Is Trump a Fascist? Does It Matter?

On the Fool's Errand of Navel-Gazing

The nature of discourse is to be flimsy and harried, a dialogue defined by its own gauzy entropy. It’s a format built for witty clapbacks and innovative new types of insult, not for complex narratives or academic rigor. But with that said, online discourse always seems to work its way back to one question, a question that seems to have created its own kind of metaphysics: Is Donald Trump, President of the United States of America from 2017-2021, a Fascist? While the argument might’ve started in the middle of 2016, when Trump’s first candidacy had begun to be taken seriously by the chattering class, and it did reach a new level of intensity after the attempted insurrection on January 6th, 2021, it feels like the past 6 months have brought the controversy to a fever pitch. Unlike other flashpoints in the debate though, this new round of jabber comes not out of the need for clarification or because Trump has attained some new level of fash-iness, but out of a growing desire to defend the alternative. With the genocide happening over in Gaza and a lousy immigration policy regime, leftists and liberals who for whatever reason ardently defend the Biden presidency have had to tie their tongues into a form of Logicism. And, although they might wander a few times into more street-preacher territory, a good 75% of these points rely back to this same roundhouse kick: Trump is a fascist, and even with the evils happening around us, we don’t live in a time for experiments. 

For the arguer, the “Trump is a Fascist” line serves as a self-evident aphorism, intoned like a biblical commandment. An American left which has for so long vaunted itself on its supposed whole-hearted condemnation of fascism now, due to its own desires for contrarianism, risks bringing a fascist into power. Its a potentiality which portends becoming an eternal gotcha towards leftist criticism of the Democratic Party, similar to how Soviet diplomats would always respond to American criticisms of Soviet policy with “And you are lynching Negroes.” This isn’t a retort made to persuade or encourage or even provoke. It’s frankly just a means towards bullying, a phrase uttered with a smirk and a punctuation mark. It’s a statement made without largesse but nevertheless embedded with a sense of virtue.

Now, I find it very tedious and mournful to be even debating this point because I essentially agree with the arguers here. Anyone who thinks that a second Trump term in office isn’t dangerous or threatening is a person not meant to be taken seriously. We can have squabbles over the specificities of etymology, but there’s an undeniable truth to the incantation of the phrase. But inside that truth is something more intellectually penetrable, more fluid in its practice of philosophy. And that’s what I want to write about.

What is fascism anyway? It’s a famously amorphous term; noted historian Ian Kershaw once compared defining fascism to “trying to nail jelly to the wall.” It’s purposefully amorphous; it’s an ideology that synthesizes so many traditions and narratives that to simply stack them in a perfect order is impossible. More than any other great ideology of the 20th Century, fascism exists based not on its contours but instead on its emotive responses. It has a sort of “I know it when I see it” je ne sais quoi. But if you put a gun to my head, I’ve always liked historian Roger Griffin’s definition of the word: palingenetic ultranationalism. As he once put it: 

[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.

It’s a definition that, in my mind, attempts to transcend the trappings of the idea’s permutations in Nazism and Italian fascism to create a more concrete denotation better than any of the multitudes of definitions I’ve seen. It captures the paradoxical aesthetics inherent in fascism, its rejection of modernity which was only manifested by the powers of modernity itself. Fascism is not merely an attempt at structuring the realms of power; it’s an attempt to elucidate a wholly new social order. This just happens to make calling the things fascist a logistical pain in the ass. 

To get to the bottom of it; I don’t think Donald Trump is a fascist. Fascism denotes a specific understanding of politics, of society, of citizenship that I frankly think Trump isn’t mentally capable of holding. He’s an idiot, and his words and maxims roll over into a whole bunch of sound and fury which, at the end of the day, mostly signify nothing. He’s less of a Mussolini than he is a Berlusconi: a rich, personalistic uber-narcissist who destroys an older style of politics through the help of forces formerly in the cordon sanitaire. He’s certainly not committed to any form of democracy, but he doesn’t have the ideological sturdiness or the physical temperament to use even a 3rd of his power to do anything about it. 

But here’s the rub: does that matter? If it quacks like a duck, and if it walks like a duck, is it really worth taking the time to identify the biological complexities which separate this animal from the Anatidae family line? I admit that I’m often one prone to navel-gaze, but even I understand that at this point this quibble serves nothing but to mystify the unmystifiable. What we as a country saw on January 6th was unmistakably an undertaking in fascism; the societal makeup of the crowd, what the day’s speakers roared at them, the rioters’ own chants and jeers, the whole project of “taking back” an election that was meant to be theirs. These are men and women who sincerely believe they’re living on the doorsteps of the Battle of Armageddon, that American liberalism is some sort of Antichrist to be slew. The fact that Donald Trump is a boorish moronic oaf doesn’t change any of this. Those insurrectionists and their ilk see Trump as a sort of Caesar, they see Trump as their one-way ticket out of Gomorrah. Just because we can’t see that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist to its viewers. 

Discourse will rage on and on, and I’m positive that I will get a number of angry comments calling me a liar and an idiot and whatnot. I might even just be. But definitions matter, sincerity matters. The truth can only be spoken as what it is: the truth, and any attempt we make at approaching it from a slant only serves to help the force of lies. As George Orwell so magnificently put it in Politics and the English Language:

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.