The Is Trump Fascist? discourse is peaking right now, thanks to the release of a book, Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America, dedicated to airing out this debate via essays written by scholars and journalists with differing viewpoints, including big names like Corey Robin and Samuel Moyn.
I enjoyed Andrew Marantz’s rundown of the controversy, as well as the meta-conversation animating it, in The New Yorker, but I fundamentally just don’t understand why the question of whether Trump is a fascist, a protofascist, or an insert-your-own-label-here is of any practical importance. There isn’t the faintest whiff of mystery about who Trump is, what he wants, his political views (or, in many cases, lack thereof), or anything else about the man. His machinations are well-documented, there’s a mile-high pile of evidence he tried to steal the 2020 election, there is no denying that he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” while campaigning for president in 2015, and then enacted a stripped-down version of this policy once he was elected, and, well. . . I could go on. Even if you think, as I do, that some of his most supposedly infamous quotes have been taken out of context (and like Marantz, I think people are misinterpreting the recent “bloodbath” comment, which sparked days of panicky cable-news segments), it’s undeniable that Trump does not speak like most mainstream GOP candidates in recent history, and that some of his rhetoric, like his repeated claim that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., are at least a bit fash-y.
Whether or not this all adds up to “fascism” has led to a white-hot debate, but it’s one that appears to be devoid of practical ramifications. This is demonstrated in Marantz’s own essay, when he tries to drag this debate out of the academic clouds and into the real world. At one point, he asks, “If we can’t be clear-eyed about what it was, then how can we prepare for what might happen here—maybe again, maybe anew—in a few months?” Later on: “When American politics is compared to European fascism, the standard deflationist impulse is to reduce the analogy to a reductio [meaning a reductio ad Hitlerum], lest American readers use it as an excuse to treat Trump as exotic and let the rest of us off the hook. But perhaps the comparison should have the opposite effect, urging us toward deeper self-reflection by linking what is most shameful in our past to what is most galling in our present.” And toward the end of his essay, Marantz argues that “To know when we ought to panic, it’s helpful to know what to look out for[.]”
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