I believe debating whether Donald Trump is personally a fascist is not as helpful as determining whether his MAGA movement is itself fascistic. Calling people “fascist” brings very little light to our situation. In fact, dehumanizing those who have participated in historical fascistic movements and seeing them as abhorrent monsters can hamper understanding what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil” in our own time. Monstrous evil can be done without actual monsters.
To de-personalize the conversation we might ask what specifically was wrong in what Hitler and Mussolini did and then ask whether the MAGA movement acts out of the same assumptions and principles. Let us list what fascistic movements of the past have had in common and then ask whether the MAGA movement bears those same characteristics.
I seems to me fascist moments of the past had these traits in common: They centered their movements around one person. They replaced democratic co-operation with the maximization of individual wealth and power for an unaccountable elite. Fascistic movements have placed a hollow sense of narcissistic nationalism over civil engagement for the masses. Fascist movements have historically seen themselves as exceptions for any existing ethical standards. Fascist movements have replaced expertise with a kind of group think. Fascistic movements have historically used appeals to fear of an enemy within and without to destroy any sense of a social contract for the whole nation.
IS THE MAGA MOVEMENT CENTERED AROUND ONE PERSON?
Looking back in history, both Nazi Germany and fascistic Italy were devastated by centering their entire political structure around the whims of one individual leader. When Donald Trump, or any leader, claims to be the only one who can fix a nation they are assaulting the very idea of sharing power democratically through a system of checks and balances..
When ANYONE seeks to minimize government in a democratic republic they are not just seeking to end waste and bureaucracy, they are ultimately attacking the very idea of democratic governance. When a leader says, as Trump did recently, “He Who Saves His Country Does Not Violate Any Law” he is describing a fascistic state under one powerful leader, not a democratic republic as defined in the Constitution.
DOES THE MAGA MOVEMENT SEEK TO REPLACE DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE WITH A BUSINESS MODEL?
Mussolini was quoted as saying, “Fascism should more appropriately be called “Corporatism” because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
I do not know if that is an accurate translation, but I do know FDR warned, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace said it this way, “A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make (them) ruthless in (their) use of deceit or violence to attain (their) ends.”
Placing an individual like Elon Musk in charge of the economic system (or ANY unelected individual) is a rejection of the democratic republic and an embracing of economic fascism.
DOES THE MAGA MOVEMENT PLACE NATIONALISM OVER CIVIC PRINCIPLES?
It seems to me the MAGA movement is not about serving one’s country through civic activism. Its sense of unity is not so much a love of the people or the land. The unity of the MAGA movement is seems more focused on protecting our boundary lines than a love of the population and land WITHIN those boundaries.
MAGA threats to absorb Canada, Greenland and Panama have less to do with loving our constitutional republic and more to do with the kind of self aggrandizing imperialism that Hitler used to disguise his absorbing surrounding nations as an attempt to make Germany safe. Again, the “patriotism” of any fascistic movement is not about empowering the people over their own lives, but instead distracting them so they buy patriotic trinkets and follow its flag waving leader.
DOES THE MAGA MOVEMENT SEEK TO DISCREDIT ANY SCALE BY WHICH ITS CLAIMS MIGHT BE MEASURED?
When Trump claims that everything he does is bigger and better than anyone who came before him, he is consciously or unconsciously conditioning people to not learn the lessons of history. Fascistic leader see their every act as unprecedented and therefore exempt from historical analysis.
Fascistic leaders reject ANYONE with scientific or journalistic expertise and replace them with a notion of common sense. “Common sense” refers to the sense of certainty found among what Plato called “unexamined lives.” They believe Trump’s claims must be true because his followers all believe them.
Medical experts are replaced by uncredentialed ideologues. Journalist integrity is seen as “fake news” unless it parrots what the leader wants us to believe. To disagree with the leader is by definition to be a liar, a deviant and a traitor.
DOES THE MAGA MOVEMENT REJECT THE NOTION OF OBJECTIVE TRUTH IN FAVOR OF DEFERENCE TO THE OPINIONS OF ITS LEADER?�
Henry Wallace claimed, “The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.”
Historian Frederico Finchelstein writes, “Goebbels defined propaganda as “the art, not of lying or distorting, but of listening to ‘the soul of the people’ and ‘speaking to a person a language that this person understands.’
And, as historian Richard Evans observes, “The Nazis acted on the premise that they, and they alone, through Hitler, had an inner knowledge and understanding of the German soul.The idea of a truth that emanated from the soul was the result of an act of faith in an absolute certainty that could not be corroborated.”
DOES THE MAGA MOVEMENT USE FEAR AS A CORE ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE?
According to Gerry Spence, “A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights – which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.”
NPR recently did an investigation finding more than 100 instances where Trump has called for the investigation and/or arrest of his political enemies. Fear of immigrants and of “an enemy within” is a staple of fascistic propaganda.
CONCLUSION
While we can and should love the human beings in question, we cannot ethically make peace with any fascistic movement until it ends its assault on human rights. We must somehow love the people involved in a movement without ignoring the fact that the price of not destroying American fascism is the democratic republic itself.
Whatever conclusions we draw about the MAGA movement we must realize that fascism is a list of political traits, not an emotional insult we hurl at people. We must choose between living in a democratic republic and embracing the political traits that would destroy it. We cannot both grasp the hand of nationalistic patriotism AND take the hands of the people that movement would harm.
One cannot be in an ethical relationship with the persecuting Nazis AND the persecuted Jew because the price of being friends with fascism is the very life of the other.