Bestiaries of fascism

Time to bear witness

The bitterness of the defeated South tended to express itself in the study of history.

—Robert O. Paxton

I feel I got in early on the sort of palliative care highlighted in the above epigram.

The history of the Weimar Republic—leading into the overthrow of German democracy—rhymes so well with the unfolding disaster of Trumpism that it is impossible to ignore. (Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it, and all that.) Nonetheless, over the last few years, I have had some sympathy with commentators who have claimed that using the word fascist wasn’t appropriate or was at least risky: not because it wasn’t true, but because of its limited purchase as a line of attack.

Comparison is "a way of thinking more than a method," and it works better when we try to account for differences than when we try to amass vague resemblances."

Historian Robert O. Paxton says in this fascinating profile, “the word was used with such abandon — ‘everyone you don’t like is a fascist,’ he said — that it had lost its power to illuminate.”¹

But that was then and this is now and now I think it is important to call the fascist a fascist. If we don’t, we risk normalising a Trump administration that is already dangerously normalised and still to reveal its true intent.

What we should learn from history is that you don’t give people like the Trump the benefit of the doubt. The history books are full of examples of Jews who, even in the late 1930s, resolved to stay in Germany on the grounds that Hitler would never actually do what he had made perfectly clear he would do. The same was true of newspapers and political leaders around the world who appeased and excused Hitler right up until the outbreak of war. Even then, they remained in convenient denial about the emergence of the death camps and were less than expedient in the help they provided to those Jews still able to flee.

The point is, if you don’t have the right language with which to discuss what is happening, then you can’t properly respond to what is happening.

We are seeing this writ large now in the way in which the world is responding to the ongoing tragedy in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring countries. The singular failure of world leaders and the mainstream media to use words like “ethnic cleansing”, “genocide” or “apartheid” not only makes it impossible to properly confront what the Netanyahu government is doing and planning to do, the failure to use accurate language is also designed precisely to avoid an adequate response.

UN Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, nailed it other day when she was asked why she thinks Western governments refuse to use the word apartheid.

“Because apartheid is a crime. And recognising it as a crime carries responsibilities – responsibilities to stop it, not to engage with it, to take actions including justice.”

Or as Alex McKinnon argues, “Israel and its proxies demand their liberal defenders loudly and enthusiastically disseminate whatever new horseshit they've come up with, knowing that making them do so ties their political fortunes ever more closely together.”

Of course those defenders won’t use the vocabulary of apartheid or ethnic cleansing or genocide.

When it comes to Trump, we must say fascism

The fascism of Trump will be different to the fascism of Hitler (or Mussolini or whomever else) because, strictly speaking, fascism isn’t an “ism”. This is the point Robert O. Paxton makes in his book The Anatomy of Fascism:

“Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”

This fuzziness leads, inevitably, to contradictions, disorganisation, and discrepancy, but spare me from what I suspect will be endless gotchas in leftist-liberal commentary as Trump and company say one thing and do another. His regime will not unfold neatly and we shouldn’t focus relentlessly on such inconsistencies but rather on the underlying fascism.

Centring what happens as fascism, however Trump’s program rolls out, will keep us focussed.

Paxton also points to something else we should keep in mind in terms of where we direct our ire:

The fascist leaders who have reached power, historically, have been condemned to govern in association with the conservative elites who had opened the gates to them. This sets up a four-way struggle for dominance among the leader, his party (whose militants clamor for jobs, perquisites, expansionist adventures, and the fulfillment of elements of the early radical program), the regular state functionaries such as police commanders and magistrates, and the traditional elites—churches, the army, the professions, and business leaders. This four-way tension is what gives fascist rule its characteristic blend of febrile activism and shapelessness."

This is a useful reminder as endless post-election articles are being produced blaming ordinary citizens for Trump’s ascendance. The truth is, Trump’s fascism, like all fascisms, is impossible without the support of self-serving elites, whether they are bureaucrats, politicians, judges, media owners, or dancing billionaires and other members of the business class.

World leaders too, including our own prime minister, have been tweeting their obsequious congratulations, dragging us all into that now fascistic zone of influence (as if we weren’t in it already).

Elon Musk appears next to Donald Trump on a rally stage in Butler, Pennsylvania on October 5. (REUTERS)

Yes, Trump has a cult-like following, but his ascension would’ve been impossible without the capitulation of, first and foremost, the Republican Party, but also many other members of the political class, in the US and around the world.

Blame them first.

In the year 2025

As I’ve noted before, the Trump administration, if it is to carry out its deportation plans, will need a network of concentration camps to manage the process, though, of course, they will not call them that. The risk with such places, apart from the obvious—the immediate use case—is that they create extrajudicial spaces in which the rule of law is suspended. This invites a sort of entrepreneurial violence that is dispersed, uncontrollable, but sanctioned.²

This sort of fascism, in other words, unleashes cadres of willing executioners who see their role as fulfilling the leader’s wishes. It is what Ian Kershaw, borrowing a term coined by a Nazi functionary in 1939, calls “working towards the Fuhrer”.

Volker Ullrick explains in his Hitler biography:

Those who wanted to get ahead in this system could not wait for orders from above, but rather had to anticipate the Führer’s will and take action to prepare and promote what they thought to be Hitler’s intentions.

Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Hitler Biographies Book 1) (pp. 752-753). Random House.

It is clarifying to recognise that Trump comes to power in 2025 with more democratic authority than Hitler ever had. Young Adolf’s assumption of the chancellorship in 1933 happened when support for his party was falling (at successive elections that year) and he was gifted the role as chancellor—he was seen as an easily controllable compromise candidate—as the various rightwing factions were trying to consolidate against the broad left of the Reichstag. As Robert Paxton said in the article linked above, “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base. Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

God, this is getting dark, isn’t it?

We can take some comfort from the fact that, for all its faults, the United States is a more stable democracy than Weimar Germany and therefore Trump’s path to authoritarianism can still be roadblocked. Not every person and institution has yet capitulated, and the more honest they are now in recognising what they are up against—call it fascism!—the stronger the resistance will be.

The final stage of Paxton’s five-stage analysis of how fascism develops is, in fact, “radicalisation or entropy” and we can take enough heart from Trump’s basic incompetence to believe that entropy is more likely than radicalisation, that things will fall apart for Trump rather than consolidate.

The arc of the universe may or may not bend towards justice, but there is a certain lived human reality that not even a megalomaniac like Trump cannot get away from.

Vaclav Havel, speaking of another authoritarian regime, noted that “The aims of the system reveal its most essential characteristic to be …a movement toward being ever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means that the radius of its influence is continually widening as well. This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itself.”

Such centres do not hold.

Havel, therefore, also pointed out in the same essay that “Between the aims of the totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss,” and while the totalitarian system “demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline”, nonetheless, “life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization, in short, toward the fulfilment of its own freedom…”

Whether we like it or not, we are now witnesses and messengers to an unfolding catastrophe. To respond successfully, we need to use the right words and not shy away the confrontation that accurate language demands. In short, we can’t resist Trump if we are going to hide behind euphemisms.

Call it fascism.

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1. Paxton changed his mind after the events of 6 January 2020, although, as you would expect from one of the great historians of fascism, he uses the term judiciously.

2. If one thing connects the various iterations of fascism throughout history and throughout the world, it is the centrality of a common enemy, what Paxton calls “the indispensable enemy”. The target will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and while Trump is currently most focussed on “immigrants”, his “indispensable enemy” is most likely to hone in on some idea of the “woke liberal.” They will be the Jews of Trumpism. (And yes, I know “woke” is, rightly, a disputed term, but I am using it here as Trump does. Its vagueness is central to its power.)