Fascism in America?

The fascism debate rages on: Here is why it matters, what the main contentions are, and why the arguments of the Skeptics are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right

Far-right protesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, August 2017

Is Donald Trump adequately described as a fascist? Is it helpful – intellectually, diagnostically, politically – to approach Trumpism as a form of fascism, to situate it in the broader historical and ideological tradition of fascism? Or is all this talk about fascism in America misguided and actually dangerous: An insidious form of liberal alarmism meant to distract us from the real problems?

About a month ago, I was drafted into the fascism wars – a debate that has been raging for years and has recently turned pretty nasty. I was invited to discuss the publication of Did It Happen Here? Perspectives of Fascism and America, a collection of essays edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, at an event organized by the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University in DC. The event was moderated by political theorist Laura Field, and my fellow panelists were historian Michal Kazin and Steinmetz-Jenkins himself, an intellectual historian of modern global political thought at Wesleyan University. The anthology presents itself as an attempt to take stock of the fascism debate, at “tracing and understanding the dispute,” as Steinmetz-Jenkins claims in his introduction. But Steinmetz-Jenkins belongs to a group of leftwing intellectuals and academics who believe the fascism talk is, at best, silly – and, more often, dangerous. I am not sure if we have yet settled on a good terminology to describe the opposing camps in this conflict, the proponents of the fascism interpretation vs those who object. I have seen the term “Skeptics” or “Deflationists” used to describe those who reject the fascism argument. Political theorist Corey Robin might be the most vocal Skeptic; other prominent figures in this camp are intellectual historians Daniel Bessner and Samuel Moyn – the latter certainly one of the most established leftwing intellectuals in the country.

The fascism debate has been going on since at least 2016. I admit I have no illusions about building bridges between the different sides – nor is that my overriding goal, as I find myself rather strongly disagreeing with the Skeptics. In fact, I fully expect backlash. And if the way the fascism debate has been conducted so far is any indication, the reactions will probably be quite unpleasant.

Why wade in at all then? I am not a fascism scholar – but I have taught twentieth-century German history for many years as an assistant professor in Germany and, in that position, have also been affiliated with and helped advise many research projects on Nazism and the Holocaust. The current fascism debate ultimately concerns the question of how to interpret and contextualize recent developments on the American Right – and that is precisely where my own focus lies. It is also a conflict over the role of history, historical analogies, and our collective imaginary in contemporary politics. As a historian who spends much of his time pondering these questions, I feel a certain obligation to not simply sit this one out.

I have hesitated for a long time. But for better or worse, being a panelist at last month’s fascism event pulled me into the struggle. And quite frankly, the camp of fascism Skeptics to which Steinmetz-Jenkins belongs has now arrived at propagating a position that is as implausible on substance as it is intellectually problematic. They are carelessly and/or deliberately obscuring the rightwing threat, even if that means advancing claims that lack factual evidence or ignoring radicalizing tendencies on the Right – mostly due to a singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism as the real, the ultimate, the only evil they are willing to address.

If I were to abstain from writing about the fascism debate now, it would be solely because I fear the backlash and the yelling that is likely to come my way. But “Where does this put me in the discourse and who is going to be mad at me?” should not be the overriding concern for anyone who takes their public platform seriously. And so, here we go.

Trajectories of the fascism debate, 2016-2024

Did It Happen Here? is firmly shaped by the “deflationist” perspective: Not only does Steinmetz-Jenkins use his introduction to denounce the fascism interpretation as neurotic and demand we put it to rest; his selection of contributions is heavily indexed towards the argument of the Skeptics. Rather than offering a dispassionate inventory, the anthology is better understood as an attempt by the leftwing critics of the fascism paradigm to regain the upper hand in an increasingly heated debate in which they have been losing ground over the past few years.

The argument that American democracy is facing an acute fascistic threat got a boost when Trump won the 2016 election. As mainstream liberal America was under shock and desperately searching for meaning and orientation, the fascism interpretation propelled certain academic observers like Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley and historian Timothy Snyder, also at Yale, to public intellectual stardom. Yes, this is indeed fascism, and we need to fight it! Stanley and Snyder argued in bestselling books that offered validation for liberal America’s worst fears and anxieties while also serving as rallying cries for the emerging anti-Trump coalition.

However, the pushback against the idea that Trumpism should be considered fascism was strong initially, and a reluctance to apply the term seemed to prevail within academic circles. In early 2017, for instance, Christopher Browning, who has been one of the world’s most prominent Holocaust scholars for decades, declared it “hyperbolic” to compare Trump’s Alt-Right supporters to Nazism. Later that spring, Robert O. Paxton, whose Anatomy of Fascism from 2004 might just be the most cited contribution on the subject in existence, called Trump “an opportunist concerned exclusively with his own celebrity and wealth” and predicted that Trump would seek to establish “generic dictatorship rather than fascism in particular.” Paxton suggested that the most appropriate term for what America was looking at was plutocracy.

However, both Paxton and Browning have reconsidered their positions. After January 6, Paxton declared that the assault on the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Browning finally gave up his resistance in the summer of 2023, when he predicted a second Trump would constitute a “new kind of fascism.” The trajectory of Browning and Paxton is indicative of how the whole debate has developed – the fascism thesis has undoubtedly gained supporters, as Trump himself as well as the American Right more broadly have continued to radicalize. But that hasn’t convinced the leading Skeptics. On the contrary, Corey Robin and co. have only become more convinced that those they deride as “alarmists” are not only foolish, but dangerous.

Framing the fascism debate

I have three preliminary remarks to frame my interpretation of the fascism debate. First, there is no question that the term “fascism” is overused colloquially and in the public discourse. Quite often, it is uttered purely as a slur. Or it is meant to stigmatize something or someone as the ultimate evil. For the term to have any analytical value, we must refrain from approaching the fascism question as if we were looking at a scale from “good/harmless” to “fascism.” That being said, the Skeptics like to focus on the weakest, most outlandish claims, which is intellectually unserious. Let’s not play that game where we present the silliest version of an argument and, on that basis, declare the whole premise invalid.

Secondly, I sympathize, to a certain extent, with the Skeptics’ exasperation. I don’t think I have written anything about the Right in the past few years that didn’t get at least a few dismissive “Uh, that’s a lot of words when you could have just called it fascism and be done with!” responses. Or, worse yet, since I don’t necessarily emphasize the fascism concept in my own explorations of today’s Right, I have been accused of “covering up” for the fascists, as if the substance of the analysis was meaningless unless it came under the fascism headline. In that way, some people have decided that the label alone, irrespective of the accompanying analysis, is a litmus test to be applied to all political and historical interpretation. That’s not helpful, and it is annoying.  

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly: I ultimately don’t care all that much about whether or not someone uses the term fascism, the fascism concept, or deploys the fascism analogy. While I am convinced that certain ideas and strands on the Right, and certainly Trumpism itself, are adequately described as a specifically American, specifically twenty-first-century version of fascism, I’ll repeat that my own interpretation is not centered around the fascism concept. I also don’t think that the European interwar period is the most useful analogy for our political moment: The long domestic struggle over egalitarian pluralism and the intense, often violent counter-mobilization that has defined it is often more instructive. There are people – some with a large public platform – who incessantly use the term fascism while they have evidently no adequate understanding of what is happening on the Right; but there are also people who regard any mention of fascism as pure “alarmism” precisely *because* they have very little grasp of the Right’s past and present. Whether or not someone uses the label fascism is not the key question. What matters is the analysis underneath: Are we getting the diagnosis right?

Finally, I am certainly not claiming to be reinventing the wheel here. On the contrary, what I present here is based on the work of scholars, writers, and commentators who have invested a lot of time and effort into understanding what is happening on the Right. What I hope to offer is an attempt to build on their insights, maybe synthesize the fascism debate, and hopefully provide some overview and guidance for whoever reads this newsletter. There are certainly valuable and interesting contributions included in Did It Happen Here? If you would like to go deeper and get a more balanced perspective on the fascism debate, I suggest starting with an episode of the always excellent Know Your Enemy podcast from shortly after January 6 which, to this day, is probably the most precise, most accessible introduction to the fascism debate and the underlying fascism scholarship. John Ganz has written a whole series of thoughtful, nuanced, historically precise reflections on the fascism question for his Unpopular Front newsletter. Both Geoff Eley and Anna Duensing have weighed in with clarifying pieces from a more strictly academic perspective. Finally, from the latest historical scholarship on the American Right that is devoted to exploring the relationship between mainstream conservatism and rightwing extremism, I will mention recent book publications by David Walsh (Taking America Back), John Huntington (Far-Right Vanguard), and Edward Miller (A Conspiratorial Life); the explorations of how rightwing extremism took over the Republican Party in Oregon that Seth Cotlar provides in his Rightlandia newsletter; and, finally, an essay by Rick Perlstein in the New York Times, published shortly after Trump first entered the White House, that in many ways signaled the beginning of a broader reconceptualization of conservatism’s history. All of them represent a growing consensus among scholars that the “fascism” concept can indeed be helpful in making sense of the anti-democratic radicalization that characterizes today’s Right.  

The analytical debate

We need to distinguish between an analytical and a political dimension of the fascism debate. On the political level, the question is: Is it politically useful – and to whom? To what end? – to call Trump and Trumpism fascism? Or is it, perhaps, politically counter-productive, even dangerous to do so?

The analytical question is a very different one, and ideally, the way we answer it should not be influenced by politics at all: Is it diagnostically a) plausible, and b) helpful to apply the fascism concept? Does the concept offer analytical surplus value by enabling us to make the right connections and distinctions: Does it help us understand Trumpism better if we connect it to, and situate it within, an international (that means, first and foremost, European interwar) or domestic fascist tradition? Does the fascism concept illuminate certain features of Trumpism that make it a distinct phenomenon not to be subsumed as merely a continuation of established reactionary politics?

What makes the analytical debate complicated is the fact that there is no consensus definition of fascism – there are different definitions and approaches, plural. All are derived from studying the “original” or Ur-fascisms of Europe’s interwar period. Unsurprisingly, Nazism in Germany and Mussolini in Italy have gotten the most attention. But there were many fascist movements and parties that varied wildly in popular support and political success. Even if we limit our sample to just this particular historical period, and just Europe, the picture is complicated: Fascism, as contemporaneous observers often remarked, always had an idiosyncratic quality to it, and fascist politics also developed – usually: radicalized – over time, rather than being a static phenomenon.

Fascism scholars have presented many attempts to distill certain elements and conditions that define fascism: An ideological essence, maybe, or a certain style of politics, a form of exerting power; other approaches have focused on the specific economic, social, political circumstances that gave rise to fascism in the first place.

Fascism is one of the most intensely studied political phenomena in world history – yet the resulting picture doesn’t easily lend itself to thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes on whether or not something / someone is fascist. Which and how many of the different elements that characterized Europe’s interwar fascism does a movement or party have to display in order to qualify? How much deviation do we allow? How do we account for evolution over time and variation by culture? “Is Trumpism fascism?” is, from an analytical standpoint, not a question that generates a quick Yes or No answer – it requires a conversation that clarifies terms, grapples with definitions, and weighs the empirical evidence accordingly.  

But let’s not hide behind all this handwringing. The proof is in the pudding: Let me make the case for applying the fascism concept to Trump/Trumpism – before presenting the main counterarguments and reflecting on why I believe they don’t add up to a convincing rebuttal.  

Donald Trump, American fascist

Donald Trump, let’s start here, has a fascistic way of describing the problem – and offers a fascistic solution. According to Trump and those who support him, the country is in decline. It is threatened by outsiders – immigrants, invaders who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, as Trump has put it. The nation is also threatened by the enemy within: Un-American forces of radical leftism and globalist elites. If Trump is to be believed, in order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make it Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be purged. Trump has repeatedly promised to round up and deport 15 million people – a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, explicitly targeting non-white immigrants, necessitating the creation of a federal deportation force unlike anything that currently exists. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” the political theorist Roger Griffin has argued, forms a core myth of fascism – “palingenesis” means re-birth or re-creation, a movement or ideology desiring the rebirth of the nation through revolutionary change.

According to Trump and his supporters, only one man, one providential leader can guide the nation to its re-birth and former glory – “Only I,” Trump likes to say. And this leader comes from outside the conservative establishment. Trump rose to domination within the Republican Party because of a base that developed a fierce personal loyalty to him, bound to him by a cult of personality. Trump delivers the kind of charismatic leadership and radicalizing mass base that reactionary elites have not been able to inspire – but have, for decades, sought (and failed) to harness.

Trumpism regards any opposition to this project of national purification and re-birth as fundamentally illegitimate. It is dogma among Trump’s supporters that he as their leader embodies the will of the true people, the Volk, “real America.” Anyone who dares to object has therefore forfeited the right to be considered “American” in any meaningful sense. How should “real America” deal with those elements who stand in the way of making the nation great again? Trump has consistently embraced, condoned, and invoked vigilante as well as state violence as part of the solution.

While we are undoubtedly confronted with something that is distinct from the historical examples or Ur-fascism, many of the elements that most of the widely cited scholarship lists as fascism’s defining features are present: A specifically American, specifically twenty-first-century version of fascism.

It’s not fascism! Or is it?

Let’s tackle the main counterarguments offered by the Skeptics:

Indispensable conditions for fascism’s rise are missing

This line of argument often comes from Europeanists, specifically from historians of Nazism like Cambridge historian Richard Evans. They usually focus on two specific aspects: First, fascism emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, which had industrialized and “totalized” warfare to a hitherto unknown degree; secondly, fascism arose in response to a strong threat from the Left in the form of popular socialist or communist movements and parties, and the specter of the Russian Revolution provided fertile ground for fascists across Europe to present themselves as guardians against a Bolshevik takeover.

As a historian, I have a strong disposition to be sympathetic towards the argument of historical specificity. But let’s at least acknowledge that we hardly insist on such narrow definitional criteria – “It can’t be X unless it looks exactly like the Ur-X and the circumstances are the same as when Ur-X first emerged” – for other political phenomena. More importantly, the argument that present-day circumstances are so categorically different, that indispensable conditions are missing, doesn’t always hold up. The idea that there is no leftwing “threat” in America, for instance, reveals a lack of engagement with what defines the American Right today. It is empirically true that socialism (in a form that would be recognizable within the European political tradition) and communism are confined to the margins of American politics and have very little popular support. But that is not at all how anyone of significance on the Right sees the current situation. For both the rightwing base as well as large swaths of the conservative establishment, the election of Barack Obama represented precisely that: A rising leftist, socialist threat. Moreover, it has quickly become a key part of rightwing political identity to regard the mass protests after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 as evidence that a violent leftwing assault on America was already underway.

The idea that radical leftist forces are laying siege to America is not something we only find on the kooky fringes. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, for example, openly told the New York Times in December that he indeed believed there was a vast communist conspiracy across government. In fact, that is the diagnosis from which all the rightwing planning efforts for a second Trump presidency starts. “Project 2025,” for instance, is entirely conceived as an effort to counter the “woke” Left’s supposed takeover of all major institutions of American life by mobilizing and weaponizing the enormous powers of government. We have no chance to even come close to understanding what is animating the Right’s accelerating anti-democratic radicalization if we simply dismiss the idea of an acute leftist threat as meaningless propaganda that no one on the Right *actually* believes. Instead, we need to grapple with the permission structure that governs conservative politics: Anything is justified in defense against what they see as a radically “Un-American,” extremist “Left” that has supposedly taken over the Democratic Party, the government, and the major institutions that are determining America’s future.

Trump is too weak to be a fascist

The argument that Trump is simply too weak to be a fascist has been made most forcefully by Corey Robin, who gets the final word in Steinmetz-Jenkins’ collection. Fascism, to Robin, “is a politics of strength and will,” which supposedly contrasts with Trumpism’s weakness. As Robin put it in an interview in Jewish Currents in December 2020: “It seems so strange to me that people spoke so much of authoritarianism under Trump when what we’ve been seeing for years now, including the Trump years, is political impotence, the absence of political will.” According to Robin, the institutions – Congress, the courts, the media – proved stronger, able to contain him.

It is certainly true that Trump did not end the American Republic in one fell swoop: He was ultimately removed from power after a presidency that the Right itself now regards as a massive disappointment. Measured by a specific and rather narrow definition of “weakness,” therefore, Trump may indeed have been a weak president. Then again, he has been the defining figure in Republican politics for almost a decade now, no one has even come close to dislodging him as the leader of the Right, and his hold over the Republican Party is so strong that no crime nor scandal has been enough for the GOP to turn on him.

And even if Trumpism is “weak,” does that mean it cannot be fascism? There are actually a lot of rather unsuccessful fascistic movements in history. Making Hitler and Mussolini the fascistic norm and disqualifying anything that didn’t lead to a totalitarian dictatorship is entirely ahistorical. Robin has rejected this criticism: He argues that only a comparison to fascist regimes in power is admissible, as Trump already had four years in the White House. This suggests a weirdly static perspective on Trump and the Right more broadly, however. No one understands better than the Right itself that they weren’t ready in 2017. When they first rose to power, Trump world had no concrete plans, no personnel to implement them, and very little understanding of the vast and powerful machine that is the American government. They are determined not to let that happen again and eliminate all the hurdles that slowed them down – sabotaged them, as they see it – in Trump’s first presidency. They will be much better prepared next time and would also operate under conditions that are vastly more favorable to their cause. The next rightwing regime could count on a game-changing reactionary supermajority on the Supreme Court. Moreover, this would be a very different Right from the one that came to power in 2017. That starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures how he has been making ever more bizarre promises and has become fully unhinged. Beyond Trump, the Right’s significant radicalization has found its manifestation in an almost fully Trumpified GOP and an institutional infrastructure as well as an intellectual sphere that have adopted far more extreme positions. Finally, resistance to the rightwing regime – not just coming from “the Left,” but also potentially fueled by whatever resistance still remains among Republicans – would face a level of violent threat far beyond anything the country experienced during the first Trump presidency. None of this means that the Right will be able to implement all their plans just as they have outlined them. But to simply dismiss the first Trump presidency as weak and then declare we shouldn’t expect anything but more of the same in the future is all too casual.

There is no tightly organized fascistic movement around Trump

Fair enough, the American Right doesn’t have anything of the quality or on the scale of the fascistic mass organizations in Nazi Germany or Mussolini Italy. But there are militant extremist rightwing groups loosely affiliated with Trump and the Republican Party. The existence of such alt-right, neo-Nazi, or white power groups is not a new phenomenon. But it is significant that the rightwing extremist fringe went all in on Trump in a way it certainly hadn’t for leading Republican politicians in decades. Their position within the Right and in relation to the power centers of the Republican Party has shifted rather dramatically; they now see themselves, and are viewed by Trump and his supporters, as part of a new rightwing coalition. When the fascists – and I am referring to self-regarding neo-Nazis here – are excited about a politician and view his rise as a game-changing event in American history, certainly that is not something we ought to just dismiss entirely?

Trump is not using violence systematically

Again, if the premise is that it cannot be fascism unless we are dealing with the same form, quality, and quantity of state and paramilitary violence that characterized the late Weimar Republic and was a constitutive element of Nazi rule, then there is not much of a discussion to be had. But such a reductive perspective obscures the significant rise in political violence in the United States. Every election worker in the country now faces a barrage of violent threat, every Republican politician daring to mount any kind of resistance against Trump knows they’ll become a target. In fact, all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence. Just a few days ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, and Republican-led states are legalizing violence against left-coded protesters by so-called “riot laws.” Leading Republicans are sending the message that lethal violence against their ideological enemy is fine, and they are encouraging white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence. It is certainly not a coincidence that a rapidly increasing percentage of Americans, especially on the Right, regard political violence as not only justified, but urgently necessary.

Much of the Skeptics’ argument relies on a view of Trump, Trumpism, and the Right that seemingly hasn’t been updated in quite a while. Trump, it is true, didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to blue cities in order to suppress the mass protests of 2020. But he and all his supporters now consistently bring this up as their biggest regret and a mistake they are not going to make again. Trump’s advisors also dream of a massive deportation force that would scour the country, searching for those the regime wants to purge from the nation. All this certainly sounds like someone who is itching to mobilize the coercive powers of the state, and is willing to unleash an enormous level of violence against the enemies of his particular vision for America?

Trump has no coherent ideology

This is often the first thing people bring up in response to the suggestion there might be something fascistic about Trump: He is too lazy, he doesn’t care about anything but himself, his only goal is to enrich himself. I find both the underlying idea of what constitutes fascism as well as the guiding assumption about what’s happening on the Right unpersuasive. The lack of ideological rigor would be more convincing as a counterargument if a lot of fascism scholarship hadn’t emphasized that ideological coherence wasn’t really something most original fascisms in interwar Europe displayed either.

The argument is also focused too much on Trump himself, while ignoring the mobilization of rightwing forces around him. The most overtly Trumpist part of the reactionary intellectual sphere, which has found an institutional home at and around the Claremont Institute, is explicitly and aggressively engaged in providing a kind of ideological basis and justification for the “counter-revolution” they hope Trump will unleash. The Heritage Foundation as the most powerful rightwing think tank has united much of the conservative machinery behind “Project 2025,” an unprecedented planning effort aimed at installing a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. Granted, this particular wannabe-providential leader himself is not sitting down to dictate his manifesto. But the people behind “Project 2025” and those in the Claremont orbit are animated by a very clear worldview and vision for the country. They see themselves as noble defenders of “real America” against a totalitarian assault from “the Left.” They are driven by a desperate sense that nothing short of a reactionary “counter-revolution” will suffice to save the nation from the onslaught of anti-American “woke,” “globalist” forces. And they offer a promise to restore former national glory by purging enemies and deviants from the nation.

Isn’t this all just reactionary politics as usual, rather than evidence of a revolutionary political project?

When I referenced the recent trajectories of the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation at last month’s panel discussion with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, he argued that, since “these groups have been around forever,” they should be regarded as evidence that what is happening on the Right is entirely a continuation of established conservative politics – “unless there’s been some huge ideological revolution.” He added that last part not so much as a sincere question, but because he was evidently convinced that no such “revolution” was underway. That, however, reveals a rather profound misreading of the rightwing political and ideological landscape.

The argument is not that every institution of establishment conservatism has been wiped away and replaced by fascist structures. The point is that, first of all, fascist elements exist in a coalition with established reactionary and conservative forces – as was the case in every European country in which fascism emerged in the interwar period – and are increasingly in charge of that alliance. In fact, the chances of fascist movements and parties rising to power depended almost entirely on whether or not the established Right decided to make common cause with the extremists, thereby mainstreaming and elevating them. That is certainly a dynamic that is shaping American politics today. 

Secondly, anyone who has actually paid attention to what has been going on at the Heritage Foundation and, specifically, the Claremont Institute must be puzzled by the suggestion that they present evidence *against* the argument of a profound transformation of conservative politics. Their recent trajectory is among the clearest indications we have of how much the power centers of conservative politics have radicalized, how much a lust for “counter-revolution” has come to define today’s Right.

This “counter-revolution” entails a strikingly open renunciation of the supposed pillars of modern conservative thought. The general sentiment that it is no longer enough to be “conservative,” that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics, is being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of conservative politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with conservatives to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

The radical political project that emerges here cannot be captured by the platitudes with which modern post-war conservatism has usually been described since the 1950s or in the terms in which conservatives themselves have presented their cause. As Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker Glen Ellmers put it in an infamous essay published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021: “Conservatism is no longer enough.” Fittingly, the piece was published with a picture of a very manly-looking guy taping his fists, getting ready for a fight. Ellmers certainly embraced the idea of mobilizing the coercive powers of the state. But he also went much further, outlining a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers derided them as “zombies” and “human rodents.” For “authentic America” to survive, Ellmers was sure, a different kind of leader needed to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.”

This desire for a savior figure who can deliver the nation comes in different forms and guises. Talk of an American “Caesar” who can stem the tide of woke Liberalism and wipe away the system is all the rage on the Right. In any case, influential circles on the Right are ready to openly discard even the pretensions of democracy and constitutional self-government. 

The Skeptics choose ignorance in service of a political crusade

There were always openly racist, antisemitic, conspiratorial, radically anti-democratic, aggressively militant forces on the Right. Extremist ideas and groups have always been a constitutive element of the modern conservative movement, they were never fully ostracized from the modern conservative political project. But their relationship to the rightwing mainstream, their relative standing within what historian David Walsh calls the rightwing popular front, has changed. The conservative mainstream and its leading institutions have significantly radicalized, to the point where they are now openly and aggressively accommodating and elevating extremism. And the extremists have moved towards the center of conservative politics, they have in many ways become dominant and are increasingly defining the Right’s agenda.

I want to repeat the point I made in the beginning: I don’t think foregrounding the fascism terminology, concept, and historical analogy is the only way to adequately capture these developments on the Right. But it is certainly plausible to describe these increasingly influential strands of extremism, and Trumpism as its most visible expression and rallying point, as a specifically American, specifically twenty-first century version of fascism. If nothing else, reflecting on these tendencies on the Right as variants of fascism allows us – forces us – to properly grapple with what is happening over there. Meanwhile, the Skeptics’ position that it cannot and must not be fascism, that all fascism talk is silly, hysterical, and dangerous, relies specifically on *not* grappling with these tendencies. It is, in fact, built on either a lack of awareness or a deliberate decision to ignore them.

From a historical or analytical standpoint, there is no justification for this stubborn refusal to engage seriously with the fascism argument and the radicalizing tendencies it emphasizes. So, what is animating the fascism Skeptics on the Left, then? A week after January 6, Samuel Moyn posted something interesting on ex-Twitter: “FWIW, my reluctance was and is rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of the likely political consequences of certain framings.” This, I believe, hints at what is actually going on: The Skeptics’ overriding concern is not to get the diagnosis right. They are engaged in a political struggle against what they believe is the real enemy: The (neo-) liberal establishment. In their view, Liberals are using the “fascism” bogeyman as a way to distract from their own culpability; to discipline the Left into accepting a popular front under liberal leadership; to reinvigorate the (neo-) liberal project by conjuring fears of the ultimate evil, as that is bound to make people flock to the liberal cause; to expand their power by using tyrannophobia (which, according to Samuel Moyn, is the far more urgent danger to democracy) as a way of entrenching liberal rule. To the Skeptics, the fascism talk is just liberal dishonesty, self-exculpation, and self-aggrandizement. Their devotion to this anti-liberal struggle makes them rationalize backwards from their preferred outcome. And it has led them to propagating a position that is increasingly untethered from what is actually happening on the Right.

I will have much more to say about this in a second part, hopefully tomorrow, in which I am going to focus on the Skeptics’ anti-liberal crusade and provide more concrete examples of how that has distorted their perspective. But there is a word limit to what email providers are willing to send out as a newsletter (we are over 6,000 words in!), not to mention a limit of how much time any reasonable person is willing to invest into reading an essay like this… and I believe I have probably crossed both a while ago. This is, therefore, where Part I must end.

Here is a link to Part II of my exploration of the fascism debate, in which I focus on how prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right.