The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem

Prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right

An anti-fascist popular front demonstration in France in February 1934

This is Part II of my deep dive into the fascism debate. Part I offered an extensive reflection on the stakes, the scholarship, the key arguments, and the politics of the question of whether or not Trumpism is best understood as fascism. Before you get into this Part II, in which I focus specifically on the Skeptics’ anti-liberal crusade, I strongly suggest reading Part I, as we are picking it up right where we left off:

A week after January 6, Samuel Moyn, one of the country’s most prominent leftwing public intellectuals, posted something interesting on ex-Twitter, explaining why he objected to applying the fascism concept and terminology to Trumpism: “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 remark hints at what is really fueling the stubborn refusal by a specific camp of leftwing intellectual Skeptics to engage seriously with the fascism argument and the radicalizing tendencies on the Right. Their 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 elites, which they define in very broad and unspecific terms to include basically the entire mainstream of American politics from Center-Left to Center-Right, and particularly the Democratic establishment.

Samuel Moyn likes to chime in with the occasional warning of liberal hysteria, but otherwise mostly stays out of the trenches of the fascism debate. Some of his allies in the Skeptics camp have shown no such restraint. And thankfully, they have explicitly spelled out what Moyn only insinuates. It is worth quoting extensively from what they have said.

Shortly after January 6, for instance, Daniel Bessner co-authored a piece in Jacobin Magazine in which he and Ben Burgis vehemently rejected the idea that the assault on the Capitol had been part of an attempted coup. Just like all the fascism talk, using the “coup” label was, the authors argued, actually dangerous:

“Our point is that there is the potential for very real, and very negative, political consequences if the fascism and coup narratives become the dominant frameworks through which leftists and liberals understand the threat posed by Trump and QAnon. In our opinion, these narratives distort how many of our friends and comrades on the Left think about the Democratic Party, tech censorship, and police power, while also providing a sop to those who would like the incoming Biden administration to increase the authority of an already far too powerful national security state.”

The Left, they argued, should do anything in its power to fight the idea that Trump represented a fascist threat to American democracy. The fascism narrative, they were sure, was not going to help the leftwing cause:

“Instead, it creates a constant pressure on socialists to deemphasize our own program, and our own profound conflict with the neoliberal center, in order to force us to unite with that center as well as neoconservative Never Trump Republicans, big tech companies, and even ‘the intelligence community’ in a grand reenactment of the Popular Front against fascism assembled in the 1930s and 1940s. After all, if a rising tide of fascism poses an imminent threat to democracy itself, shouldn’t we put everything else aside to defeat that threat?”

This has been the key theme in Bessner’s engagement with the fascism question and the broader debate about the nature of Trumpism. A little over a year ago, he argued in a podcast interview that the fascism narrative signaled a crisis of liberal hegemony. He explained its popularity among the American mainstream as an attempt by the liberal elite to prolong its rule:

“So in a moment when liberalism is in crisis and there’s no clear identifiable existential ideological enemy like the Soviet Union anymore, liberals and liberalism as a structure have needed to identify fascists in order to rejustify themselves as a vital center, which is why the talk of fascism exploded under someone like Trump and not under someone like Bush. It’s effectively because liberalism is in a moment of crisis right now.”

Finally, about a month ago, a day after I discussed his Did It Happen Here? anthology with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins at a public event in DC, he and Bessner published a piece in Jacobin Magazine criticizing liberal hysteria and “apocalyptic frameworks,” like the fascism interpretation, that supposedly “have in the last decade become so popular among the MSNBC set”:

“they allow the cadre of liberal elites who at the very least helped the right wing make the world we live in today to maintain a basic innocence at odds with the actual history of liberal governance. For liberals, it is easier to blame ‘fascism’ (or ‘white rural rage,’ or ‘deplorables,’ or ‘Christian nationalists’) for causing our country’s problems than the deregulatory, financialized, and militarist neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”

If liberal elites were to admit that, Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner argued, they “would have to reexamine the premises of their politics, and soul-searching is far less enjoyable than rallying against an unambiguous enemy.”

I really don’t see how this particular group of prominent fascism Skeptics on the intellectual Left could be any clearer about what is animating them. They are not approaching this issue as an analytical question, but as a key battle in the struggle against liberalism. 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.

Anti-liberal distortions

The problem is that we have reached a point where their devotion to this anti-liberal struggle has led them to propagating positions that are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right. Their incessant warning that the real danger lies in liberal hysteria has turned into sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence.

I do not make these accusations lightly. These are, after all, fellow academics. They are also key figures on the intellectual Left, they are extremely well connected institutionally, they possess a much larger public platform than I do, and they have shown a willingness to use it to go after those who have criticized them. I therefore want to provide several concrete examples for what I am criticizing here: Faced with a tension, or even a clear contradiction, between the anti-liberal premise and the available evidence, all too often the Skeptics are choosing to distort the picture rather than modify the premise.

The final piece in Steinmetz-Jenkins anthology, written by Corey Robin, is a good place to start. Robin initially published the essay in The New Yorker in May 2021 under the title “Trump and the Trapped Country.” Robin argued that the liberal fear of fascism and tyranny was entirely disproportionate: “Even when Trump and the Republicans controlled all the elected branches of government, they were routinely unable to exercise the power that they had. They failed to repeal Obamacare, to ban federal funds for abortion, and to ban abortion after twenty weeks.” Almost exactly a year later, the Supreme Court abolished the right to abortion in the Dobbs ruling. Robin’s argument relied heavily on the assessment that the Right wasn’t willing or able to do what alarmist Libs had always predicted they would. But the Right did.

Notice how I quoted from the original version of the piece in The New Yorker. The version that we are given in Did It Happen Here? is actually different, the passage has been updated:

“Even when Trump and the Republicans controlled all the elected branches of government, they were routinely unable to exercise the power that they had. They failed to repeal Obamacare. Though the Republican Senate did vote to appoint three SC justices who struck down Roe v Wade, the Republican Congress was never able to ban federal funds for abortion or enact a federal ban on abortion after twenty weeks.”

I’d be very interested to find out what happened here. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn’t find an acknowledgment anywhere in the anthology that the selected pieces might have been altered and updated. In the credits, it merely says “reprinted.” The update, clearly, has been made to reflect that something major had happened in between the original publication and the reprint, something that in many ways directly contradicted a key argument. Robin’s overall assessment in 2021 was that Liberals needed to calm down since the Right wasn’t ever exercising its power in the way Liberals decried, the liberal doomsday scenarios were never coming true. But in Dobbs, the Right did exercise power in a dramatic way, stripping half the population of bodily autonomy and equal rights. Robin might say that everything he wrote both in 2021 and in the updated version factually holds up, at least in a narrow sense: There is indeed, to this day, no federal abortion ban. His overall argument, however, seems rather misleading, considering that Republican-led states across the country have dramatically escalated their assault on reproductive rights, leading to immense suffering. As evidenced in “Project 2025,” the Right has also developed detailed plans for how to use the powers of government to curtail abortion rights everywhere, even without federal legislation. Shouldn’t the Dobbs decision and the ensuing radical campaign against abortion rights on the state level have led to more than just an updated paragraph? Shouldn’t it have been a moment to reflect on why those liberal hysterics, at least on this specific matter, had gotten it right? An opportunity to reflect on why Robin had gotten this wrong? No! The broader point *must* stand. The premise that nothing new or distinct was happening, that there was no significant radicalization underway on the Right that would necessitate a new framework, that we are merely experiencing continued neoliberal elite rule, must be defended.  

What happened on January 6?

The Skeptics’ continued insistence that January 6 does not qualify as an attempted coup is another example of this same dynamic. Not even ten days after the assault on the Capitol, Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis, in their aforementioned piece in Jacobin, came out aggressively against the idea that January 6 had constituted an attempted coup. This whole affair, they argued, actually “demonstrated the weakness of Trump’s position”:

“What happened in Washington, DC, last week was a violent spasm of impotent rage by a mob mostly made up of civilians and a president who egged them on and talked out of both sides of his mouth about whether he supported what they were doing, but who also made no real attempt to mobilize the power of the state to back them up.”

To drive home the point of how ridiculous it supposedly was to call this a threat to democracy, the authors offered some rather interesting comparisons:

“Even if the QAnon-ers at the Capitol thought they could overthrow the government and ensure Trump remained in power, a deranged action that had no chance of succeeding cannot reasonably be called a coup. Otherwise, any bizarre event, from Charles Manson’s attempt to foment a race war that would transform the United States, to the bombings carried out by the many tiny organizations in the 1970s that considered themselves to be carrying out a revolutionary war against the government, could be classified as a ‘coup.’”

So, on one side, we have a multi-level campaign, carried out over months, spearheaded by the president of the United States (and *still*, over three years later, undisputed leader of the Right) with support from leading elected officials of one of the two major parties and much of the conservative base, to nullify the results of a democratic election – and on the other side, presented as an equivalent to that, we have… Charles Manson?

Maybe this was just an overreaction in the moment? You might expect that all the evidence about January 6 and the events leading up to it that has since emerged and is now providing us with a fairly detailed understanding of what actually happened would make someone reconsider. But there is no indication Bessner, specifically, ever engaged self-critically with these takes or revised them substantially. In fact, just a few days ago, on May 22, Bessner was asked by one of his followers on ex-Twitter how people like Yale historian Timothy Snyder could possibly keep insisting that Trump represented a fascist threat “when we had a peaceful transfer of power aside from a group of online-poisoned yokels?” – to which Bessner replied: “one would think that would be dispositive wouldn’t one.” Friends, if you ignore all the violence, America had a peaceful transfer of power, didn’t you know? Bessner also added in a separate post: “But in all seriousness: In this perspective, January 6 is framed as a very serious coup attempt overseen by Trump that suggests that in a second term he would be far more authoritarian and effective in his use of power.” Here, “this perspective” refers to Snyder and all those making the fascism argument. And what actually represents a very accurate summary of the situation – Trump *did* oversee the attempt to nullify the election, of which January 6 was a key part; and given all the detailed plans and personnel mobilization on the Right, we should expect a second Trump term to be more effective, more ruthless, more authoritarian – is mocked as liberal hysteria: Bessner added a link to the latest piece he and Steinmetz-Jenkins published in Jacobin Magazine, the one about the Libs going crazy with the apocalyptic rhetoric.

Once again, Bessner himself has given us the answer to why someone would refuse to grapple with any emerging evidence, even when that means propagating and defending takes that have clearly been proven wrong. In their Jacobin piece, he and Burgis were very explicit about why they refused to entertain the notion that the country had just experienced an attempted coup: “the most dangerous potential consequence of the Capitol storming is the overreaction of an emboldened security state.” The real danger, they argued, was playing “into the hands of those who want to give new, repressive powers to the security state.” Certainly, this would lead to new domestic terrorism legislation: “There’s a great danger that any such laws will be used against the Left.” This isn’t about getting the diagnosis right. It’s about preventing an interpretation that might help the Libs – even if it is the correct one.

Who is being hysterical?

That latest piece Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner published in Jacobin in mid-April, titled “Liberals’ Heated Fascism Rhetoric Sidesteps Self-Reflection,” is another reminder that the perspective we are getting from the Skeptics is distorted in very specific ways. “In response to the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency,” the authors argue, “Democrats are dusting off apocalyptic rhetoric of looming fascism and total democratic collapse. It’s a self-soothing deflection of responsibility more than anything else.” We have seen them do this several times already, Bessner and Steinmetz-Jenkins explain, and declare the run-up to the 2022 midterms a particularly egregious example:

“During the 2022 midterm electoral campaign, well before Trump’s return, President Joe Biden argued that the ‘extreme MAGA philosophy’ was ‘like semifascism,’ while the liberal media anxiously worried that a tsunami-like ‘Red Wave’ would wash away the republic.”

What, exactly, does “well before Trump’s return” mean here? It insinuates that Democrats are widely deploying such hysterical propaganda, and not just against Trump. But when Biden used the term “semi-fascism” in late August 2022, he explicitly referenced Trump – who, that is the whole point, never actually went away and never lost the support of the Republican Party. In fact, in his big “Soul of the Nation” democracy speech in Philadelphia a few days later, Biden was adamant he was only attacking the hardcore MAGA movement and its leader and made sure to distinguish them from the majority of the Republican Party and its voters.

But Bessner and Steinmetz-Jenkins can’t be bothered with such details. They continue: “After these various prognostications proved incorrect, one might have expected politicians, analysts, and casual observers to temper their rhetoric.” They are referring to the “red wave” prognoses that did indeed prove wrong. But what they are implying is that the results of the midterms should therefore have ended all talk about a rightwing threat to democracy. Well, sure, if you ignore what’s happened on the Right since – Trump is the nominee and the Right is closing the ranks behind him; the rightwing machine is radicalizing, mobilizing, proudly proclaiming its plans to end multiracial pluralism –, then that makes sense.

Next, the authors present a star witness who, they argue, can attest to how foolish all the liberal hysteria is: “In truth, it’s unclear that warnings about a ‘Red Wave’ toppling our democracy galvanized voter turnout. According to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, this rhetoric might have had the ironic effect of suppressing voter turnout by demoralizing voters.” If you know Rosenberg and his work, you might be surprised to find him invoked here. And Bessner and Steinmetz-Jenkins are indeed completely decontextualizing a quote from an interview on Vox.com in which Rosenberg says: “My own view is that it probably net cost us. It could have cost us the House.” Crucially, while Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner are conflating the “red wave” narrative and the “democracy in danger / fascism” discourse, that is not at all what Rosenberg is arguing. The “it” to which he is referring is the “red wave” narrative that was pushed by the Right and picked up by mainstream media. The narrative was stupid, as the polls suggested a close election all along. Unlike Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner, Rosenberg is not criticizing liberals for being “hysterical,” certainly not for emphasizing an acute rightwing threat to democracy, which he very much also diagnoses. His actual argument is that Democrats were able to overcome the faulty “red wave” narrative precisely because the Democratic base was mobilized by the threat to fundamental rights, especially abortion rights, which Democratic voters intimately tied to the threat to democracy.

It must not be fascism, damn it!

The discussion at last month’s event at George Washington University offered another stark example of the rather bizarre places this devotion to the political and ideological struggle against the liberal establishment can lead the fascism Skeptics. As I mentioned in Part I, I was drafted into the fascism wars when 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 GW. While Steinmetz-Jenkins stuck to the “deflationist” refrain in his prepared remarks, he went much further in the discussion with the audience afterwards. Not only did he blame Democrats, and President Joe Biden specifically, for supposedly calling all Trump voters fascists all the time – something that, to my knowledge, Biden has actually never done. When asked how he reconciled his insistence that there was no serious fascist threat to democracy in America, that fascism was not an adequate term to describe the forces that were fueling Trump’s rise, with what happened during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, Steinmetz-Jenkins insisted that there had been “many Black people” marching with the neo-Nazis and far-right militias that day. He presented this as evidence that it was wrong to call the “Unite the Right” protesters a white supremacist or fascist movement. When pressed by journalist Sarah Posner, who was in the audience and on the ground in Charlottesville in 2017, he referred to Cornel West, one of America’s best-known Black intellectuals, as a witness: West was among the counter-protesters in Charlottesville and, according to Steinmetz-Jenkins, confirmed that “many Black people” were marching under the “Unite the Right” banner (I have not been able to find anything in the public record that would support the claims Steinmetz-Jenkins made about Cornel West – I might well be missing something, but it seems West was very explicit that what he encountered in Charlottesville was indeed fascism). Why would people of color make common cause with those who openly identified as Nazis and white supremacists? Because, as Steinmetz-Jenkins suggested, they were disillusioned, disaffected – frustrated with a system that wasn’t working for them. That was, in this interpretation, the real problem on which we should be focusing if we are worried about democracy: Not the hysterical “fascism” chimera, but the neoliberal order and those who uphold it. Anything else is just an undue distraction. 

I must admit I was completely flabbergasted by these remarks in the moment, and I would have liked to write about them sooner. But I wanted to wait until the video recording of the event was out, so that everyone might have a chance to confirm for themselves if my presentation of what transpired was accurate. The video is now, finally, out. However, if you’ll make it all the way to the end, you’ll see that it actually cuts out rather abruptly, and before Steinmetz-Jenkins has made any of the remarks I am criticizing. That is because Steinmetz-Jenkins has blocked the release of the full recording. According to the organizers, he would not consent to the release if it entailed the whole discussion, even though the event had always been announced as public, the intent to publish the recording was clearly communicated to everyone involved, and no one else has any objections. As a matter of fact, all other participants have made it clear to the organizers that they want this whole thing out in the public. Alas, the organizers have decided they cannot overrule Steinmetz-Jenkins’ veto. And so, I have to rely on my own notes taken during and immediately after the event, as well as several conversations with multiple other people who were in the room that night.

To turn the fact that there were some non-white members of far-right militias among the Charlottesville protesters into this “many Black people” insinuation and thereby spinning the “Unite the Right” rally into an argument against the fascism interpretation strikes me as bizarre. But it is also in line with the dynamic I have tried to outline above: Once the overriding concern is no longer to get the diagnosis right, but to fight back against the neoliberal hegemon and whatever narrative it may use to entrench its power, this is what happens.

What are we even doing here?

I want to take a deep breath and clarify two things that are important to me: I am not attacking “the Left” and I am not defending neoliberalism.

“The Left” doesn’t exist as a monolithic block, at least not outside of the reactionary imagination. I am on the Left myself, although I have no personal or institutional ties to the American Left, as I only moved over from Germany a little over three years ago. Some of the smartest, most ardent proponents of the fascism interpretation are undoubtedly lefties, like John Ganz. In fact, the skepticism towards the fascism argument cuts across the political and ideological spectrum, as some prominent pundits on the Center-Right, like Tom Nichols, are also keen to dismiss all fascism talk as silly alarmism (Nichols seems to think it’s funny to make the same “Oh no, I guess now we get fascism – ha ha!” joke over and over again). My critique is focused on a specific strand of leftist interpretation, advanced most visibly and forcefully by a specific group of leftwing intellectuals – not “the Left.”

As long as we are talking politics: The neoliberal hegemony that lasted from the 1970s through at least the global financial crisis and may or may not be crumbling now was an absolute disaster. My strongest agreement with those on the Left who are aggressively skeptical towards the Biden-led “Defend Democracy” coalition, as I have said and written often, is that the solution to our predicament can’t possibly be to merely restore the deeply deficient pre-2016 type of “liberal” democracy, to just turn the clock back to a situation that resulted in Trump’s rise in the first place. If the danger is truly as great as the fascism interpretation implies, we must look for a response that is commensurate with such an immense threat – one that propels America forward and transforms it into something closer to the kind of egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet. But I simply don’t see why such a transformative vision is inevitably impeded by acknowledging a radicalizing threat on the Right and a fascist danger to democracy, as the Skeptics often allege but never substantiate. I find the position historian Eric Rauchway, who knows the New Deal better than anyone, outlined much more plausible: “Concern that fascism might spread everywhere got us the New Deal, a bold alternative if ever there was one.”

More generally, I disagree with the fascism Skeptics that the *real* problem is (neo-) liberalism, and whatever is happening on the Right is just a subordinate issue – a side contradiction, in more Marxist terms. They are both real. Acknowledging how the devastations brought about by neoliberalism have helped create the conditions under which Trumpism can thrive does not mean the radicalization of the Right, the rise of extremist forces within the rightwing coalition, can be wholly subsumed as a side effect; just like emphasizing long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the Right does not mean we shouldn’t also grapple with more recent developments that, while not merely a departure, still constitute a distinct phenomenon.  

We must not exceptionalize Trump

There is, finally, one crucial argument from the Skeptics camp with which I want to properly grapple. It has both an analytical and a political dimension. We must not abnormalize Trump! Samuel Moyn warns in the piece that is reprinted in the Did It Happen Here? anthology and was first published in May 2020 in The New York review of Books. And I wholeheartedly agree!

Using the fascism concept or terminology to separate Trump from the continuum of U.S. history is not just nonsense analytically, but also politically problematic if it allows American society (and especially those who were involved in conservative politics before 2016) to pretend Trump was just an aberration from an otherwise healthy liberal democracy, a departure from an otherwise noble, venerable conservative tradition. If the comparison to Europe’s interwar period is invoked to mark Donald Trump as something Un-American, something so foreign that you have to use terms and concepts from Europe’s past to describe it, then we are doing it wrong. Trumpism is not an aberration. It is deeply rooted in longstanding traditions and continuities of racism, white nationalism, white nationalist Christianism, and nativism. It is fueled by many of the same energies and anxieties that have shaped the American project from the beginning. His support from conservatives is based on long-standing anti-democratic impulses on the Right.

The question is, however, what a counter to such an aberrationist tale with apologist implications should look like? And insisting that absolutely nothing has changed, nothing to see on the Right, just the same conservative politics as ever, is certainly not the answer – at least not as long as we are trying to get the diagnosis right. And yet, that is what the Skeptics are offering.

On March 27, Corey Robin singled out a quote from Andrew Marantz’ review of Did It Happen Here? in The New Yorker: “Don’t think armband insignias, tanks in the streets, and martial law; think lawfare, sophisticated cronyism, surveillance, and counter-majoritarian restrictions on reproductive rights and voting access and academic freedom.” Robin added: “Sounds to me like ye olde GOP.” And he continued: “If the debate has gotten to the point that this is what we’re now calling fascism or the threat to democracy, then I don’t see how any serious person could say it’s anything other than the same old GOP we’ve been battling since 1968.” Several things are remarkable about these claims. First, the quote Robin is highlighting is actually not making the fascism argument. In this passage, Marantz is agreeing with the contestation by Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller that Trumpism does *not* constitute fascism, but a form of rightwing populism. “Don’t think armband insignias…” is how Marantz tries to explain to his audience what Müller’s concept of authoritarian rightwing populism – not fascism! – looks like in practice. Robin evidently doesn’t care, or didn’t pay enough attention to notice. He saw a chance to defend the premise: Don’t be silly, it’s not fascism! And so, he jumped on it.

Beyond the misleading reference, the substantive argument is also remarkable: “the same old GOP we’ve been battling since 1968.” 1968: That’s very early in the process of partisan realignment that created a liberal(ish) Democratic Party and a conservative Republican Party in the first place – in the late 60s, a moderate, pro-civil rights wing was still very strong in the GOP, while most of the southern segregationists were still Democrats; it’s about a decade before the Religious Right mobilized as a partisan force; it’s over two decades before a more populist form of politics moved to the center of the Republican Party in the 90s, and the paleo-conservative strand on the Right rose to new prominence, led by Pat Buchanan, who openly and explicitly declared democracy the real enemy, something that would have gotten him ostracized from the political mainstream before the end of the Cold War… The idea that today’s Republican Party and the configuration of the Right more broadly is basically the same as in 1968 is utterly ahistorical. Robin likes to insist that anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn’t understand that conservatism “has always been a far-right and illiberal and anti-liberal,” that all this talk about rightwing radicalization and fascism is coming “from people who only began thinking about American conservatism and the Republican Party when Trump came along.” But there is actual empirical scholarship on the recent history of the Right, tons of it, actual research, and all of it disagrees with such a static, abstract interpretation of GOP and modern conservative history.

Simplistic narratives – “This is what it’s always been” vs “What’s happening now is a complete departure from everything that came before 2016” – won’t cut it. The actual challenge is to grapple with both long-standing traditions and continuities, but also recent radicalizations and the extent to which they have, in fact, created something distinct. If we are worried about exceptionalizing Trumpism, the step to take is not to say: “If it’s fascism, that would make it an aberration, so it can’t be fascism” – but rather: “If there is something fascistic about this, we need to investigate longer-term *domestic* fascistic, rightwing extremist traditions and continuities that got us here.”

These are precisely the questions that are currently animating a whole lot of historians of the American Right and modern conservatism who are doing fine-grained empirical research to investigate the relationship between conservatism and the extremist Right. No one who seriously engages with these ongoing attempts to revise the story of the Right can come away thinking that there is too much aberrationism going on. If anything, historians of the Right have been indexing strongly towards emphasizing long-standing domestic traditions. But almost across the board, they believe the “fascism” concept can indeed be helpful in making sense of the anti-democratic radicalization that characterizes today’s Right, in exploring how radicalizing dynamics and long-standing tendencies have intersected, how the power and influence of different factions and ideas within the rightwing popular front have shifted.

But instead of engaging in earnest, the Skeptics have declared victory. In his introduction to Did It Happen Here?, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins simply announces: “The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest.” I say a much better way forward is to stop calibrating your position by whatever the political upshot is, by whether or not it might help the Libs, and instead investigate the phenomenon itself, empirically, with as much diligence, transparency, and humility as possible. The way forward, as long as we are pretending to be something other than ideology-driven pundits, is to get the diagnosis right and let the chips fall where they may.