Review of Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (New York: W.W. Norton, 2024)
Donald Trump just accomplished what neither Adolf Hitler nor Benito Mussolini ever achieved. The incoming president secured power through a clear, popular majority on November 5, 2024 — fair and square.
That’s worth thinking about right now, since the 2024 election results will certainly reignite what’s been called the “fascism debate”— the persistent question raging in magazines, newspapers, and Substacks about how Trumpian authoritarian populism compares to fascism.
After settling down after a year or two, a few recent articles argued that Trump’s increasingly dark language over the past two months has settled the debate: he’s definitively a fascist. What’s more, Kamala Harris used the term during her campaign, and a few former Trump administration officials agreed. Granted, Republicans recently ratcheted things up a notch: Trump has promised the “largest deportation operation in American history” and called for violence against protesters. Kevin Roberts, one of Project 2025’s architects, stated that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins edited Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a collection published in March 2024, which catalogs the debate up until 2023 and includes classics from figures such as Leon Trotsky, Angela Davis, and Hannah Arendt. In his introduction, Steinmetz-Jenkins writes that the “way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest,” but Trump’s victory all but ensures that the discussion…
Auteur: Tristan Hughes
