Excellent piece. If Trump wins again, I won't like it. But I won't make the same mistake I did in his first term by getting over-emotional all the time. I'm committing to a more stoic approach.
This is an exceptional take, one I largely subscribe to (and appreciate as a counterweight to the needless hysteria). It also frames the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in a way I hadn't considered. Great piece.
Beautifully put. American institutions are absolutely terrible for getting anything accomplished - and that was always intentional. In normal times that is a giant pain in the ass. But when you have someone fascist-leaning in charge, you appreciate it.
Solid piece. As a Democratic elected official at the local level I agree that the structural complexities and inefficiencies of American government can help us blunt the impact of a Trump win. Beyond regurgitating the same doomsday Death of Democracy campaign rhetoric there has been almost no discussion on the left about what Trump will actually try to do and how we can stop him. To even suggest that we can save ourselves and the republic if Trump wins is treated like defeatism or, even worse, colluding with the enemy. Sadly this superstitious fear of realistically game planning a resistance will only lead to Democrats being more confused and disorganized if Trump wins, making him more capable of executing whatever fascist plots he is hatching.
You are not wrong that implementing "authentic" fascism like Nazi Germany's will be more effort than it is worth to the dodderer. But Pee Wee Goebbels certainly is committed to starting the process. I think that the legitimate fear is that once he wins we never see any other opportunity to derail the massive unmaking of the country the is in the wings.
The Department of Education does not only distribute funds; it also collects all kinds of data that is used to justify those funds. I don't think that you grasp how badly school districts want/need those funds, and to claim that there are blocks to those funds in favor of local decision making is. . .not right.
In the end, though, this is "it's sparkling authoritarianism" at its worst. Things will be bad. They will be very very bad. They may not be "Gestapo spying on everyone and disappearing all resistance" bad but that isn't really going to matter for the degree of chaos and suffering that will be unleashed if Trump wins, even as much of it will be ineffectual in the long run. It's clear that enough is already broken to justify avoiding even on more thing being more broken.
You sound just like Germans 1930-33, after all, Germany is civilized, highly cultured, this Hitler is only a blip, soon to be replaced by the elites… when you find yourself on a “list” and threatened with a term in a reeducation camp you’ll bemoan your trust in our system
Germany in 1933 was civilized, highly cultured…and an economic basket case, subject to constant reminders of its humiliating loss in a war that killed 3% of its population, and experiencing periodic strikes, bombings, and uprisings by Communists that its weak, infant democracy had no effective response to.
Even in America’s darkest hours, we’ve never come close to the conditions that led to fascism in Germany, Italy, or Spain.
Thank you for this. I've have similiar thoughts. As for Harris being a weak candidate, I agree. I think, however, for many, that the anti-Trump fury has created exaggerated praise for Harris (and some attacks by our fellow Harris-voters when we publicly voice our concerns about Harris' electability). Anecdotally speaking, I'd guess that significantly more than half of my left-leaning friends and family wish that we had a stronger candidate, especially one that had won a contested primary. I still have the (goofy?) wish that there had been a highly cinematic delegate battle at the Democratic National Convention. And, yeah, I would've loved to have seen a Whitmer/Warnock slate...which would probably be running 50/50 (or maybe 52-48!) against Trump in the swing states.
Just simple historicism, based on poor analogies. The Nazis didn't come for the songbooks, the composers worked towards the Nazis. Victor Klemperer relates a story from 1934, right after the Enabling Act, when his cat fancy magazine ran an article about "the Aryan Cat." Hitler didn't ask for that, some editor did, perhaps out of sincere belief, perhaps thinking the times had just changed and cat fancy had to keep up. We could easily pass a tipping point like this, when all of your school boards and states voluntarily work towards the rulers, seize the levers of state coercion, and crush the opposition.
Beyond that, iIt would take perhaps a few military leaders ignoring their oaths to the constitution.
The idea that these things cannot happen is naive.
When you describe control of school boards, you are describing "totalitarianism," which is not fascism, but rather a particular subset of fascism. About European fascism Umberto Eco writes, "It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat."
About Italian fascism in particular he notes that, "There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line.... All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust). The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations."
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
What happens then, if Trump is defeated, but there’s still a large contingent of fans willing to latch onto a successor such as Vance? I’m worried that there are dozens of millions of such devotees out there, and that their organization, decentralized as it is, will still revolve around the tenets of national rebirth under a militaristic strongman invested in racial supremacy and appeals to law and order, tradition and violence as an ends. Will the MAGA mind virus still fester within the GOP at large, with its memetic power? Will we see something like the Years of Lead, or late May 1968, or the Troubles, brought onto our shores? Or will the McConnell and Romney acolytes put a lid on it all? Or will DeSantis and Hawley and Ramaswamy tackle Vance in an ugly, ego-filled, farcical brawl?
This is an excellent corrective. Trump is more of a nickel-and-dime caudillo by nature. The Democrats with their lawfare, state-NGO censorship apparatus, and political weaponization of the intelligence agencies, are the more fascist ones, if anyone is.
Let’s assume that one agrees with the author that fears of Trump-led fascism are hysterical and overstated. And further assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Bush-Cheney wing of Republicanism was worse in some sense than Trump and his white nationalist cronies. Mr. Barkan is welcome to pound away on these two points, as he has done for some time. Neither point makes me feel much better about the terrible damage that Trump, Trumpism, and Trump’s supporters have caused and will continue to cause if he is returned to office (or defeated). So it’s not Stalinism, Nazi Germany, or Maoism. Bush was a more damaging free-market imperialist? So what?Trump is plenty awful on his own terms.
Perhaps you’ve not noticed the hallmarks of pending fascism: installation of political leadership committed to one person, obsequious kowtowing by business leaders, and the building of nationwide organizations aimed at enforcing the soon-to-be enforced dogma.
I think when the for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the former chief of staff, BOTH say Trump has fascist, despotic leanings, it’s time to listen and take it seriously.
Sure, we’ll still have our jobs and families, and probably continue our lives as before initially. But this country will be profoundly and dramatically altered and that will lead to a huge difference in the way we live in the coming years. The most famous fascist in history took control of his government (without winning a majority) in 1933…it took a little while for the full image to be clear.
I was spoke to a former German Army soldier who settled in the U.S. after being released from a POW camp in Canada. He had a portrait of Hitler in his dining room and said to me, “You know, that Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy. He built camps for old people to go to.”
Fascism as an ideology in history is inseparable from the rise of the nation state, not actually some eternal and natural sociopolitical unit but a highly contingent thing that crystallised in Europe somewhere between the Treaty of Westphalia and Louis XVI's return from Varennes. The only time something like fascism has been imposed on an imperial scale to any degree of success is contemporary China - and, as Ross alludes to here, that comes with enough asterisks to make a small galaxy. (Even Russia, for all its apparent contiguous mass, is really one relatively dense country with a massive colonial hinterland for resource extraction.)
Fascism is just not the word to describe authoritarianism in the United States, as it would be for an authoritarian EU, the Ottoman Caliphate, the Mughal state or indeed the Roman Empire. It's not an accident that it arose when it did largely out of the national neuroses of newly-minted 'nations' like Italy and Germany. Yes, ideology is about ideas, but ideas are also partly about scale (as a lot of those with scars from debates about left 'universalism' will know too well), and just because Trump Is Bad In These Ways, it doesn't make him the same type of thing.
Excellent piece. If Trump wins again, I won't like it. But I won't make the same mistake I did in his first term by getting over-emotional all the time. I'm committing to a more stoic approach.
This is an exceptional take, one I largely subscribe to (and appreciate as a counterweight to the needless hysteria). It also frames the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in a way I hadn't considered. Great piece.
Beautifully put. American institutions are absolutely terrible for getting anything accomplished - and that was always intentional. In normal times that is a giant pain in the ass. But when you have someone fascist-leaning in charge, you appreciate it.
Solid piece. As a Democratic elected official at the local level I agree that the structural complexities and inefficiencies of American government can help us blunt the impact of a Trump win. Beyond regurgitating the same doomsday Death of Democracy campaign rhetoric there has been almost no discussion on the left about what Trump will actually try to do and how we can stop him. To even suggest that we can save ourselves and the republic if Trump wins is treated like defeatism or, even worse, colluding with the enemy. Sadly this superstitious fear of realistically game planning a resistance will only lead to Democrats being more confused and disorganized if Trump wins, making him more capable of executing whatever fascist plots he is hatching.
You are not wrong that implementing "authentic" fascism like Nazi Germany's will be more effort than it is worth to the dodderer. But Pee Wee Goebbels certainly is committed to starting the process. I think that the legitimate fear is that once he wins we never see any other opportunity to derail the massive unmaking of the country the is in the wings.
The Department of Education does not only distribute funds; it also collects all kinds of data that is used to justify those funds. I don't think that you grasp how badly school districts want/need those funds, and to claim that there are blocks to those funds in favor of local decision making is. . .not right.
Diane Ravitch notes that Project 2025 intends to gut public education and its funding in this country, but has some very disordered and unlikely ideas about how to do it, as you note: https://dianeravitch.net/2024/10/29/brookings-institution-what-project-2025-means-for-education/
In the end, though, this is "it's sparkling authoritarianism" at its worst. Things will be bad. They will be very very bad. They may not be "Gestapo spying on everyone and disappearing all resistance" bad but that isn't really going to matter for the degree of chaos and suffering that will be unleashed if Trump wins, even as much of it will be ineffectual in the long run. It's clear that enough is already broken to justify avoiding even on more thing being more broken.
You sound just like Germans 1930-33, after all, Germany is civilized, highly cultured, this Hitler is only a blip, soon to be replaced by the elites… when you find yourself on a “list” and threatened with a term in a reeducation camp you’ll bemoan your trust in our system
Germany in 1933 was civilized, highly cultured…and an economic basket case, subject to constant reminders of its humiliating loss in a war that killed 3% of its population, and experiencing periodic strikes, bombings, and uprisings by Communists that its weak, infant democracy had no effective response to.
Even in America’s darkest hours, we’ve never come close to the conditions that led to fascism in Germany, Italy, or Spain.
Fascism is creeping across Europe today, we maybe next
Thank you for this. I've have similiar thoughts. As for Harris being a weak candidate, I agree. I think, however, for many, that the anti-Trump fury has created exaggerated praise for Harris (and some attacks by our fellow Harris-voters when we publicly voice our concerns about Harris' electability). Anecdotally speaking, I'd guess that significantly more than half of my left-leaning friends and family wish that we had a stronger candidate, especially one that had won a contested primary. I still have the (goofy?) wish that there had been a highly cinematic delegate battle at the Democratic National Convention. And, yeah, I would've loved to have seen a Whitmer/Warnock slate...which would probably be running 50/50 (or maybe 52-48!) against Trump in the swing states.
Just simple historicism, based on poor analogies. The Nazis didn't come for the songbooks, the composers worked towards the Nazis. Victor Klemperer relates a story from 1934, right after the Enabling Act, when his cat fancy magazine ran an article about "the Aryan Cat." Hitler didn't ask for that, some editor did, perhaps out of sincere belief, perhaps thinking the times had just changed and cat fancy had to keep up. We could easily pass a tipping point like this, when all of your school boards and states voluntarily work towards the rulers, seize the levers of state coercion, and crush the opposition.
Beyond that, iIt would take perhaps a few military leaders ignoring their oaths to the constitution.
The idea that these things cannot happen is naive.
I think you're conflating totalitarianism and fascism. It's going to be more like modern day Turkey or Hungary than East Germany.
When you describe control of school boards, you are describing "totalitarianism," which is not fascism, but rather a particular subset of fascism. About European fascism Umberto Eco writes, "It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat."
About Italian fascism in particular he notes that, "There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line.... All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust). The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Summarizing Eco, Open Culture, at https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html, writes,
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
This is comforting for some, but to me, it reads as speculation.
What happens then, if Trump is defeated, but there’s still a large contingent of fans willing to latch onto a successor such as Vance? I’m worried that there are dozens of millions of such devotees out there, and that their organization, decentralized as it is, will still revolve around the tenets of national rebirth under a militaristic strongman invested in racial supremacy and appeals to law and order, tradition and violence as an ends. Will the MAGA mind virus still fester within the GOP at large, with its memetic power? Will we see something like the Years of Lead, or late May 1968, or the Troubles, brought onto our shores? Or will the McConnell and Romney acolytes put a lid on it all? Or will DeSantis and Hawley and Ramaswamy tackle Vance in an ugly, ego-filled, farcical brawl?
What should the left do then?
This is an excellent corrective. Trump is more of a nickel-and-dime caudillo by nature. The Democrats with their lawfare, state-NGO censorship apparatus, and political weaponization of the intelligence agencies, are the more fascist ones, if anyone is.
Let’s assume that one agrees with the author that fears of Trump-led fascism are hysterical and overstated. And further assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Bush-Cheney wing of Republicanism was worse in some sense than Trump and his white nationalist cronies. Mr. Barkan is welcome to pound away on these two points, as he has done for some time. Neither point makes me feel much better about the terrible damage that Trump, Trumpism, and Trump’s supporters have caused and will continue to cause if he is returned to office (or defeated). So it’s not Stalinism, Nazi Germany, or Maoism. Bush was a more damaging free-market imperialist? So what?Trump is plenty awful on his own terms.
Perhaps you’ve not noticed the hallmarks of pending fascism: installation of political leadership committed to one person, obsequious kowtowing by business leaders, and the building of nationwide organizations aimed at enforcing the soon-to-be enforced dogma.
I think when the for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the former chief of staff, BOTH say Trump has fascist, despotic leanings, it’s time to listen and take it seriously.
Sure, we’ll still have our jobs and families, and probably continue our lives as before initially. But this country will be profoundly and dramatically altered and that will lead to a huge difference in the way we live in the coming years. The most famous fascist in history took control of his government (without winning a majority) in 1933…it took a little while for the full image to be clear.
For most Germans, they were able to go on with their lives pretty much unaltered until 1939.
I was spoke to a former German Army soldier who settled in the U.S. after being released from a POW camp in Canada. He had a portrait of Hitler in his dining room and said to me, “You know, that Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy. He built camps for old people to go to.”
I asked him if they ever came back…🤷🏻♂️
Fascism as an ideology in history is inseparable from the rise of the nation state, not actually some eternal and natural sociopolitical unit but a highly contingent thing that crystallised in Europe somewhere between the Treaty of Westphalia and Louis XVI's return from Varennes. The only time something like fascism has been imposed on an imperial scale to any degree of success is contemporary China - and, as Ross alludes to here, that comes with enough asterisks to make a small galaxy. (Even Russia, for all its apparent contiguous mass, is really one relatively dense country with a massive colonial hinterland for resource extraction.)
Fascism is just not the word to describe authoritarianism in the United States, as it would be for an authoritarian EU, the Ottoman Caliphate, the Mughal state or indeed the Roman Empire. It's not an accident that it arose when it did largely out of the national neuroses of newly-minted 'nations' like Italy and Germany. Yes, ideology is about ideas, but ideas are also partly about scale (as a lot of those with scars from debates about left 'universalism' will know too well), and just because Trump Is Bad In These Ways, it doesn't make him the same type of thing.