Notes on Historical Comparison in the Age of Trump (and Erdoğan)

Since the U.S. election, there have been two major debates on the left and in the broader public about the implications of Trump's election and his assumption of the presidency. The first has concerned the relationship between the Trump movement and various potential historically analogous movements, especially fascism. The second has involved trying to understand the reasons for Trump's victory (or Clinton's defeat); this conversation has involved numerous factors, from Russian intervention to voter intimidation, but from the perspective of political strategy the most important dimension of this debate has been the question of what social categories (i.e., race, class, gender, region, and so on) were the most salient in shaping voter preferences.

The following notes—initially drafted between the election and the inauguration and revised in the first weeks after the inauguration—start from the question of what it means to make historical comparisons, and go on to address questions about historical precedent and political mobilization on the left in the new national and global context. Historical comparisons and analogies are worth taking seriously because—for better or worse—they are frequently the foundation for powerful cultural memories that help produce individual and collective identities and because they inevitably play a role in historical understanding and political movement.

My title's allusion to the Turkish situation is meant to suggest the need for all of us to look beyond our own national context and think about what we can learn by taking a broader perspective, even if it means leaving our comfort zone. Ultimately, my call is for cross-border as well as cross-disciplinary collaboration—in the attempt both to understand our world and to change it.

The questions addressed here are urgent, and the situation is rapidly changing day by day. While these notes seek to preserve some of that urgency, they are also a first attempt at a slower, longer-term process of reflection that will need to be continuously revised in the light of events.

1. Historical figures and political movements do not repeat themselves exactly. Even if similarities exist, their meanings will change because of the changed context in which they appear and unfold. Trump is not Hitler and his followers are not Nazis—nor are Erdoğan and his followers in Turkey. One could say the same for Putin and his followers, in Russia, Kaczyński and his followers in Poland, Modi and his followers in India, and so forth.

Nonetheless:

2. Some of Trump's followers see themselves as Nazis, and Trump and some of his followers hold racist and authoritarian positions that bring them into relation with historical fascism. Similarly, Erdoğan mobilizes racism toward minorities in Turkey as part of his strategy for consolidating power and has steadily destroyed the autonomy of civil society and state institutions in a way that resonates with National Socialist Gleichschaltung ("coordination"). There are already hints of such "coordination" in the United States, too, after Trump's first week in power. In our moment, analogous forms of racist, sexist, and homophobic mobilization in the interest of state power can be found in many other locations, as well.

3. In the face of such a politics, historical comparison can be an affectively powerful mobilizing force for critique and opposition. Yet we also have to recognize that all of the populist movements come with their own politics of memory and forgetting: think of Turkey's neo-Ottomanism paired with its ongoing genocide denial or the Trump administration's decision to bar refugees and immigrants from certain Muslim countries on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, all while failing to mention the Nazis' Jewish victims. Whether it comes from the left or the right, mobilization of the past matters and does so regardless of historical accuracy.

Thus:

4. Comparison is unavoidable and can be enlightening. But it must be handled delicately and must strive to mark significant discontinuities while also drawing lines of continuity.

5. There is a difference between comparison in the name of political mobilization (e.g., antifascism) and comparison in the...