RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is the US on the edge of a new fascist epoch? To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler. In her presidential campaign, vice-president Kamala Harris openly called Trump ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist’.

The Democrats and their media allies believed these accusations would be the key to electoral success, hoping to scare Americans into voting for Harris. Some even suggested Trump would throw Democrat politicians and commentators in jail once in office. Liz Cheney, the one-time rightist turned anti-Trumper, warned Americans this might be ‘the last real vote you ever get to cast’.

Yet these accusations did not ring true for most Americans. Similar nonsense charges have been hurled at far less worthy targets, like George W Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Perhaps this has desensitised Americans to Democrats crying ‘fascism’. In any case, a recent Gallup poll showed that only three per cent of voters described ‘elections / election reform / democracy’ as a key issue in 2024, well behind economic problems or immigration. Notably, voters in swing states said that Harris, not Trump, was a bigger threat to democracy.

MAGA and similar movements, such as the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK, have grown in stature by leading a rebellion against unrestrained immigration, rising crime and the post-nationalist ethos of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, they display some worrying, right-wing tendencies.

Yet in economic terms, at least, Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other progressives are closer to embracing corporatist ideas, which any fascist might recognise, than Trump or his doppelgangers. Critical here is the central notion of fascism. ‘At its fullest development’, writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism ‘redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had been untouchably private’.

Under Mussolini, for example, private property remained and powerful corporations thrived. But only, as Il Duce himself suggested, if they pledged, ‘formal adherence to the regime’. Mussolini relied heavily on large landowners and companies to help finance the March on Rome. Once in power, Mussolini, who viewed himself as a ‘revolutionary’ transforming society, saw the state as ‘the moving centre of economic life’. He successfully co-opted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure, as well as the military, which he used to fight off Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions.

In contemporary times, the most powerful corporatist economy can be found in nominally Communist China. Here, concentrated wealth, governmental power and control of information, even about the past, has echoes of fascism. In China, as one scholar observes, corporatism is ‘a socio-political process’ where monopolies flourish with the assistance and connivance of state agencies. They follow state strictures by embracing the party ideology, celebrating the CCP’s vision and enforcing ideological conformity among employees and even foreign business partners.

Although clearly less expansive, Biden and then Harris also sought to expand government power at a rate unprecedented in peacetime. Biden’s economic policies, and those embraced by much of the mainstream in Europe, have cast aside the autonomy of private interests, embracing draconian policies on climate change, ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and the environmental ‘great reset’ that subject companies to bureaucratic diktats.

Trump may preen like an aged Mussolini, but his economic approach, notably tax cuts and widespread deregulation, seeks to maintain the independence of business. This is especially attractive to the independent private sector, particularly the small firms that are his most loyal base of support. In this sense, Trump represents something of a throwback to the less restrained cowboy capitalism, rather than an incipient fascism.

Perhaps the most egregious proof of the new authoritarian, corporate left can be seen in attempts to control free speech, which have been embraced not by Trump, but by Democrats like Harris. Recall the social-media deplatforming of the New York Post, in collusion with the intelligence services, in order to squash reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which could have doomed the Biden campaign in 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic in particular revealed this new ‘liberal’ censorship in stark terms. Any view that violated the party line on masks, vaccines, school closures and herd immunity was widely censored – even though research has now proven many of the more rational critics of the public-health diktats to have been accurate. Nor were the Biden people reluctant to take government power even further. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen suggested in November that the Biden administration was seeking to impose ‘full government control’ of AI. This would have involved restricting new firms from entering the field, with the government preferring to work only with established giants. This resembles the kind of industrial policy promulgated in pre-war Italy, Germany and Japan, more so than postwar social-democratic forms of nationalised ownership.

Calls to control information have also been adopted even by increasing numbers of prominent liberal legal scholars, as well as politicians like Harris, both when she was California attorney general and vice-president. For them, Chinese repression seems more of a role model than a cautionary tale.

In this sense, Trump’s ascension, rather than promoting fascism, can be seen in part as a small step against this new progressive or liberal authoritarianism. This is not because Trump has any great convictions about free speech or liberty, but because his rise has undermined the ideological unity of the oligarchic elite. Only now do predictable progressive pundits like Franklin Foer suggest that these moguls constitute ‘a corrupt cabal’ eager to undermine democracy. Even Biden himself made a sudden show of concern in his farewell speech this week, warning Americans that ‘an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy’. He was referring, of course, to the likes of Elon Musk and the other tech bros who have jumped on board the Trump train recently. Such aspersions on the tech elites were not heard from liberals when they were marching in lockstep for Biden in 2020, or collecting paychecks from progressive billionaires like Laurene Jobs, Marc Benioff or Jeff Bezos.

To be sure, there remain elements in the Trump coalition, as well as its European counterparts, that reflect ugly values on issues like racial and gender equality. But they are not likely to take leading roles in the administration. You can count instead on Trump trying to appeal to the Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites when in office, who do not share such views. His working-class supporters may find themselves on the outside as he tries to win over the oligarchy.

So, if Trump is not the next Mussolini, could he be the next Hitler? Some may see in Mar-a-Lago a kind of hot, humid Berchtesgaden, where the Nazi Führer held court. Yet it’s unlikely that Trump is an anti-Semite or an unreconstructed racist. His own daughter is a Jewish convert, making him grandfather to Jewish grandchildren. His vice-president, JD Vance, is married to a woman of Indian extraction. Most remarkably of all, this widely labeled ‘racist’ outdid virtually all past Republicans in attracting black, Asian and especially Latino voters.

In contrast, it is the radicals on the left who see the world based largely on racial identity. Advocates of such movements as ‘BIPOC’ divide the world between ‘black, indigenous and people of colour’ and the hegemonic forces of ‘white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism’. This approach is defined by such things as reparations, race quotas for universities and professions, as well as separate dorms for minority students.

Such racial policies can only divide the country as they evolve, and are certainly not electoral winners. For context, Jews were barely one per cent of Weimar Germany’s population. Today, racial minorities account for about 30 per cent of all Americans and by 2050 could constitute a majority. Democrats once saw these voters as theirs, but the 2024 election confirms that they are up for grabs politically.

Finally, MAGA lacks the ideological coherence or political structure associated with the National Socialists or Mussolini’s fascists. Some MAGA people may follow the odious Tucker Carlson, but there’s no defined ideology. It contains elements as disparate from populist radicals to religious zealots, from traditional conservatives to ultra-nationalists. The Art of the Deal is no Mein Kampf.

The Trumpistas also lack anything like Hitler’s Brownshirts, Mussolini’s Blackshirts or even Oswald Mosley’s pathetic mob. The MAGA crowds are also largely plebeian, whereas many of the strongest backers of the fascists were non-Jewish university students and intellectuals.

If Trump fails to be much of a new Mussolini, he does even worse as the next Hitler. At the very core, as Robert Gellately points out in Hitler’s True Believers, the Nazi vision was linked most of all to a nationalistic vision of a greater German Volksgemeinschaft, a people’s community. Although the Nazis eventually won support from business, Nazism’s fundamental urge was collectivist, with a prudish and anti-Semitic streak. Trump is many unpleasant things, but he is none of these.

Of course, we do have to be careful about factions among the MAGA legions. As shown during the 6 January storming of the Capitol in 2020, these extremist elements have too little respect for legalities and the basics of constitutional rule. But these were hardly serious insurrectionists, and made Hitler’s attempted Beer Hall Putsch in Munich seem like the Normandy landings in comparison.

The real problem is not so much incipient fascism or, for that matter, the imbecilic claims by Trump and other conservatives that Biden and Harris are proto-communists. The real problem is hyperventilating extreme language that does not fit in with reasonable political debate. It may not be morning in America, but we are far from the dawn of a fascist era.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.