http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/opinion/campaign-stops/is-donald-trump-a-fascist.htmlIs Donald Trump a Fascist? Ross Douthat DEC. 3, 2015
The Republican establishment, that lumbering beast, still can’t decide on how and whether and when to go after Donald J. Trump. But last week a few Republican insiders floated an accusation that you usually hear liberals sling against the right: That the real estate magnate turned populist is actually a fascist.
The hook for this charge was Trump’s illiberal musings about Muslims and databases and his lies — or, to be charitable, false memories — about cheering throngs of Muslim-Americans after Sept. 11.
But the charge can be easily fleshed out with more examples. Writing for Slate last week, Jamelle Bouie argued that Trumpism, however ideologically inchoate, manifests at least seven of the hallmarks of fascism identified by the Italian polymath Umberto Eco. They include: a cult of action, a celebration of aggressive masculinity, an intolerance of criticism, a fear of difference and outsiders, a pitch to the frustrations of the lower middle class, an intense nationalism and resentment at national humiliation, and a “popular elitism” that promises every citizen that they’re part of “the best people of the world.”
Does this sound like Trump? Well, yes, it rather does: His bravado and performative machismo (complete with mockery of the weak, unattractive and disabled), his obsession with how we get “beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists” and other immigrant threats, and as of this week his promise to not only bomb and torture our foreign enemies into submission but to round up their families as well — no, it isn’t hard to match Eco’s list to many of the Donald’s greatest hits.
One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But the absence of a real American fascism (as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking. And part of the explanation has to be that the American conservative tradition has always included important elements — a libertarian skepticism of state power, a stress on localism and states’ rights, a religious and particularly Protestant emphasis on the conscience of an individual over the power of the collective — that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.
But Trump, because he isn’t really an ideological conservative, lacks that inoculation. And while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace, he tends to differ from them in precisely the places where fascist temptations can creep in.
Buchanan, for instance, was a nationalist, but also a deeply religious man, whose campaigns were fueled as much by pro-life conviction as by populism. Not so Trump: He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.
Perot was an economic nationalist but also an obsessive deficit hawk and budget balancer, who won a lot of libertarian votes with his promise of a green-eyeshade approach to government. Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted with a hyperactive state so long as it’s working hand-in-glove with corporate interests.
Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump: When he sounds an anti-Washington note, the argument isn’t that local governments can do things better, or that local folkways need respect; it’s that he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce — er, Donald — at the top.
Whether or not we want to call Trump a fascist outright, then, it seems fair to say that he’s closer to the “proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative or his recent predecessors in right-wing populism.
So is it time for Trump watchers to dust off their copies of “It Can’t Happen Here” and “The Plot Against America”? Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a bouffant-haired Hitler at the next Republican debate?
I would say no, for three reasons. First, Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-television meets WWE-heel-turn campaign style. He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!) or rallying a movement of far-right intellectuals (Ann Coulter notwithstanding). His suggestion that a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies might have deserved to be roughed up was pretty ugly, but still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move, which would require organizing a paramilitary force to take to the streets to brawl with the decadent supporters of our rotten legislative government.
Second, precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him. His lack of any real religious faith, his un-libertarian style and record, his clear disdain for the ideas that motivate many of the most engaged Republicans — these qualities haven’t prevented him from consolidating a quarter of the Republican electorate, but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who tops out where Trump’s poll numbers are currently hovering is not something to panic over — yet.
Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far — the deep disaffection with the Republican Party’s economic policies among working-class conservatives, the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration, the accurate sense that the American elite has misgoverned the country at home and abroad.
If Republicans don’t want Trump the phenomenon to turn into an actual movement, if they don’t want the intimations of fascism in his appeal to cohere into something programmatically dangerous, then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step — a way to repress the problem rather than dealing with it, to dismiss discontents and have them return, stronger and deadlier, further down the road.
The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.
