Let's Get Our Words Right

On Definitions in the Age of Trumpism-Fascism

Fascism

Refuse Fascism (on whose editorial board I sit) defines fascism as follows:

“Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights…Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this [took] dramatic leaps under the Trump Regime. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

Trump and Trumpism, also known as MAGA, are fascist, an updated version of the political pathology that took over Italy and Germany between the last century’s two world wars. They are a match for the definition of fascism provided on Refuse Fascism’s Web Site. They seek “a qualitative change in how society is governed.” They “foment and rely on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’” They “unleash fascist mobs and threats of violence to build their movement and consolidate power.” Under the consolidated fascist rule to which Trump MAGA fascism aspires, “traditional democratic rights” are “essentially eliminated. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors.”

In the wake of Trump’s second election victory, US-American “fascism has direction and momentum.” It must not be allowed to consolidate its rule across American government and society. It must be resolutely resisted and decisively defeated by the masses of decent people who refuse to live in a fascist America. Such a defeat requires confrontation with the underlying conditions and system that give rise to fascism – capitalism-imperialism.

One obstacle to this necessary mass refusal is the failure of journalists, commentators, pundits, intellectuals, academics, activists, politicians and others to properly understand and name Trump and MAGA Trumpism as fascist. These public “authorities” and opinion shapers describe Trump and his movement in misleading, insufficiently alarming and activating terms that distort and downplay the grave menace posed by the new Amerikaner fascism.

“Conservative”

The mainstream US media-politics culture commonly calls Trump and his MAGA movement “conservative.” This is absurd. There’s nothing “conservative” about American Republi-fascism’s determination to overthrow the rule of law and carry out a Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society. There’s nothing conservative about MAGA’s wars on racial equality, immigrant rights, gay and transgender rights, livable ecology/environmental regulation, women’s reproductive rights, truth, science, independent media, political opposition, and the accurate teaching of American history, past and present.

It is radical, not conservative to try to overthrow an election, as Trump and his minions did in 2020 and 2021, replete with an attempted physical insurrection that Trump wanted armed with military assault weapons.

It was radical, not conservative for the Trump-crafted Christian fascist Supreme Court to trash longstanding judicial principle and defy super-majority public opinion by ending women’s constitutional right to an abortion.

It was radical, not conservative for the Trumpist high court to grant Herr Trump immunity from prosecution for any crimes he has committed or will in the future commit as part of his real and/or supposed “official duties” as president.

It is radical, not conservative, to threaten mayors and other city officials with incarceration and crippling civil liability for failing to cooperate with a federal nativist-racist mass deportation project.

It is radical, not conservative to threaten your political rivals and enemies with discriminatory criminal federal investigation and prosecution and to nominate vicious toadies sworn to undertake that task atop the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It is radical, not conservative to call centrist capitalist-imperialist Democrats “communists” and to claim that the militantly bourgeois US higher education system is under the control of “Marxists” and “the radical Left.”

It is radical, not conservative to threaten to invoke the slave-owners’ 1807 Insurrection Act to crush protests of your rule with the US military on the day you are inaugurated.

It is radical, not conservative to call for police to be given “one really rough day” to do whatever they want to inner-city populations — a not-so veiled call for extrajudicial police state executions in the streets of US ghettos and barrios.

It is radical, not conservative to plan to replace thousands and thousands of federal career civil service employees with inexperienced operatives selected for their allegiance to Christian white nationalist values and loyalty to Trump.

It is radical, not conservative to nominate the drunken women-abuser Pete Hegseth, an open Christian fascist, to head the biggest and most lethal imperial military system in history – a military Hegseth will be only too happy to deploy against fascist Trump’s “enemies within.” A longtime FOX/Fatherland News host and full-on white nationalist MAGA fascist without real administrative experience, Hegseth boasts large body tattoos representing his identity as a Christian Crusader. He sees himself and his fellow “true Christians” as enlisted in a holy war against “domestic enemies” he accuses of trying to take down God and country: LGBT folks, non-Christians, leftists, liberals, feminists, and anti-racists. The Christian Fascist theologian atop Hegseth’s religious order (Doug Wilson) preaches that women should have no authority in home or society and says that the years of Black chattel slavery were a time of welcome “harmony between the races.”

A religious expert and pastor recently told the “P”BS Newshour that “If you want to be the kind of president who uses the Insurrection Act, to call in the military against uprisings in American cities, to use military force against protesters, Hegseth is the man for the job.”

That’s precisely the kind of president that Trump has clearly said he wants to be.

Trumpism-fascism is radical – radically reactionary, like the Southern Confederacy of 1861-1865, like the proto-fascist Jim Crow regime that ruled across the former Confederate states between 1877 and the 1960s, and like the Third Reich, which drew key inspiration from the Jim Crow system and prior US-American genocide and colonialism.

An interesting banner entered the US Capitol during the Trumpist Insurrection Bid of 1-6-2021

“Populist”

Another common and problematic mainstream description of Trump and his party and movement is “populist.”

Political scientists define populism as the notion that society is divided between two fiercely opposed groups: "the pure people" vs. "the corrupt elite." A true populist leader claims to embody the united "will of the people" over and against the nefarious “establishment” enemy.

By this definition, Trump and Trumpism are obviously a match. The problem is that the definition tells you nothing about the core fascist content of Trumpism beneath its generically populist language about “draining the swamp,” taking down “the liberal elite,” and smashing “the establishment” (Republi-fascists sometimes even say “the ruling class”).

America’s initial Populist Party embodied mass popular opposition to the plutocratic rule of concentrated capitalist wealth. It emerged from radical U.S. farmers’ fight for social and economic justice and popular sovereignty against the plutocracy of the nation’s Robber Baron capitalists and their giant new corporations and financial institutions during the late 19th century. It was at first very much a movement of the Left, one that backed human rights, social equality, freedom, and popular democracy. It wanted the government to serve the laboring majority and the common good, not the parasitic corporate and financial Few.

A cartoon depicting the Populist Party’s initial enemies in the 1890s

MAGA-fascist “populism” mounts no core challenge to ruling class capitalist wealth and power beyond companies and elites it sees as “woke” enemies of its revanchist agenda and its tangerine-tinted Fuhrer Elect. Its pampered, orange-sprayed Dear Leader’s main “legislative accomplishment” as president was a giant tax cut for the wealthy Few and their giant corporations and financial institutions.

Trump Republi-fascist populists are racist, misogynist, eco-exterminist, and repressive. They loathe democracy, freedom of speech, and independent media. They spread hate and popular division to take and keep power.

Like Hitler in the early middle 1930s, Trump’s demonization, scapegoating, “them and us” Othering, and menacing of multiple “internal enemies” – leftists, liberals, Muslims, Black and brown immigrants, inner city residents, academics, environmentalists and more – and external foes (China above all) diverts attention from his service and allegiance to the super-rich and their parasitic profits system. In Trump’s case, he is himself one of the nation’s grotesquely rich capitalist parasites.

Fascism past and present embraces stark economic inequality and the lethal power that inequality grants to those atop an imagined Social Darwinian (“survival of the fittest”) pyramid. The world’s richest man, a deranged spawn of fascist South African apartheid Elon Musk, has garnered a potentially powerful de facto Cabinet seat in Mein Trumpf’s second administration with his considerable plutocratic efforts for Trump’s re-election. The absurdly rich sociopath Musk hopes to use that position to advocate vicious assaults on the security and well-being of poor and working class people.

Two Loathsome Fascist parasites

Journalists and others who insist on calling Trumpism “populist” should have the decency to identify it as specifically right-wing, racist, sexist, and nativist populism. It would be far better to just call by its real name – fascism.

“Authoritarian”

Mainstream commentators and reporters sometimes call Trump and MAGA Trumpism authoritarian. Here again the word fits but leaves out much of the key substance.

Merriam-Webster’s’ Online defines the word authoritarian as follows: “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority; 2. : of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.”

The term is a match for Trumpism and MAGA fascism, to be sure, but it tells you nothing about the social and ideological content of the authoritarian/anti-democratic regime Trump and his backers favor. Lenin and Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China are commonly seen as authoritarian states under the standard definitions but no serious analyst should call those states fascist. The communist-led Lenin-Stalin and Mao governments were anti-capitalist and anti-fascist socialist states that (for decades) supplanted authoritarian feudalism and capitalism with socialist planning and control. Fascism supplants bourgeois democracy and rule of law not with socialist authority – not with a “dictatorship of the proletariat” – but with a new political superstructure atop persistent capitalist-imperialist class rule: the continuing underlying core of bourgeois class rule with the outer democratic shell torn off.

“Oligarchy”

Trump is sometimes called “oligarchic,” a proponent or agent of “oligarchy.” Merriam-Websters’ Online defines oligarchy as follows: “1. government by the few; 2. a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; 3. an organization under oligarchic control.”

The problem here is that government by and for the parasitic wealthy Few is characteristic of capitalist rule in general beneath all the rhetoric of democracy. Academics and others exposed and described the United States government as a capitalist oligarchy well before Trump became a serious presidential contender with the help of a handful right-wing billionaires. It has long been commonplace for scholars, journalists, activists and others to correctly observe that the United States is not an actual democracy but is instead a plutocratic capitalist oligarchy in which the corporate and financial ruling class is vastly over-represented and the policy preferences and societal values of the working class majority are coldly trumped (no pun intended) by concentrated wealth and power on one key issue after another – this regardless of which ruling class party or combination of ruling class parties holds sway in elected and appointed office. What makes US oligarchy under Trump distinct from US oligarchy under other presidents is the extreme degree of “transactional” and “gangster-capitalist” venality involved in Trump’s rule, the mercurial unpredictability of the cult leader, and the openly fascist/racist/nativist/sexist/eco-exterminist nature of Trump and his minions. Whether or not the second Trump administration is more tightly and classically oligarchic than previous presidencies is something that remains to be seen. Chances are good that it will.

“Far Right”

Trump and his supporters are sometimes described as “far right.” They certainly are far right but this phrase does not distinguish between different parts of the “far right.” The determined anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney is far right on one key political and policy area after another – guns, abortion, the environment, worker rights, schools, militarism/imperialism, and more – but she retains a commitment to longtime domestic US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy and rejects her party’s capture by a fascist cult of personality and violence centered around the wannave strongman for life Trump. Numerous “free trade” and “deficit hawk” Republicans and libertarians are far right in their militant opposition to social and environmental regulation, welfare, and civil and worker rights but do not fully embrace Trumpism-fascism’s tariff, tax, and spending policies along with the fascist cult around the Dear Leader.

Trump and his MAGA backers and movement represent a specifically fascist form of far-right politics. They support the active and forceful use of big government state power to enforce savage social inequalities and oppression structures while more libertarian variants of the far right are more content for those inequalities to be left in place and exacerbated through pure market forces and without big government intervention.

“Totalitarian”

Some intellectuals like to throw the word “totalitarian” around rather loosely, applying it to Trumpism-fascism (among other political pathologies and different regimes past and present). This is problematic. Britannica Online defines totalitarianism as:

“a form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini coined the term totalitario in the early 1920s to characterize the new fascist state of Italy, which he further described as ‘all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.’ By the beginning of World War II, totalitarian had become synonymous with absolute and oppressive single-party government. Other modern examples of totalitarian states include the Soviet Union ern examples of totalitarian states include the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and North Korea under the Kim dynasty.”

The use of this word is badly flawed in relation to our topic in at least three critical ways. It drastically exaggerates fascism’s success in winning the allegiance of the populations in countries that have fallen under fascist control. It drastically underestimates the extent to which fascism has relied on alliance and collaboration with “multiple social forces and economic interests”[1] within society and state. And it falsely conflates corporate-capitalist authoritarianism and militarism of fascism with the bureaucratic-collectivist authoritarianism of 20^th century socialism in the Soviet Union and China under Mao. (Both Mao’s Chinese Communist Party and Stalin’s Russia fought epic battles with fascism in the last century. The anti-fascist Soviet Union lost more than 20 million lives to the fascist and militantly anti-Marxist Nazi Third Reich during World War II. Maoist partisans fought and died heroically against invading Japanese fascist forces during the 1930s and WWII.)

Trumpism-fascism is situated in a neoliberal era and nation that elevates and esteems market forces in ways that militate against “all within the state, none outside the state” – an ideal that was never achieved even under classic in-power European or Japanese fascism in the last century.

“Extremism”

The mainstream media sometimes refers to hardcore Trump fascist MAGAts (e.g. the fanatical Republi-fascist Congresspersons Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Loren Boebert) as “extremist.” This is problematic in at least two ways:

* it underestimates the terrible extent to which the new American fascism has been taken out of the “extreme margins” and mainstreamed into the formerly republican Republi-fascist Party of Trump, one of the two dominant capitalist-imperialist political organizations in the US.

* it leaves the specificity of fascism, suggesting no differences from –- and false conflation with --- fascism’s blood enemies socialism and communism, both of which are considered “extremist” in the dominant ruling class ideology.

We Can Drop the Qualifying Prefixes

I’ll conclude with some words on some poor usages I have seen on “the left” – whatever that is anymore – during the fascist Obama-Trump years. It is really quite silly for analysts and others to dilute the harsh fascist reality of Trumpism by adding hyphenated qualifiers to the underlying pathology: “proto-,” “semi-,” “para-“ and the like. I have no serious objection to putting “neo-” before “the F-word” and have done that myself a bit since all it signifies is a temporal resurgence of the pathology after the period of classic European fascism.

“Aspiring”?

I recently saw an esteemed Atlantic writer refer to Trump as an “aspiring fascist.” It is quite absurd at this late date to call Trump’s multiply evident fascism aspirational! Perhaps what the writer meant to say was “aspiring fascist dictator,” in which case I have no objection.

“Corporatism”

I have over the years received many messages claiming that both two dominant US parties are fascist because (a) they are both dominated by corporations and (b) Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatism.” This is seriously f*#ked up! Corporatism does not refer to corporate dominance. As Wikipedia usefully explains:

“Corporatism is a political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby corporate groups, such as agricultural, labor, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come together and negotiate contracts or policy (collective bargaining) on the basis of their common interests.^[1][2][3] The term is derived from the Latin corpus, or ‘body.’ Corporatism does not refer to a political system dominated by large business interests, even though the latter are commonly referred to as ‘corporations’ in modern American vernacular and legal parlance. Instead, the correct term for that theoretical system would be corporatocracy. The terms ‘corporatocracy’ and ‘corporatism’ are often confused due to their similar names and to the use of corporations as organs of the state.”

As for Mussolini’s supposed statement, the anti-fascist organization Political Research Associates has exposed it as a total myth:

“ ‘Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.’ — Benito Mussolini. [This quote] is generally attributed to an article written by Mussolini in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana with the assistance of Giovanni Gentile, the editor. The quote, however, does not appear in the Enciclopedia Italiana in the original Italian. It does not appear in the official English translation of that article: Benito Mussolini, 1935, ‘The Doctrine of Fascism,’ (Firenze: Vallecchi Editore). And it does not appear in the longer treatment of the subject by Mussolini in: Benito Mussolini, 1935, “Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions,” (Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers). Where the quote comes from remains a mystery, and while it is possible Mussolini said it someplace at some time, a number of researchers have been unable to find it after months of research. It is unlikely that Mussolini ever made this statement because it contradicts most of the other writing he did on the subject of corporatism and corporations. When Mussolini wrote about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds. The article on Wikipedia on Corporatism explains this rather well.”

In my next post, I will continue with more reflections on key words and phrases (including some of my own invention and/or particular use) and their meaning relative to the Trumpist-fascist nightmare that is now descending with more horrific weight than ever before on the people of the United States and the world: eco-fascism, pandemo-fascism, Amerikaner, Trumpenleft, Weimar Democrats, and Vichy Democrats.

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Endnote

1. Carl Boggs, Fascism Old and New: American Politics at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2018), 69.