Who's Afraid of Fascism?

Since Trump broke onto the political scene, commentators have asked if he’s a fascist. It’s not a useful question.

Illustration: Shealah Craighead’s official White House portrait of Donald Trump, taken in 2017.

The word “fascism” comes from Italian. It’s a reference to Mussolini’s fasci di Combattimento, an early iteration of his National Fascist Party, though it certainly also evokes the Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks lashed together. (That fasces and faggot are cognates is remarkable to me.) 

As a public school student, it’s this latter etymology that I learned, and it always puzzled me. Isn’t the implication – that a group of people together are harder to break – better suited to Marxism? After all, fascism is a strong-eat-weak ideology. The fascism you’re taught as a high school student hardly seems concerned with the unity of people, but their division. 

But then, one learns about Nazism in school. Even as an AP Euro student, I can’t recall learning much of anything about Francoist Spain or Fascist Italy, but the horrors of Nazi Germany still consume America’s attention. Pop history books about Nazis crowd library shelves. Countless fact-free torture-porn stories about the Holocaust like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas are required reading. And all the same, when pressed to define “fascism,” your average American just starts describing their opponents. 

In spite of the popularity of fascism as a signifier, what it signifies isn’t clear. And that’s hardly the fault of the public education system. Even academics like Umberto Eco and Ian Kershaw have struggled to contain a definition to a few sentences, instead creating lists any nascent fascist can be measured against, like legal tests enshrined in statute. 

Lots of ink has been spilled measuring Trump against these lists. It’s useless. Academic definitions of “fascism” first must assume that “fascism” is coherent enough to be defined. If Mussolini’s rapid redefinition of his ideology into something that gelled better with Hitler’s proves anything, it’s incoherence.

So, incoherent – but analytically useful? Perhaps if I were writing in Italian. Everything called “fascism” has undergone significant changes from country to country, with its core tenets transforming into whatever flatters its new citizens the most. It’s the end boss of insincere political flattery, where a politician believes in their own power first and foremost, and secondarily in whatever their constituents want. 

Nothing outside Italy will ever look like Mussolini’s fascism, and nothing outside Germany will ever be Hitler’s Nazism. As James Waterman Wise, Jr. said in 1936, “If fascism comes, it will not be identified with any 'shirt' movement, nor with an 'insignia,' but it will probably be 'wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.”¹

Nor does calling Trump a fascist tell us anything important about his second term. If the term is broad enough to encompass a 21st century American president, then it’s also too broad to say much about their regimes. Hitler was in power about 12 years, dying by suicide rather than face the collapse of his government. Franco reigned 36 years until he died of congestive heart failure. All they had in common was dying in office. 

In part, this is a warning against using history as a scrying tool. We want to have a clear and compelling definition of Trump’s faults so that we know exactly what to do. If Trump is Hitler, we must resist him in the same way as the Partisans. 

But he’s simply not. And the argument-from-definition obfuscates more than it reveals. Resistance that was effective in the last century won’t be in this one, and Trump’s ideology doesn’t look like anything that came before it. It has adapted to the peculiar tastes of the American people: the thirst for revenge, the desire to kick down, the Star Spangled Banner and the Christian God.

No matter what words you use for it, life is going to get worse under Trump’s rule. The tariffs he’s set on will raise everyone’s cost of living, his demonization of immigrants such as those in Springfield will decimate communities, and his spite for the administrative state will hobble basic governmental functions. 

You don’t need a scary word from high school civics to know this. And nor does that word give us any clues on where to go from here. The great rhetorical battles of the past 9 years of Trump have never been less relevant than they are now, though they’re about to get a lot more intense. Whether you believe him to be a literal Nazi or an unremarkable imperialist, bite back the urge to prove the deep intricacies of your correct take when you hear someone who agrees with you on everything but etymology. Now is an era of coalition-building, not arguments from semantics — especially not over a word as semantically fractured as “fascist.”

1. This is not a direct quote, but rather comes from the Sinclair Lewis Society’s FAQ. A version of this is often attributed erroneously to 40-

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^My cat’s addition. Far be it from me to delete it. Anyway, the quote is erroneously attributed to Lewis, but the Society lists several compelling places it may actually have come from. Wise’s is the closest to the meme version.