There’s a “Fascism Debate” in the Summer of 2024?

Really? Why?

I hear that academics are having “a fascism debate” regarding Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump and his followers.

Seriously? Why?

“A Lot of People Like My Talk of Dictatorship”

Recall that Trump tried to subvert the last presidential election and to physically overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020-21. He wanted his “beautiful” January 6 rioters armed with military assault weapons.  He wanted to be physically present at the Attack on the Capitol as Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Proud Boys rounded up Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence for extrajudicial execution on the US Capitol’s steps.

Trump’s refusal to accept the peaceful transfer of power in 2020-21 was easily predicted by commentators and activists who had the basic intelligence, knowledge, and decency to identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist from the beginning.

Here we are three and a half years after the ugly conclusion to Trump’s first fascist presidency[1]. All but a tiny number of “traditional” non-Trump Republicans have been purged from the party of Trump.

Three-fourths of the nation’s Republicans buy Trump’s Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.  

Most of the party’s base believes his claim that the belated and obstructed efforts to prosecute him for some of his high crimes – election interference, obstruction, the theft of public documents, campaign finance crimes, and more – are nothing more than partisan political persecution.  

Trump openly expresses his desire to be “a dictator”…“for a day.”  He tells Time Magazine that “a lot of people like” his “talk of dictatorship.”

In a December 2022 “Truth Social” post, Trump said that the (mythical) theft of the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Trump says he wants to declare the Insurrection Act on the day he is inaugurated for a second time, to quell protests with the US military. Recall that Trump as president wanted to deploy the US armed forces to crush the George Floyd Rebellion. (For an exhaustive catalogue of Trump’s fascist actions and statements during his first presidency, see the third chapter – titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21” – of my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. )  

Trump has just preposterously charged that the FBI had orders to assassinate him when they searched his Mar a Lago estate for classified documents he stole – part of his claim that he is being persecuted by “the radical left deep state.”  

Close Trump observers know that his malignant narcissism involves constant projection so that his FBI charge has an chilling translation: he wants to use federal gendarmes to assassinate his political enemies.  And indeed Trump is currently arguing before the Christian fascist Supreme Court (that he and Mitch McConnell created) that he would as president possess full legal immunity from prosecution from sending out a military hit squad to assassinate one of his political opponents.

Trump says he will not promise to honor the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if it doesn’t go his way – no surprise there, same as in 2016 and 2020.

Political Violence

Dictatorship is one of the core pillars of fascism. So is the embrace of political violence, seen of course on January 6, the Trump-triggered physical culmination of  Trump’s many-sided attempt to sabotage and revoke the 2020 presidential election.

Here it is worth recalling that Trump would likely have been convicted by the US Senate for inciting insurrection and thereby banned from further public office but for some Republican Senators’ concern that voting to convict him would have put the lives of their families at risk. The senators in question were too frightened of Trumpist assassins to fulfill their basic duty to the Constitution. That’s mafia state shit.

Trump has opened his 2023 and  2024 campaign rallies with the tune, “Justice for All,” the Star-Spangled Banner badly sung by some of his cult members who were jailed over the participation in the January 6 attack on US Capitol. The wannabe fascist strongman recites the Pledge of Allegiance while the song, recorded over a prison phone line, plays.

Trump promises to pardon untold hundreds of the January 6 rioters.

Trump openly taunts and demeans the rule of law by intimidating and mocking jurors, prosecutors, witnesses, and judges in the various legal cases against him.

Trump has gone full bore with the neofascist National Rifle Association (NRA), calling for the arming of just about everyone, including kindergarten teachers, as the solution to the nation’s insane gun violence and mass shooting epidemic. Recall that the NRA ran a commercial threatening the assassination of liberal elites during Trump’s first presidency.

Recall that Trump spent the last night of his 2020 campaign in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in honor of teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two people with an illegally owned AR-15 there at a Black Lives march the previous summer.

White Power Republi-Nazi meet up at Mar a Lago

The threat of right-wing political bloodshed is now ubiquitous and normalized across all levels of government, no small problem in a nation that glorifies violence and is more heavily armed than any nation in history.

Fascism is about (among other things) the rule of men over the rule of law.

“Poisoning Our Blood”

Trump has in recent months openly channeled the ultimate genocidal fascist Hitler by saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promising to rid the nation of socialist, communist, and Marxist “vermin.”

Trump absurdly calls the dismal capitalist-imperialist Democrats and the blood-soaked warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden “radical left.”  He has declared his determination to rid higher education of “the radical left” and “Marxists,” whom he preposterously says are running  academia.

A leading Congressional Trumpist-fascist, US Senator Lyndsey Graham (Rf-SC) says that Israel should consider nuking Gaza. 

Another leading Congressional Trumpist-fascist, Rep. Elise Stefanik (RF-NY), has responded to righteous coast-to-coast campus protests of the genocidal US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza by launching a neo-McCarthyite witch-hunt absurdly demonizing universities as hotbeds of supposed leftist “antisemitism.”

It’s one Goebbels- and Orwell-worthy falsehood after another and another with Trump  and his ilk.

Project Amerikan Reich

This is no longer about the bloviating fascist Steve Bannon and the neo-Nazi Mercer family whispering in Herr Donald’s ear. The Republican policy establishment has now congealed around the orange-tinted cult leader.  Led by the once “conservative”  Heritage Foundation, these neofascist planners have crafted an ambitious, many-sided agenda for the full white Christian nationalist takeover/makeover of US government and society: “Project 2025.”  With revanchist policy input from Heritage, the Claremont Institute, America First Legal, the Heartland Institute, and more than 90 other “conservative” organizations, the 2024 Donald “Retribution” Trump campaign promises a presidency that will: inflict a deportation operation meant to remove more than 11 million people from the country; build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to round up “illegals” and asylum-seekers;  permit states to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans; withhold funds appropriated by Congress at his personal discretion; fire a U.S. Attorney General who doesn’t follow his command to prosecute political enemies of his choice; pardon all the thugs who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6; gut the U.S. civil service; deploy the US military to “end inner city crime in one day,” quell protests, and round up immigrants; shutter the White House pandemic-preparedness office; slash all environmental regulations and “drill, drill, drill” (his most dangerous promise of all); end “Marxist domination of higher education” (a hilarious myth); fill his  Administration and the executive branch more broadly with toadies who support his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

Meanwhile, numerous states under Republi-Trumpist control have implemented a broad sweep of far-right policies including harsh women-enslaving abortion restrictions and bans, permission for motorists to run over civil rights and social justice protesters, voter disenfranchisement measures, and prohibitions against educators tell their students the truth about racism and sexism in US society past and present.  

Republi-Nazis have led revanchist book banning campaigns across the “red” (try brown for brownshirt) “heartland.”  

Hallmark Characteristics

Under the leadership of Trump and his party and movement, we see now the overlap and interplay of key hallmark aspects of fascism past and present: the call for dictatorship; the embrace and advance of political violence; the demonization and Othering of racial and political enemies; the rejection of previously normative electoral and parliamentary “democracy” and civility; a cult of personality; mocking and violation of the rule of law even as the cult leader trumpets fearsome “law and order;” constant propagandistic lying and truth-inversion; xenophobic border obsession; arch-patriarchy; white supremacism; paranoid-style conspiratorialism; anti-intellectualism; glorification of the rural and white “heart/mother/fatherland” combined with racially tinged and sexually threatened suspicion of multicultural and cosmopolitan cities; virulent anti-Marxism/-leftism; palingenetic ultra-nationalism.

First Wave Academic AFD

And yet, even now, on the precipice of unprecedented fascist consolidation in the world’s most dangerous and powerful country, we have academics who think there is something debatable about the claim that Trump and Trumpism are fascist. In the fourth chapter (titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial”) in my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York, Routledge), I provided a detailed, point-by-point critique of a cadre of academic fascism deniers (AFDs) who sadly emerged in the semi-public eye in the in the last summer and fall of Trump’s initial fascist administration. This head-in-the-sand crew included NYU law professor Bruce Neuborne, historian Eliah Bures, historian Robert Paxton (who thankfully dropped his denialism after January 6), historian Stanley Payne, emeritus Oxford historian Roger Griffin, political scientist Sheri Berman, government professor Jason Brownlee, political scientist Cory Robin, and Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn. 

I guess or at least hope that many of the current and former academics who denied the fascism of Trump and Trumpism in 2020 have changed their tune in response to subsequent developments.

Second Wave AFD

Calling Jimmy Dore

The current AFD team includes Robin, Moyn, University of Washington historian Daniel Bessner, University of Pennsylvania historian Bruck Kuklick, and Wesleyan University historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.  

Steinmetz-Jenkins is so completely out of it that the following actually happened at a recent academic conference on “Illiberalism” at George Washington University:

“When asked how he reconciled his insistence that there was no serious fascist threat to democracy in America, that fascism was not an adequate term to describe the forces that were fueling Trump’s rise, with what happened during the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, Steinmetz-Jenkins insisted that there had been ‘many Black people’ marching with the neo-Nazis and far-right militias that day. He presented this as evidence that it was wrong to call the ‘Unite the Right’ protesters a white supremacist or fascist movement. When pressed by journalist Sarah Posner, who was in the audience and on the ground in Charlottesville in 2017, he referred to Cornel West, one of America’s best-known Black intellectuals, as a witness: West was among the counter-protesters in Charlottesville and, according to Steinmetz-Jenkins, confirmed that ‘many Black people’ were marching under the ‘Unite the Right’ banner.”[2]

What madness: Steinmetz-Jenkins needs to get on FOX News, or at least “the Jimmy Dore plantation,” to use Dr. West’s term for the deranged Trumpenleft Jimmy Dore YouTube Show. Dr. West was an early supporter of Refuse Fascism, which formed immediately after Trump’s first election.  He explicitly identified the right-wing marchers who endangered his own and other civil rights and social justice activists’ lives in Charlottesville as fascists.

Behind the Times

Steinmetz-Jenkins is the editor of Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a 2024 anthology dedicated to “the fascism debate” regarding Trump and Trumpism.  

Or perhaps I should say dedicated to ending the “debate.”  Here is the bizarre conclusion of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to Did It Happen Here?:

“The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest, even as we try to come to terms with the neurosis it revealed in us – a purpose that this anthology serves. ‘The past may live inside the present,’ observes the historian Matt Karp, ‘but it does not govern our growth.’ Instead of letting fear distort politics, the goal now should be to push forward with the hope of building a better society for a new age.”

As one reviewer of Did It Happen Here? notes, this is “like welcoming guests to a dinner party by promising them it will be over soon.” Equally absurd and insulting are Steinmetz-Jenkins’ assertions that fascism is essentially a thing of the (European) past, that observing a real and present fascist danger in the contemporary US is a sign of mental disturbance  (“neurosis”), and that our politics and hope for a better world are enhanced by sticking our heads in the sand about contemporary fascism, which is dedicated to locking in existing social hierarchies and oppression structures by force.

Considering the current US political situation described in the opening pages of the present essay, Steinmetz-Jenkins’ title is jarringly off-putting.  What’s with the past tense? Did It Happen Here? Really? Have Steinmetz-Jenkins, his editor, and his publisher been paying attention to US political news the last three and half years? Being a historian is no excuse for living in the past (properly understood or not).

A bizarre disconnect from present-day reality is evident in the commentaries featured in Did It Happen Here? More than twenty of the thirty previously published essays collected in the volume came out between 2020 and 2022. All but one of them were originally published before 2023. A  handful appeared long before Trump was first elected. There’s just one primary or secondary source dated after 2022 in the book’s endnotes.

Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to his “2024”anthology cites sources only  from 2017 to 2021, with one exception: University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick’s condescending and denialist volume Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture, a film history which argues that “fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult” (emphasis added).  

Here is a preposterous statement from Harvard communications professor Mora Weigel, one of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ contributors, near the end of an essay whose endnotes contain no sources later than 2020: “Now that the Trump era has officially ended, and yet stochastic acts of racist violence and the macabre strangeness of [fascist] Q’Anon persist, it seems clear that there are still many social and psychological variables to map.”  

Okay then: let’s get mapping! Steinmetz-Jenkins’ ill-fated anthology is copyrighted in 2024, a year in which the open Hitler channeler Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump leads Biden in all but one of the six contested states that absurdly determine presidential election outcomes under the archaic US Electoral College system.

“To Improve Our Democracy”

But, well… whatever. Professors Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner recently wrote this at the left-liberal DSA site Jacobin:

“seeing fascism everywhere prevents those who rightly despise Trump’s reactionary social and economic positions from crafting the bold alternatives we need for the new era that we’re so clearly entering. The time for stern warnings about our American (semi, proto, or fascoid) Adolf Hitler has long passed. If we really want to improve our democracy, we must lay the fascism debate to rest and turn to face our uncertain future.”

Please. What “democracy”? Whose democracy? As any good leftist should know (Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner’s appearance in Jacobin certainly suggests left identification) bourgeois democracy is cover for a capitalist-imperialist class dictatorship wherein majority public opinion has long been trumped by concentrated wealth and power on one major policy issue after another. One person, one vote: know any other good jokes? Bourgeois democracy US-American Style, is a right-tilted Minority Rule regime that vastly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions, interests, and people through the Electoral College, Senate malapportionment, rampant gerrymandering and over suppression, plutocratic campaign finance, an undemocratically appointed and now epically corrupt and illegitimate judiciary, and “states’ rights.”   

Serious scholars, commentators, and activists who see Trump and Trumpism as fascist (including Cornel West, Henry Giroux, Anthony DiMaggio, Jason Stanley, Ruth ben-Ghiat, Federico Finchelstein, Bob Avakian, Sunsara Taylor, Carl Dix, Samantha Goldman, Andy Zee, Rick Perlstein, Robert Reich, Jeff Sharlet, Thomas Zimmer, Robert Reich, and the present writer) do NOT “see fascism everywhere.”  They/we are specific about precisely how they define fascism[3] and what aspects of Trump and Trumpist politics match the definition. 

We are not going to make a better world and create a decent future by turning our heads away from overwhelming evidence that a dire fascist menace is afoot in the USA.

I don’t entirely disagree with Steinmetz-Jenkins.  He’s right that there ought not be “a fascism debate” regarding Trump and Trumpism at this juncture.  It’s so ridiculously obvious by now that Trump and Trumpism are fascist – as many observers saw from the start – that only a chucklehead or (worse) a Trumpenleftish/Jimmy Dorean/proto-Vichy collaborator could think – or pretend to think – that the “debate” is called for in the first place.   

Postscript

No, this is not a campaign piece for Joe Biden, as anyone who follows my writing (all five of you!) should know. Later this week or early next week I will take down a critical aspect of the mind-boggling idiocy behind the leftish academic and non-academic fascism-denial still absurdly evident on the precipice of a second and much worse Trump presidency: the notion that telling the empirical truth bout the fascism of Trump and Trumpism makes one an apologist for or ally of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats and their current bloody-jawed standard bearer Joe Biden. First, however, I intend to write a piece making the case for the International Criminal Court to indict Biden for war crimes in connection with the imperialist atrocities unfolding in Ukraine and Palestine.  

Endnotes

1. Please see Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021), 1-135.

2.  Thomas Zimmer, “The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem,” Democracy Americana, May 24, 2024. Zimmer provides eyewitness testimony on this depressing event.

3.  Refuse Fascism’s definition is quite concise and specific, in direct contrast with the claims of Steinmext-Jenkins and Bessner (“seeing fascism everywhere”) and Kuklick (“little informational meaning” and just a term “used to denigrate or insult”). Read it here.  See the second chapter, titled “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold,” in This Happened Here for my own considerably more (and perhaps overly) elaborate definition in 2021.