I’ve recently been reading or rereading the literature on pre-WWII fascism and post-WWII “neo-fascism” in light of whether or not the Donald Trumpinization of Republican and American politics fits into the broad category “fascist.”
There is a danger in over-broad, over-use of the term “fascist” as a generic put-down or pejorative that makes it, analytically, meaningless. Even admitting this danger, I think what the German scholars call Extremismusforchung or “extremism studies” have utility to understanding the current negative moment in American politics.
Fascism was in some ways a historically specific form of extreme right-wing authoritarian politics that arose under the crisis conditions of national breakdown and economic collapse between the two world wars. It was a counter-revolutionary revolt against modernity promising “organic” national renewal against “alien forces” and moral and spiritual decadence. Fascist movements were mass movements appealing to broad segments of disaffected people feeling a sense of alienation or uprootedness from the traditional social order. They were authoritarian movements wanting to install one-party government and uniformed paramilitary and secret police and do away with parliamentary democracy. They typically extolled a maximum leader or “the fuhrer principle.” Their appeal to nationalism often spilled over into racism and anti-Semitism. They not only flirted with political violence; they embraced it as regenerative force and necessary reaffirmation of masculinity.
In contrast to pre-WW II Italian or German fascism, more recent neo-fascist movements can’t entirely escape the reality of the devastating defeats of Mussolini, Hitler, and fascist Japan during World War II and the likelihood of permanent political marginalization of parties or movements slavishly modeled on them. They try to adopt to “post-modern” conditions of spiritual malaise and either economic prosperity or slow-motion economic crisis like that since the 2008 financial crisis rather than a full-scale depression like the 1930s. They may deemphasize the traditional fascist glorification of national greatness to new emphases on identity politics and anti-globalization.
Donald Trump’s call to “make America great again” is certainly not fascism per se. After all, it has at least a bit in common with liberal political calls like JFK’s “to get America moving again.” Yet is also has an unsettling ideological resonance that relates to what the British political scientist Roger Griffin calls the “fascist minimum” or the ideological embrace of “palingenesis” or political organic renewal or rebirth like an organism being born or reborn. To emphasize Trump’s cult of personality, I ironically call him “the orangefuhrer” for such tactics as urging crowd members to swear an oath of allegiance not to the American flag but to him personally. Yet he does not aspire to be a Hitler-style dictator or create single party rule. His movement’s growth model is nationalist and Isolationist, ideologically targeting Mexicans and Muslims as both internal and external threats, without seeing itself growing in the same way as some Hitlerite crusade to make people into card-carrying members of an “organic” nation-state.
Yet the organic metaphor is still illuminating in understanding Trump’s appeal. Griffin invokes the comparison with a “slime mold” or “a slug-like entity that forms from countless single cells in conditions of extreme damp . . . [without] a central nervous system, [but with] the mysterious power of forming into a brainless eye-less super-organism that somehow moves purposefully like a mollusk animating by single consciousness.”
I think that it is not too far a stretch to call “sliming” the process through which the Trump movement grows both at the level of recruiting ordinary followers and by coopting political leaders, many of whom previously highly critical of him. While others may attribute this merely to political opportunism or cynicism or cowardice, I think that leaders like former Vice President Dick Cheney, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and even Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Arizona Senator John McCain who have come to embrace Trump have been “slimed” by the attractive or absorptive power of Trumpism.
Trump’s Isolationism, nativism, borderline racism (against immigrant Mexican “rapists” and “drug dealers” and now a Mexican but really American-born judge as well as Muslims everywhere), and indifference if not tolerance to anti-Semitic fringe supporters qualifies his movement as more than soft-core authoritarian but as fascist or neo-fascist.
It is remarkable and at least to me terrifying that such a man and movement have slimed their way to control of a great national party and the endorsement of mainstream politicians whom one would have thought know better.
That there are politically active Jews like Sheldon Adelson and Ari Fleisher who have also embraced Trump to me beggars belief.
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