Donald Trump: Between Election and Inauguration

TRUMP AND FASCISM: A VIEW FROM THE PAST*

Is Trump a fascist? Let's start with another question: why do we want to know? Is it simply to stick him with the most damning political label available? Or is it because his ideas, his actions, his support really put him in the same genus as the fascist movements and regimes of interwar Europe?

For months, historians of the twentieth century have been looking nervously at Trump and asking what tools we have to understand the man, his popular appeal and his backers – and to measure the danger he represents. Against my own better judgment, I have been spotting Mussolini in this gesture or turn of phrase, Hitler in that one; I have been watching the manipulated interactions of speaker with audience, the hyperbolic political emotions, the narcissistic masculinity, the unbridled threats, the conversion of facile fantasies and malignant bigotries into eternal verities, the vast, empty promises, the breath-taking lies. A whole repertoire seems to have returned us to the fascisms of interwar Europe, acted out by a man whose vanity is equalled only by his ignorance. But has it?

Fascism has always been a challenge for historians to pin down, empirically or conceptually. It is not alone in testing our precision. You could say the same of 'populism' – another term much in circulation these days – or virtually any other ideological -ism; they all resist conclusive definition. What's particular to 'fascism' is the combination of its slippery meaning – like mud, easy to throw around – and the special political horror that attaches to it. Under this term also slides its most horrifying incarnation, Nazism, waiting in the wings so to speak. But since Nazism has become so closely identified in public memory with the Holocaust alone, it's the more indeterminate 'fascism' that takes the stage.

Thirty years ago, when studying fascism was a scholarly cottage industry, the historian Noel O'Sullivan suggested that 'the prevailing intellectual mood of our age has inevitably made fascism incomprehensible to us', because fascism – far less Nazism – was 'not supposed to happen at all'. It contradicted the optimism characteristic of modern western thought, but at the same time it exposed the tension between the activist-democratic and limited-liberal styles of politics that have prevailed in Europe since the French Revolution: the fundamental question here is how much power can be entrusted to the people. Fascism, like populism, is a creature of democratic politics, its shadow and its threat – or, depending on your interests, its promise, a weapon with which to beat the masses back into submission.

These questions are back on the agenda with a vengeance. 'The intellectual mood of our age' has been ambushed again by something that now seems to have been lying in wait, gathering force, in Europe and now in the USA. But now it has to be confronted, not just historicized. Anyone who studies modern history always has at least one corner of one eye trained on the present; and there are moments when the encounter between present and past suddenly forces itself to the centre of our field of vision. The moment of Trump is one of these. But this eruption does not mean simply that we should paste bits of the past onto the present and see if they fit. The point is how the history we already know can be used to make sense of the present.

I'll focus on three of the most pressing issues where I think the history of fascism offers us something usable. This leaves a lot out, and in any case the aim is not to play a taxonomic game, but to try to identify points of risk and resistance. If I use the case of Germany, this is not to substitute Nazism for fascism in all its guises, but to disclose some of the crucial mechanisms through which power can be translated into tyranny.

1. Crisis and opportunity

The fascist movements of interwar Europe were the creatures of war and defeat, revolution and political violence, economic inequality and depression: in a word, systemic crises of national identity...