Bessner writes that:
There is a fundamental truth at the heart of Trumpism that makes comparisons to European fascism difficult to sustain. Put simply, Trump and his hangers-on are building on long-standing American traditions and using the normal tools of the American government to dismantle democracy. Trumpism is not a foreign importation. It is distinctly homegrown.
The unargued-for assumption here is that it is only by comparison to its prewar European variant that Trump’s program can be properly considered fascist. That may be part of the story, but fascism, according to the standard work in the field, Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, has common features wherever and whenever it appears.
It consists of five stages (although they do not need to arise in the same sequence each time), including the creation of a movement; its rooting in the political system; seizure of power; exercise of power; and a choice of either radicalization or entropy. Paxton describes fascism as:
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
If one accepts this definition, it’s hard to miss the overall connections with Trump and the current moment. I think it’s short a few key elements: class dynamics in place of the weaker sociological notion of “elites”; the role of the charismatic, all-knowing leader; and the destruction, once in power, of the helping parts of the state apparatus while bulking up the repressive apparatus.
Paxton also allows for differences based upon variations in…
Auteur: Fred Glass
