The Faces of Fascism and Challenges to Democracy

“A republic – if you can keep it,” was Benjamin Franklin’s reply in 1787 when asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced. For the first time since the Civil War, whether we can keep that republic is again in question. The answer will depend on the actions we take and also on the words we use, because political discourse is the soil and climate in which actions grow.

Like a lexical chick trying to hatch, the term “fascism” has cracked the surface of American political discourse but has not fully broken through. Whether it does has intellectual and moral consequences. So we must ask: What is fascism? Is it accurate to call Trumpism fascism? And if it isn’t fascism, what is it?

No one has written more trenchantly on this subject than Umberto Eco. In “Ur-Fascism” (New York Review of Books, 1995), Eco drew on his Italian childhood under Mussolini to identify fourteen features that cluster within the concept. They include (paraphrasing Eco):

1. an emphasis on tradition and the …
2. the implicit rejection of modernism;
3. a cult of action for its own sake and disdain for thought, hence a predilection for violence;
4. intolerance of criticism, and the belief that “disagreement is treason”;
5. fear of diversity or difference;
6. appeal to “a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups”;
7. nationalism and xenophobia; an “obsession with the plot”; ‘
8. the figuration of one’s political enemies as by turns either too strong or too weak, and an “Armageddon Complex”;
9. a conception of life as permanent warfare;
10. military and aristocratic elitism and contempt for the weak;
11. the cult of the hero;
12. machismo and “disdain for women and intolerance…of nonstandard sexual habits”;
13. what Eco calls “selective populism,” wherein individuals have no rights, only the people collectively, and disdain for democracy; and
14. lies and distortions in the use of political language, per “Newspeak” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, including a focus on certain symbolic words and the abolition of others.
15. I would add one more: the mobilization of the masses through electronic media, beginning with radio. That is why fascism is a distinctly modern phenomenon.

Eco also borrows Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance.” Games share no single essence. Some are competitive and some are not; some involve money and some don’t. Fascist regimes likewise share no single defining trait. As Eco writes, “one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” Resemblance, not identity, is what makes fascism a coherent rubric for a particular variety of misrule.

That leaves some unavoidable vagueness around the edges. As Orwell noted, even the major fascist states “differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.” But vagueness doesn’t strip a word of its validity or descriptive power. “Fascism” is in the lexicon because it is useful and sufficiently clear, and rigorous analysis of exactly the kind Eco performed makes it clearer.

FASCISM IN THE TRUMP ERA

The New York Times has editorialized persuasively on how the United States has accelerated toward autocracy in Donald Trump’s second term. Although it does not use the word “fascism”, the second Trump Administration has exhibited many of Eco’s features:

• It has targeted political enemies through criminal and mortgage-fraud investigations while pardoning friends.
• It has detained American citizens without due process.
• It has deployed federal troops and the National Guard to cities including Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland.
• It has sought to silence critics in the military, the judiciary, and Congress.
• It has poisoned debate with lies and epithets (”low-IQ,” “evil,” “the enemy within”) that appeal to racism and xenophobia.
• It has built a patently corrupt system of shakedowns aimed at corporations, news organizations, universities, and law firms.

We should add kleptocracy to the list of frequent, if not universal, markers of fascism.

Additionally, we must not overlook the ways Trump departs from Eco’s model. His policies are not overtly antisemitic, even if he has not distanced himself from backers who are, and until attacking Iran he had shown little appetite for large-scale war. Courts and grand juries have often stymied his efforts to persecute opponents. Unlike Franco’s Spain, his movement is not formally tied to a church, though the Christian Right’s influence cannot be ignored. Thankfully, since the January 6th attack on the Capitol, he has not inspired violence along the lines of Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s brownshirts.

The largest difference is that Trump operates within a democratic system and erodes it, rather than replacing it. We are not living in a full-blown autocracy like the classic fascist regimes of 20th-century Europe. Trump has moved the United States toward “anocracy,“ a weakened democracy that allows fascistic policies. Our trajectory resembles Hungary, Turkey, or Poland, where authoritarians were elected and then eroded democracy without extinguishing it. The pattern also has American precedents: the Know-Nothings, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, McCarthyism. Ours is not a sudden seizure of power like Chile in 1973. It is a gradual kind of national electoral suicide.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS

One more dimension goes beyond Eco’s scheme: the movement is essentially non-ideological. All politics is emotive, and democracy is not designed for robots. But as Robert Paxton writes, fascism “does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings.”

Some figures in Trump’s orbit, such as Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, could be called explicit, ideological fascists. Trump himself is an implicit fascist, as are many of his followers, most of whom would not recognize themselves as fascists. Among Trump’s supporters there is a genuine sense of threat and loss, and it is not baseless. What distinguishes fascism is not emotion as such but the emotional terrain that feeds it: racism, grievance, cruelty, openness to violence, and at times contempt for reason and expertise. MAGA isn’t a moral theory of how politics should work. It is a moral vacuum.

CONCLUSION

Like all general terms, “fascism” is imprecise and open to abuse. But we don’t banish words like racism, genocide, or terrorism because they can be misused or sound inflammatory. Fascism is both descriptive and implicitly prescriptive, and that is no reason to avoid it. To shrink from using it stunts discourse and amounts to unilateral rhetorical disarmament.

The same goes for how we talk about polarization. Yes, we are more polarized. But the casual use of the word implies that both sides are equally responsible for the chasm. It hides the fact that one side has drifted far further from democratic norms. Polarization is not like the weather, falling on everyone equally.

I am not suggesting we attach the fascist label to voters, as opposed to politicians and policies. People vote for all sorts of reasons, including the better and worse angels of our nature. Nor am I urging anyone to “understand” Trump’s movement as if it held a coherent worldview waiting to be fathomed. Reading Eco relieved me of that burden.

For the political class and the commentariat, the task is different. Focusing only on safer themes like corruption, incompetence, or affordability is a failure of moral nerve. Naming fascism plainly, and holding leaders and policies to account for it, is the first step toward the reckoning that must ultimately come.

The Faces of Fascism and Challenges to Democracy was first published by Expand Democracy and is republished with permission.

Jeffrey Scheuer is the author of The Sound Bite Society, The Big Picture, and most recently, Inside the LIberal Arts. The arguments and recommendations here are the authors’ own.