An Ordinary Fascist

Autocrat, Fascist, Dictator, Capo, or King?

It’s a year since Trump’s election, and the liberal commentariat says it doesn’t matter what you call him, so long as you call him out. I disagree. The beginning of every cure is diagnosis. A cold is treated differently than bacterial pneumonia: One you fight with Tylenol (if you can still buy it), the other with penicillin.  A mafia capo can be brought down by the IRS; a fascist requires mobilization. So, we need to get this right.

The list of terms above could be extended: authoritarian, totalitarian, despot, tyrant, Caesar, caudillo, führerand duce have all been proposed.  But only two of them – authoritarian and fascist — are legitimate contenders. The rest are either too specific to fit the current White House occupant, or too broad to be of much help.

Führer and duce are so linked to Hitler and Mussolini that their deployment is misleading. Trump may embrace the führerprinzip, the idea that he is the supreme leader and embodiment of the nation, but at least 65% of Americans don’t; nor do most of the press, intellectual classes, and civil society. He has deployed ICE and Border Control agents like storm troopers, but their targets have been limited (so far) to undocumented workers and foreign-born dissidents not U.S. citizens. That’s nothing to applaud, but the SS had no such limits. Trump is openly racist and anti-Semitic, but racial segregation and imposition of Nuremberg-type laws are not currently in the cards. He has brought about a Gleichschaltung (consolidation of power) by among other things, eviscerating the non-partisan government bureaucracy, but he has done so by executive fiat, not beatings, torture and murder, the preferred methods of Hitler and Mussolini.

Other political comparisons too can be quickly discarded. Caudillo, Caesar, autocrat and dictator are essentially the same thing – powerful figures who rule through political domination, military might and charisma.  The Spanish term caudillo, first applied to 19^th C. strongmen such as Mexican General Santa Anna, is associated now with 20^th C. dictators like Francisco Franco in Spain (who embraced the term), Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. But unlike them, Trump does not have a military background (to say the least), and his relationship with the U.S. armed forces is shaky at best. He has fired many high-ranking officers (especially women and Black men), and in early October assembled hundreds of others and subjected them to an embarrassing, self-aggrandizing harangue. If U.S. history was like that of Argentina, Peru, and Spain – counties where the military has greater political autonomy — a coup would be likely.

The words despot and tyrant are today nearly synonymous, though they started out as distinct. In ancient Greek, a despot (despotismós) was any powerful man who ruled over household slaves, servants and women. Later, in Byzantium, the word signified noble status and unquestioned authority, which is how Karl Marx’s notorious term “Oriental Despotism” arose. He meant it to describe nations with dictatorial rule and an undeveloped class structure. Such states – including India and China – were stagnant; they could never advance toward popular emancipation and socialism.  (Edward Said chastised Marx for his “orientalism.”) Later, both Marx and Engels changed their view and agreed that Asian nations could develop their own emancipatory trajectory independent of European models. Despots could be overthrown by peasants — as proved to be true.

The word tyrant (túrannos) is also Greek in origin. For more than two millennia, it has been used to describe a variety of absolute rulers, from the Athenian Peisistratos to the British King George III, whom Thomas Jefferson described as “tyrannical” in the Declaration of Independence. (Thus, the October 18 “No Kings Day.”) That the same term has been used in such different places and times, however, suggests it is of limited use in the present case.  The most we can say is that since all tyrants thwart democracy, Trump is tyrannical. But that doesn’t get us any closer to classifying him or identifying the best way to counter his duplicity, cruelty, and greed. History offers little guidance: Ancient Corinthian tyrants were banished to remote islands. In the Inferno, Dante dispatched tyrants to the First Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell (Canto 12), where they were submerged in Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood.

“We moved onwards with our trusty guide, along the border of the purple boiling, wherein the boiled were making loud shrieks

I saw people down in it even to their eyebrows and the great Centaur said: ‘These are the tyrants who took to blood and plunder.’”

For most of us, impeachment and conviction would suffice.

“Capo” and “don” are words familiar from Mafia lore. Marlon Brando played Don Corleone in The Godfather(Francis Ford Coppola, dir., 1972) and James Gandolfini the capo and then boss Tony Soprano in the TV series The Sopranos (David Chase, producer, 1999-2007). Trump’s behavior, however, is unlike that of dons and capos of either fact or fiction. Whereas Mafia bosses say little but act authoritatively, Trump does the opposite. In addition, Trump is not part of any extended brotherhood like mafiosi are. Though he embraces other illiberal leaders – Victor Orbán in Hungary, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador – the relationships are contingent and transactional. If they offer Trump something, he likes them, if they don’t, he doesn’t. And finally, unlike mob bosses, Trump is easily intimidated, for example by Xi in China, Putin in Russia, and even Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.  (His loathing of women is matched only by his fear of them.) Though Trump has a long history of working with New York and New Jersey mobsters, he himself would never cut it as a capo, much less a don.

“Totalitarian” initially seems an apt descriptor for Trump. The word was first used in the 1920s to define governance under Italian fascism and then endorsed by Mussolini himself, who spoke of the “totalitarian state.” But his fascism, according to Hannah Arendt, (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) wasn’t truly totalitarian because his control of cadres and dominance of the masses was incomplete. In Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, on the other hand, state control of party members and even the wider public was much more thoroughgoing. Arendt writes:

Fanaticized [party] members can be reached by neither experience nor argument. Identification with the movement seems to have destroyed their very capacity for experience, even if it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death.

Under totalitarianism, Arendt argues, classes are turned into masses, unmoved by their own particularist needs, and gripped by an unshakeable conformism. In those conditions, a dictator can gain complete control of the levers of state and freely work his will.

To be sure, there’s more than a whiff of totalitarianism in the current United States. Trump is impervious to public charges of corruption, lawlessness, caprice, and incompetence.  The MAGA segment of the U.S. working class votes like a mass, ignoring all logical argument and even personal experience.  In addition, Trump has cast out of government people with talent, expertise or imagination, and replaced them with “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is … the best guarantee of their loyalty” (Arendt). But the very fact that I can publish this column in CounterPunch, indicates that the U.S. is far from a totalitarian regime. Even the mainstream media – The New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, etc – publish articles and editorials every day that would be forbidden in a totalitarian state.

There’s one other term that can be quickly dispatched: “Trumpism.” In addition to begging the question, the term suggests that the president is the originator of a novel political ideology or practice. He is not; he has invented nothing.

Authoritarian

Authoritarianism is totalitarianism-lite. It’s a term widely used to describe states in which democratic norms – elections, checks and balances, free speech and assembly – are either absent or weak, and that have a strong or domineering executive. Russia and China are authoritarian. So are Hungary, India, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Belarus and some 50 other nations that are putatively democratic, such as Israel, El Salvador, and Turkey. In states with what historian Steven Levitsky calls “competitive authoritarian regimes,” elections may be conducted fairly, but opposition parties are hamstrung by regulation or repression. In addition, civil society institutions are few, weak or closely supervised by security services or the dominant party. Above all, the chief executive in these states is sovereign and dominates both administration and media. Most of the the world’s population currently lives under capitalist-authoritarian rule.

Many consider the United States a new entrant into the ranks of capitalist-authoritarian states. The German legal theorist and Nazi, Carl Schmitt, in an early essay titled “Dictatorship” (1921), put it simply: “If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.” Trump’s rule by executive order, dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, seizure of the spending and taxing powers of the legislature, control of federal prosecutors, and willingness to deport people and even kill outside of law are the actions of a sovereign willing to negate “democratic principles” and act as dictator or authoritarian. Trump is Schmitt’s ideal sovereign because he is both outside the rules-based political order and within it since “it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety.” Which brings us back to the similarities and differences between interwar, European fascism/Nazism and contemporary American fascism.

An ordinary fascist

Fascism is how capitalists assure themselves an unobstructed path to power and profit. That was the case in Germany in the wake of war, revolution, reparations, hyperinflation and depression. Hitler and the Nazi party forged a plural marriage between themselves, major industrialists and bankers, and various class factions motivated by resentment and economic insecurity. The liaison lasted from 1933 when Hitler came to power, until Germany’s defeat in World War II, 12 years later.

In the U.S., the preconditions of a revived fascism were in place by the late 1970s, coincident with neo-liberalism. That’s when slow growth, combined with inflation, and rising demands for recognition by formerly subordinated groups and classes – women, Blacks, queers, Latinos, union members, and the young – led to a capitalist counter-revolution led first by Nixon and then more decisively by Reagan. Though liberal democracy survived the onslaught of union-busting, race baiting, monopolization, and financialization, it was badly scarred. The “Reagan Democrat” became the lower middle-class vanguard of a new plurality of voters that delivered Republican presidencies for 32 out of 55 years since 1970. It succeeded – largely with Democratic Party acquiescence — in shredding the social safety net, retarding workplace safety, reducing union strength, slowing wage growth, and impeding environmental protection.

Though socially conservative Republican voters in the generation following Reagan differed in many ways from their capitalist class allies, they were alike in one respect: both sought to discipline and disempower insurgent forces that challenged ethnic, gender and class hierarchies. The same approximate alliance – oligarchs and revanchists — remains in place now; it’s what got Trump elected inn 2016 and re-elected a year ago. But the combination has also evolved. To begin with, today’s oligarchs make their money in some new ways. Though finance capital – banks, investment houses, hedge funds, futures trading — remains big and powerful, the tech industry is even bigger (it has a larger market capitalization) with even greater political pull.

Tech has generated vast fortunes out of monopoly rents. Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Ellison and others don’t manufacture things but instead hold patents, copyrights, and licenses from which they obtain fees or “rents”. (This is also true of Elon Musk, though he’s a manufacturer too.) The tech moguls also profit from lists: caches of names and online habits that are rented to advertisers for the marketing of goods, services, entertainment and ideology. All this renting and selling is done seamlessly. Whereas former television and radio advertising existed in awkward proximity to the programming it sustained, little such friction exists today on the internet. Programming and marketing are barely distinguishable from each other. Algorithm is destiny: Your online identity is capitalized to reinforce existing hatreds, desires, and allegiances in such a way as to create and nurture a malleable and subservient population.

Another new thing is the revival of an old thing. Global capitalism has returned immigrants to their former status as scapegoats-in-chief. Though their disparagement has been ongoing since the alien and sedition acts of the late 18^th Century, immigrants have been especially abused in the last two decades. Expanded trade, especially the growth of cheap imports, led to the de-industrialization of the “rust belt” in the U.S. Midwest. Combined with government sanctioned, union-busting, this has meant the loss of formerly well paying (if health destroying) manufacturing job. Rather than blame the job losses on capitalist labor arbitrage (the seeking of lowest, global labor costs), many working people, encouraged by politicians such as Trump, have blamed immigrants for their plight. The same dynamic is at work in the U.K. and much of Europe.

The consequence of all this is the apperance of a MAGA cohort – lower middle class, white working class and traditional Republicans – that has succumbed to the cult of Trump. The “authoritarian character,” Erich Fromm wrote in 1936, during the heyday of interwar fascism, “exercises aggression against the defenseless and sympathy with the powerful.” He continued:

“He is happy when he can follow orders, as long as these orders come from an agency which, because of its power and confident bearing, he can fear, revere and love. This wish to receive orders and act upon them, to submit obediently to a higher power, or even to lose oneself in it completely, can go so far that he even enjoys being disciplined and mistreated.”

It remains to be seen however, whether current supporters of Trump will enjoy their loss of SNAP benefits and Medicaid, doubling of ACA insurance premiums, higher electricity costs and a general inflation resulting from the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. Will they continue to endorse or even accept the arrest and deportation of their immigrant neighbors and the low-cost goods and services they provide? Recent polls and election results suggest otherwise.

Fascism, we have seen, arises from a combination of political, economic and even psychological factors that combine during periods of capitalist crisis. And since capital is nearly always in a state of crisis, fascism may be understood to be incipient capitalism — thus Max Horkheimer’s famous statement from 1939: “But whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.” Challenges to current neo-fascism must therefore highlight and embrace its opposite: democracy, social democracy or even democratic socialism. The best response to a fascism that fails to deliver the goods is a program of democracy that restores social welfare and proposes new initiatives in job creation, wages, housing, healthcare, childcare, education, transportation and environmental protection.

In the weeks prior to the 2024 presidential election, Biden, Kamela Harris and some other Democrats tested use of the word fascist to help mobilize voters against Trump and Vance. A few mainstream journalists did the same, but since the election, they have largely holstered their biggest rhetorical weapon, even as the term has become ever more accurate as a description of the Trump regime. Indeed, the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, discussion of fascism nearly disappeared out of fear that use of the term might be seen as unnecessarily polarizing. Pressing their advantage, Trump, Vance and Steven Miller took the offensive by describing anti-fascism (“antifa”) as itself a kind of fascist terrorism that must be crushed. “War is peace,” says Orwell’s Big Brother, “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”

Trump is just an ordinary fascist — a compliant bagman for finance, tech, and weapons/aerospace capital; he’s an everyday demagogue. A concerted program of opposition – like that articulated by mayor-elect Mamdani in New York, AOC, Bernie and increasing numbers of others, can turn the tide against fascism. So can a strategy of mass protest and broad – peaceful but resolute — mobilization against ICE arrests and deportations. Trump is already weakened by his own cruelty, impulsivity and failure to deliver on promises. It may require only a few more hard shoves for him to fall.

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