Everyone says Trump’s a fascist. What’s a fascist?
After reading historian Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, this movement we now see sweeping the U.S. and much of the Western world makes perfect sense. Paxton’s definition is simple, “fascism is a populist dictatorship against the Left.” But the details of fascism are riveting, proving it ideal for today’s massified, atomized America and our anti-Christian “Christian” Nationalists.
“Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century,” writes Paxton, “and the source of much of its pain. The other major currents of modern Western political culture — conservativism, liberalism, socialism — all reached mature form between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. Fascism was still unimagined as late as the 1890s… The other ‘isms’ were created in an era when politics was a gentleman’s business, conducted through protracted and learned debate among educated men who appealed to each other’s reason as well as their sentiments, producing systems of governance laid out by systematic thinkers… Fascism was not given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major intelligence, like Burke, Locke, Mill, or Tocqueville.” This makes fascism seem flimsy, but as we’ll see, it turns out to be one of its greatest strengths.
Paxton writes, “Fascism was a new invention afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. It rests upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot and rightful predominance over inferior peoples… Fascism is ‘true’ insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen people or blood, locked with others in a Darwinian struggle, not in the light of some abstract and universal reason.” This struggle makes fascism a movement of “violent action, anti-intellectualism, rejection of compromise, and contempt for established society… Fascism changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity so that an individual had no rights outside nationalist politics. It expanded the powers of the executive — party and state — in a bid for total control.” What Paxton calls “the emotional lava that sets fascism’s foundations” include a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond traditional solutions, a group identity of victimization that justifies any means to rectify no matter how immoral, and fear of the group’s extinction. For fascists — in keeping with instinctive primate hierarchy — a national leader “who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s identity” is converted to a Savior as both their general and their Christ. All this is mixed with a thirst for immediate violence as a replacement for patient thought and deliberation, making analysis an act of treachery against the movement.
Fascism not only lacks a philosophical-intellectual foundation, it rejects the need for one as a prophylactic to challenge. This makes self-examination off-limits and the potential for compromise treason. Simultaneously, wide latitude is available for shaping today’s message to suit whatever’s convenient for the moment, mood, and circumstance. The January 6 insurrection can be recast as needed: a great patriotic uprising against the Deep State, a love fest, or denial that it ever happened. This makes fascism fluid. What it is, means, or does is up to the dictator. This mutability is why the “Republican” Party had no platform in 2020. Though a nonbinding display, the long tradition of the platform is a statement of “what we stand for and against.” But under Trump’s conversion, other than opposition to the Left, the party stood for nothing in particular, whatever suited Trump’s daily random stream of pap. (The 2024 platform is a regurgitation of that pap, contradicted by Trump’s repeated contempt for America’s fallen soldiers as “losers and suckers.”)
Always there for the dictator’s reference is, as Paxton puts it, the “conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one’s own community or nation has been the victim… Unlike conservatives and cautious liberals, fascists never wanted to keep the masses out of politics. They wanted to enlist, discipline, and energize them.”
Without ideals, ideology, principles, or values, the strength of fascism comes from its undereducated masses, leveraged by primate emotions to become its jihadists. Stir their blood, not their brain. Mobilization, not persuasion. Those left behind by modernity — and pissed about it — don’t need a textbook.
As we saw in the rants of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, we now see from Trump. With Putin’s help, in two weeks, MAGA is poised to be the new Nazi. The 249-year experiment in the Founder’s Great Idea will finally be dead, an event more significant than the fall of Rome, and we’re here to see it.
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