Such nominal denials are actually more like confessions. Even proud confessions.
“I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” Trump said immediately following. Whether Trump can define what a Nazi or a fascist is, would be another question. Much less what their opposite would be. Some of his advisers like Stephen Miller would be happy to explain it to him, I’m sure. Steve Bannon just got out of prison, so he’d probably be glad to fill Donald in on what those things mean.
Kamala Harris has said she agrees with the Trump-as-fascist characterization. And since he just staged a big rally in Madison Square Garden that echoed the vibes of the infamous 1939 German America Bund (Nazi) rally there, Trump’s campaign was certainly encouraging the Nazi comparison, as well:
But, to be fair, the Trumpistas haven’t adopted standard uniforms like the Bundists of those days. Unless you count the red MAGA baseball caps.
In case you’re wondering, the George Washington image was meant to stand for the “true Americanism” of the Bundists. They didn’t actually spend much time studying up on the Founders and what they stood for, though. All that late-17th-century “liberal democracy” stuff was way too Commie for them to bother with.
Defining the thing – the easy definition
Even for political scientists and historians, coming up with a clean definition of fascism has been a challenge. Political movements based on thuggish displays of enthusiasm for a Master Race and a Holy Nation don’t lend themselves to being easily reduced to precise academic models. As one example of why it’s tricky, the famous German Weimar Constitution was never abolished during the Hitler regime. It was officially in force until the day in 1945 when Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Hitler’s government just ruled without paying any attention to it. But if we looked only at the constitution, Germany was just as democratic in 1944 as it had been in 1932.
If Trump wins next week, we’ll probably hear Bannonites making a similar argument to excuse any un-Constitutional thing Trump does. They will claim to be defending the True Constitution, just as Trump claims to be defending true democracy when he declares, "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." (2) (Hey, he didn’t say there that he was tearing up the Constitution and the rule of law, now did he?)
Benito Mussolini’s movement that came to power in 1922, followed by Mussolini’s coup in 1925, called itself the Fascist Party. It would be hard to argue that Mussolini’s Fascist Party was not really fascist. His political themes were anti-socialism, anti-democracy, and a pompous hyper-nationalism of the ethnonationalist brand. Mussolini and his supporters engaged in “populist” rhetoric in which the Fascists posed as the representative of The People (the true people, ethnic Italians) against an oppressive Elite, which they defined to include liberals, socialists, pro-democracy media, and labor unions. Big capital as such was not taken to be such an urgent threat to the True People.
Militarism, including paramilitary displays by the Party itself, was central, as was colonialism. The nationalist ideology also indulged in an aggressive foreign policy, including the seemingly (for ultranationalists) contradictory effort to promote fascism in other countries, notably Austria, France, and Germany. It also included actual expansionist and colonial wars against Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) and Albania. Mussolini’s Fascism included promoting Catholicism and getting along with the Vatican, which demanded only a limited version of Christian behavior by the Fascist government for their support. Italian Fascist ideology did not have the anti-Semitic emphasis of the German Nazis. But as Mussolini became more and more dependent on German support, the Italian Fascists cooperated more actively in the Holocaust.
The Austrian dictatorship that began in 1933 and lasted until the Germany takeover in 1938 was and is known as “Austrofascism” and was closely modeled on Mussolini’s politics. Mussolini directly supported the Austrofascist government of Engelbert Dollfuss and then Kurt Schuschnigg. When Hitler Germany attempted a coup against Dollfuss in 1934, Mussolini backed Austria against Germany and threatened to intervene directly on its behalf should Germany invade Austria militarily. But Mussolini would soon become more dependent on Germany, so that by 1938 there was no Italian threat of intervention to prevent Germany from annexing Austria.
Hitler explicitly modeled his National Socialist movement on Mussolini’s fascism. The hatred of democracy and socialism and (especially) Communism, the militarism and violence in politics and foreign policy, the imperial expansionism, the use of paramilitary partisan formations, the hyper-nationalism, the bombastic ethnonationalist rhetoric and legislation, and cooptation of the Catholic Church, were all elements German Nazism shared with Mussolini’s fascism. The centrality of murderous anti-Semitism was a particular feature of Germany Nazi/fascist ideology.
We could add other features of historical fascism, like the banning of independent media outlets once in power. But politics and history are not hard sciences like chemistry or physics, where there are objective physical measures to determine what a particular substance or process is. But historical and social-science definitions are not completely arbitrary either.
The more complicated approach
The Soviet-era Communist Parties gave often Jesuitical definitions of fascism when it came to dealing with particular regimes. When Communist Yugoslavia established an independent foreign policy from that of the USSR, the Soviets denounced Yugoslavia’s government as “fascist.” When they improved relations later, Yugoslavia didn’t officially look so “fascist” anymore.
The definitions of regime type used today by institutions like Freedom House and V-Dem tend to use a spectrum running from liberal democracy to autocracy to describe the nature of contemporary regimes. The Mussolini-Dollfuss-Hitler type of regimes arose in capitalist countries, and historical left definitions of fascism usually included capitalism as part the definition of fascism. But even countries that have established economic systems based on massive state ownership and control have also been known to have what we politely refer to as “democratic deficits.”
As long as we’re talking geeky political theory here, I’ll throw in a mention of the question of whether Communist and Fascist regimes are somehow mirror images of each other. Liberals have sometimes used “red fascism” to describe Communism and Communist regimes. But however much “objective conditions” may determine the forms of political regimes, ideologies also do matter. Because however cynical their applications may be, they can and do influence how decision-makers understand the world and the actions of other countries and political players.
Aurel Kolnai was a Hungarian Jew who converted to Catholicism, moved to Austria, and became a philosopher. He was also a convinced democrat and a perceptive critic of fascism. He wrote a book called The War Against the West that was first published in 1938 in English, though he wrote it in Austria before the German annexation (Anschluss). It is a book of continuing interest, because he makes an extensive analysis of the Nazi ideology based on Nazi publications and propaganda. And his suggestions about how the Nazi policies might develop internally and externally held up remarkably well to what happened in future years. He was writing after the passage of the Nuremburg Race Laws, the attempted German putsch in Austria in 1934, and during the early part of the Spanish Civil War but before Munich Agreement.
He correctly identified the roots of Nazi ideology in the reactionary, anti-democracy, anti-French Revolution tradition of 18th and 19th century thinkers who had rejected the entire concepts of political liberalism and democracy.
The following three theses gives a good idea of Kolnai’s perspective:
1. The outstanding [i.e., most prominent] form of Fascism known as National Socialism, and the Germany known as the Third Reich, controlled by, and imbued with National Socialist thought in its more or less official varieties, constitute a reality, spiritual and historical, of supreme individuality and importance.The Nazis’ hostility attitude to Communism regarded it as yet another toxic form of democracy. Kolnai writes in relation to the philosophy of Ernst Jünger, who after the Second World War managed to rebrand himself as a responsible conservative:
2. Absolute and conscious antagonism to Western Liberal civilization is the central impulse of that intellectual and political reality.
3. The National Socialist and affiliated doctrines are fundamentally opposed to Liberal democracy, as well as to its Christian foundations and to its Socialistic trends and implications. [my emphasis] (3)
Some readers will probably be reminded of Communism, and Jünger, who is one of the so-called National Bolshevists, is likely to accept this kinship. But, in fact, the simile is completely misleading. For Communism the object of socio-economic equality is essential above a ll; its hard and inhuman methods of procedure, its militaristic organization, its use of proletarian class-privileges are throughout imbued with the dialectics of revolutionary transformation ; it destroys the former master classes instead of adapting them into fit managers of a more formidable mastery. Whether or not the sufferings and humiliations entailed by its methods are justified by its aims and achievements, Communism is bent on creating a rational society of free workers ; whereas Junger’s “ Worker-Type ”, the bearer of new Herrschaft, is in fact a new edition of the old masters, a compound of Prussian officers’ caste and officialdom, factory owners and higher engineers, placed above the workers as a personified Daemon of Work. (pp. 879-880)(To be fair to Jünger, he was dismissed from the German Army in 1944 because of his association with officer implicated in the famous 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.)
Historically speaking, both liberal democracy and Communism were products of democratic thought and practice. Or, to complicate it a bit more, the early “communism” that manifested itself in late-medieval and early-modern Christian heresies and peasant revolts actually was an important phase in the development of liberal democracy in Europe.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their legendary pamphlet The Communist Manifesto in what became known as the “pre-March” days of 1848, i.e., just before the breakout of massive pro-democracy revolts in Europe, a critical moment in the development of liberal democracy, including its social-democratic variants. It was written as the programmatic statement of a tiny group called the Communist League.
Neither the group nor the pamphlet had any detectable effect on the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions. But it wound up being influential for quite a while. Ideology does matter.
When it comes to Trump, he seems to have no actual ideology other than seeking more money and power for Donald Trump. And he thinks tariffs are somehow magically wonderful. But he understands that the far-right and xenophobic ideology he is promoting can bring him votes if he convinces enough people to put their hatreds and fears above their responsibility as citizens. He has his armed partisan militia that went into action on January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol. And, to repeat his declaration of last November in New Hampshire, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and he radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."
I’m sorry, but anyone who doesn’t recognize that as Hitler talk needs to read a history book or two.
Reading, of course, does require more effort than listening to one of Trump disjointed rants.
Notes:
(1) ‘I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi,’ Trump declares amid fascism claims. Times of Israel 10/29/2024. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/im-not-a-nazi-im-the-opposite-of-a-nazi-trump-declares-amid-fascism-claims/> (Accessed: 2024-20-10).
(2) Kurtzleben, Danielle (2023): Why Trump's authoritarian language about 'vermin' matters. NPR 11/17/2023. <https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary> (Accessed: 2024-20-10).
(3) Kollnai, Aurel (1988 [1938]): The War Against the West, 17-18. New York: Viking Press.
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