for Fascism

Closing election thoughts

I do not know who is going to win the presidential race. No one actually does. This is the definition of a coin flip election: each candidate with a roughly 50 percent chance of winning. It is not hard, for me at least, to imagine Kamala Harris coming out on the better end of that, even as her national polling lead shrinks. Donald Trump’s path to victory is slightly easier because the Republicans now have an edge in the Electoral College. Like 2016, Trump can lose the popular vote and win the presidency. That option isn’t open to Harris. The election will come down to seven states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina—and there’s a good case for either Trump or Harris in each of those. Both campaigns are within the margin of error of just about every poll.

I have no special insights into this. Perhaps Puerto Ricans will mobilize and doom Trump in Pennsylvania. I’d only caution each side—Democratic and Republican—to not be over-confident. This is not a problem for Democrats anymore. The 2016-era hubris is long gone, as is the joy of Brat Summer. Many liberals, for many months, have been warning about the return of Trump. Many privately fear Harris will lose. In my own left-liberal circles, a soft consensus has formed that Harris is in significant trouble. I’ve certainly been very critical of her campaign. I think, on the basis of candidate quality, she’s among the worst nominees the Democratic Party has fielded in the last thirty years.

That all being said, the Republicans are far too sure of themselves. Trump can win. The betting markets like him. But it’s also easy for him to lose. He’s a lousy candidate, too. He’s not popular. The external conditions all favor him—voters are angry about inflation and immigration, and blame the Biden-Harris administration for it—and he should be, like challengers to incumbent parties across the world, running up the score. Look at what happened to the Conservatives in the United Kingdom. The virtual tie in the polls is a reflection of Trump’s weakness as much as Harris’. A different kind of Republican, a cunning senator or governor, would be disciplined enough to permanently damage her campaign. The de facto victory Harris won in her sole televised clash with Trump was more a reflection of Trump’s blather and lies than any great stratagem on her part. She isn’t that far removed from getting eviscerated by Tulsi Gabbard, of all politicians, during the presidential primaries in 2019.

Enough, though, of this horse-race. Let us take stock of the future. Let us say, in fact, Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States. It is conventional wisdom, on the center-left, that Trump is a fascist, and there is no shortage of talk about how, with another term, he could bring about the end of American democracy as we know it. His campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, even before it was held, was likened to the Nazi assemblage there in the 1930s. Liberals reacted with horror and disgust after both the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times declined to endorse Harris; many echoed the historian Timothy Snyder, who has long warned of an American authoritarian project under Trump, by pointing to how conservative, establishment elites capitulated to Adolf Hitler. We are now in the Weimar era, they say, or we were in it in the last decade but now are entering a dangerous new phase. Project 2025 is one blueprint. Trump’s own words are another warning, as well as those who have worked for him. What is inarguable, if Trump wins, is that he will take special care to install unstinting loyalists and attempt, as much as he can, to stuff MAGA apparatchiks into the upper rungs of federal bureaucracy. His vindictiveness could make his Justice Department especially menacing. Like in the 2010s, he will appoint as many right-wing federal judges as possible, and perhaps get a chance to replace Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas if they strategically retire. Champions of the environment and corporate regulations should despair over a second Trump term. So should anyone who expects anything more from a president who once farmed out his Middle Eastern policy to Jared Kushner. Another Trump presidency would be, above all, damaging to our civic psyche, driving greater wedges between us and breeding further distrust.

None of this equates to fascism. The debate itself is wearying and bound to slowly turn your brain to soup. Instead of arguing to you that Trump is not a fascist, I will make a different proposition, one I feel much more certain about: the United States of Ameria is too big for fascism. Federalism itself is too unwieldy for fascism. The closest we came was on September 12th, 2001, and even then—with the conditions virtually perfect, never again to be repeated—we never teetered into the abyss. There’s a spectral American patriotism that flickers to grander and more terrifying life whenever there’s a war on the horizon. Otherwise, we are a nation of regions and counties and townships, of miniature republics and fiefdoms, each governor an infant fascist if he or she ever dreams big enough. Whenever I try to fathom fascism, I think back to what someone close to me found when she interviewed a World War II veteran who discovered a book of piano music in Nazi Germany that was stamped with a swastika. This, the veteran believed, was the embodiment of fascism: Hitler’s ideology reaching into each crevice of everyday life, subsuming psychology and culture with as much ferocity as it would politics. Hitler dreamed on this scale. Trump does not.

And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. Those who speak of American fascism do it from the airy citadels of media and academia. They barely seem to understand how their country functions. Consider public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve. Any American fascist worth his bright red tie would be able to subdue the schools and begin to teach MAGAdemics, or at least get all those pesky liberal books banned—all of them, because fascism doesn’t demand anything less. In the United States, there are nearly 14,000 separate public school districts with more than 94,000 elected board members. Some of the larger counties, like the battleground of Loudoun in Virginia, have a single board. Others are carved up into so many exhausting and segregated duchies that consensus can never be achieved. On Long Island, among two counties, there are 125 public school districts. A child in Hempstead and a child in Garden City, growing up a short drive from one another, will have radically different educational experiences; they will effectively live, racially and sociologically, in different countries. Either way, whether the school board is wealthy and white or poor and Black, it is designed, for better and often for worse, to resist the encroachment of any federal power. There is no such thing as a centralized education system in America. Beyond doling out cash, the Department of Education does little in this country. Our educational sprawl is Hapsburgian, with no single monarch able to dictate its direction for very long. Moms for Liberty or anything Trump-adjacent can no better cow a Democrat-dominated school board than a liberal politician can suddenly get a district in Mississippi or Alabama to stop banning Gender Queer.

Governance in America has grown sclerotic because, unlike European and Asian countries, it contains so many layers. The counties, the towns, the villages, the townships—so much imitation democracy, much of it persisting to shield accountability and make power as frustratingly diffuse as possible. We cannot, like the government of Japan, simply decide to build cross-country maglev trains. We are incapable of recapturing the glory of midcentury, when the federal government built interstate highways and public housing and sent a man to the moon. What will the American fascist do with all of this? With the fact that in Illinois, alone, there are thousands of local governments? They are hotbeds of corruption. They are no one’s ideal. Yet they are, collectively, a form of resistance, just as all local governance is in America. They are obstacles to progress. They are also obstacles. A fascist far more capable than Trump would stumble in these municipal thickets. There are simply too many, and they do not have to listen to the American president.

The Timothy Snyders of the land never explain how President Trump is supposed to actually make the Democratic governors and legislatures of America listen to him. Most crucial lawmaking is done at the local level. It is state and county governments setting tax rates, managing healthcare networks, and deciding what gets taught in the public schools. Presidents, certainly, can be a hinderance to governors, and there’s no doubt Blue New York or Blue California fares worse under another Trump presidency. The governors could see their federal cash allotments dwindle and find communication with the White House mostly impossible. Any infrastructure project that does require federal approval could be dead on arrival. Speaking of the dead, federalism was awful in the pandemic age. The states could not coordinate a response, and the federal government could not coordinate them. God help America if another virus ravages the land. Trump, ironically enough, had his opportunity to become a home-grown fascist in 2020, with his bevy of emergency powers and the nation, for several weeks at least, too stricken to resist. It was in that catastrophic March when Trump, facing re-election, could have summoned the worst of Lincoln (suspending habeas corpus) and Wilson (the Palmer raids) and imposed his will on the populace. It was all there for the taking. Too febrile, too indolent, he wasn’t up to the task.

Trump will never match the breadth and terror of the Bush regime—such a novelistic twist that the Cheneys are behind Kamala Harris now. If American fascism had a face—and even he, grimacing and grunting, couldn’t entirely subdue this country—it was Dick Cheney’s, and it is difficult for the young to understand what he was able to accomplish in a few short years. Vice President Cheney was the architect of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the open-ended invasions that immolated the Middle East. He was the architect of the modern surveillance state and the torture facilities of Guantanamo. Does Trump have another Patriot Act in him? Likely not—he lacks that sinister ambition, and the people around him do not resemble Bush’s neoconservatives, the Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes who marinated in government for decades before finally getting their chance to wreak havoc in the shadow of the most cataclysmic and surreal terrorist attack in modern history. A month after the September 11th attacks, George W. Bush had an approval rating of 92 percent. That is the kind of world-historical popularity required, at the outset, for fascism—only with such an eruption of good will can American institutions be ground into dust. And Bush got as close as any president would. He didn’t have to deny elections because he won them, beating John Kerry in the Electoral College and popular vote, and he left behind the surveillance machinery that no president, Democrat or Republican, has ever attempted to dismantle. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security. He metastasized the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Once, it was liberals railing against this so-called deep state. Now the right-wing does it, and they may have a point. What hope does their man, Trump, really have against any of the three? What hope against the Pentagon? Even if he were magically gifted with Xi’s pharaonic will, Trump could not overwhelm them.

The Weimar republic, at the time of its dissolution, had barely lasted fourteen years. Putin’s Russia toyed with democracy for ten. Xi’s China has never known anything approaching mass elections. The United States, for all its absurdities and manias, has been a functioning republic for more than two centuries. Just as there will be a presidential election in November, there will be one in 2028. American institutions will not be so easily wiped away. And if they are, it will take more than a flailing former reality TV host to do it. It will take more than the exhaust fumes of MAGA.