Fascism, always fascism

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives. And while Donald Trump has returned to the Oval Office after a four-year intermission, in a sense this nonetheless holds true for him as well. For he never really left the public eye, and a significant portion of American politics remained oriented—whether positively or negatively—toward him even in his absence from any formal position.

But his reclaiming of the U.S. presidency has given new life to charges of fascism and authoritarianism, which claims have accompanied him virtually from the moment he entered the political fray nearly a decade ago.

Confession time: though I still find him undeniably amusing (among other things, he remains the heavyweight champion of Twitter posters, I have otherwise been unable to generate terribly strong personal (as opposed to political) feelings about the man either way. As such, I’m not particularly interested in convicting or exonerating him of these charges.

For that matter, I’m not at this point particularly interested in refuting the accusations of fascism leveled at America today, though I’ve done so before, and others continue to do so effectively. But I am interested in why this larger question of fascism continues to prove compelling to both accusers and accused.

On the supply side, part of the appeal is simply that it's lucrative. It is fair, I think, to say that the Fascism Explainers (or in many cases Doomsayers) have built a veritable industry around the belief that American fascism, borne on the back of Trump's political ascendancy, is either imminent or already here. From Substacks to major periodicals to Ted Talks (sadly, they still exist) to the nonfiction subgenre aimed at the frequent flier class, Fascism Inc. has become a big business.

As for the demand side, I suspect there are several factors. First, it must be emphasized just how much of the rhetorical success of the "fascism is nigh" case is premised upon repetition. By raising it time and time again, it has acquired a sense of solidity. This is probably compounded by the general ignorance of political history that prevails even among the educated classes. After all, those who lack much broader knowledge in this area are at least aware of fascism and its twin, Nazism, and also aware of their essential badness. And in the absence of any larger, more varied pool of conceptual categories to draw on by comparison, fascism tends to dominate by default.

As with allegations of populism, socialism, authoritarianism, etc., it would be more effective and more accurate to consider the actual phenomena at hand, which is almost always perfectly reconcilable with democracy. The trouble is that so many people have assigned unique moral significance to democratic regimes (a mistake that neither classical nor early-modern thinkers ever made), such that any negative features it presents must be ascribed to some foreign intrusion so as to avoid the unpleasant cognitive dissonance produced by acknowledging the flaws or weaknesses of democracy. (The foreignness of these undesirable elements was made literal after 2016, when the results were blamed on Russian interference.)

This is a relatively recent development, which may have something to do with our growing distance from the actual practices of civic engagement. The more we are effectively ruled by state and federal bureaucracies with limited accountability to citizens, the more we idealize the concept of democracy in the abstract. And here it is telling that the greatest book ever written on the subject, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, deals explicitly with the limitations of democracy and the excesses to which it is prone.

The reality is that neither fascism nor any other significant ideological movement is particularly relevant to the challenges we face today. The default assumption, however, seems to be that these represent something like semi-permanent or recurring threats to political life, perhaps akin to the cycle of regimes one finds in classical political thought (about which, more below).

More broadly, however, the present preoccupation with the threat of fascism reflects a fundamental lack of understanding about the particular relationship between democracy and the modern state. I’ll explain.

Not-So-Old Enemies

First, it must be said that the attempt to categorize otherwise disparate political phenomena as a single unified threat is not unique to the fascism explainers—it is frequently applied to left-wing movements as well. Erstwhile philosopher and student of the blade James Lindsay is almost a parody of this tendency, referring to seemingly everything under the sun as “communism” or some improbable hyphenated variant thereof.

The thinking seems to be: fascism (which is generally taken as a metonym for Nazism, despite important differences between the two) and communism represented the major ideological challengers to liberal democracy/American supremacy over the past 100 years or so, and one must be watchful of their recurrence—though the direction of concern tends to vary according to whether one’s own political commitments lean right or left.

Related to this was the post-9/11 attempt by certain liberal and neoconservative intellectuals to cast some version of Islam (often termed Islamism, Islamofascism, etc.) as the heir to those movements and the latest great nemesis of American democracy. I seem to recall Norman Podhoretz, for example, calling it World War IV. Those efforts mostly faded, as the various ambitious projects to democratize Muslim countries came a cropper, and as Islamic terrorism failed to produce a comparably spectacular attack in the years since. (This is probably related in complex ways to the fact that “Islam” itself could not really function as a political agent in the way that the most apocalyptic predictions needed it to, and also to the fact that the specific individuals and organizations involved in both the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent violence against U.S. assets in the Middle East and Afghanistan could not really be replaced. And this in turn had less to do with their personal abilities and more with the substantial funding and arms networks that the United States itself had fostered over many years and which persisted well after the end of the Cold War.)

In any case, the disappointments that set in during the second Obama administration along with Donald Trump’s political ascent led to—and perhaps demanded—a return to the older categories; partly as a satisfying explanation for Trump’s appeal, but partly for the way it seemed to offer renewed meaning to liberal democracy itself, which had come to look a tad shabby during the inevitable comedown from the eschatological hopes raised by Obama’s earlier rhetoric. To this one might add that charges of incipient fascism (or populism, or what have you) served another purpose: it allowed those who leveled them to view the political developments they found most distasteful as being fundamentally foreign to democracy. Thus, it allayed any anxiety that democracy itself might be capable of producing such things, allowing many of Trump’s critics to reject him and all he seemed to represent without somehow rejecting the democratic process.

Of course, one can’t actually say this explicitly, as it would be self-defeating, and it remains doubtful anyway that most of the people making the “fascism” case understood how their attraction to these arguments stemmed from a bad democratic conscience. Thus, it became necessary to rely upon a kind of ad hoc social science that treated fascism as a semi-permanent political category, despite its having only arisen in the 20th century and having enjoyed a relatively limited reign even then.

Bringing the State Back In

The truth is that “democracy” can encompass quite a lot on its own, from militaristic foreign policies to highly restrictive immigration regimes and border controls to punitive judicial regimes to ethno-symbolic expressions of nationalism. One is free to dislike any or all of these, but they are not per se incompatible with democracy—even liberal democracy.

A lot of this simply has to do with the prevailing structure of the modern state—the dominant political form of our world, in which democracy, fascism, and communism (among much else) have all been obliged to operate. This is partly why Alexander Kojève insisted that all of these were undergoing a convergence as part of the spread of a universal and homogenous state.

But democracy is older than the others, and perhaps more fundamental as well. One scholar goes so far as to describe democracy as the “generic ideology of the nation-state.” This is to say the modern nation-state draws upon the concept of popular sovereignty, in which the impersonal structure of the state is legitimized by some collective people on behalf of which it works. This is at heart a democratic idea—feudal aristocracies and monarchies, for example make qualitatively different claims about their right to rule, and certainly wouldn’t care about the will of the people in doing so. And it was this idea that triumphed during the American and especially French Revolutions before finding purchase elsewhere across the long 19th century, with the spread of nation-states out of the decay of empires.

Fascism and communism, meanwhile, emerged as variations on this theme. Communism initially sought to overturn this scheme entirely, treating democratic states as merely the political expressions of the material interests of the global bourgeoisie. Thus, states too would surely be swept away upon the successful execution of the proletarian revolution.

Needless to say, this never quite came to pass—yet communism of a sort did triumph in various places, most consequentially the Soviet Union. When, following Lenin’s death, Josef Stalin proclaimed “socialism in one country,” this represented a dramatic departure from Marxist orthodoxy, as well as an acknowledgment of the basic legitimacy of states. One might still hope to see the emergence of a true global proletariat, but this was increasingly not the focus of communist leadership, which found itself falling back on good old statecraft with socialist characteristics.

Meanwhile, what this meant politically was an acceptance of the basic legitimizing principle of statehood: the state exists for a given people. That they might choose to organize their political economy along socialist or communist lines was a secondary concern, as well as being specific to a given state.

Thus, for example, both China and Vietnam might be communist countries, but they and their respective peoples remained distinct from one another. Needless to say, this opened up the question of nationalism, and indeed in the case of those particular countries, their sharing a broadly similar regime did little to reduce the mutual animosity between them. In fact the belief that geopolitical competition would continue to persist between socialist states was a defining feature of the Nixon/Kissinger strategy during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, being a kind of superstate, was a more complicated case, though its eventual dissolution into constituent nation-states, as well as the totalitarian measures it had to resort to during its reign, was eloquent proof of the limits of socialist ideology to override the underlying claims of peoples and nations.

Fascism, on the other hand, enjoyed a much shorter prime and never really spread as far as its ideological competitors. Even right-wing states like Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal were never quite fascist. Nonetheless, it operated in similar fashion as its leftwing counterpart in representing a kind of branching pathway from a democratic trunk.

For it too relied upon what philosopher Bernard Williams would call the Basic Legitimation Demand of appeals to the people to establish political authority. Its innovation was the insistence that only a fascist dictator could rise above the petty politicking and corruption of actual democratic legislatures to properly represent the will and interests of the people. To this it joined a belief in the crucial importance of martial prowess, both as a necessary response to the lethal competition that defined the international sphere, and as a correction to the private interests that otherwise prevailed in the domestic one—threatening to undo the order of the state and being essentially contemptible besides.

As with socialism, this form of organization was notionally open to all states, and as with socialism, it rested atop a kind of democratic base, in which the form of the modern state represented a given people living in a given country.

In any case, the point remains that the observable similarities between fascism and democracy exist not necessarily because noble democracy is declining into brutish fascism, but both operate within the form of modern statehood and already converge in ways that many probably find discomfiting. Yet this idea of the decay of better regimes into worse ones over time remains and likely derives, however inchoately, from classical teachings—though these are not readily applicable to our situation.

The Classical Connection

Whether people are subconsciously drawing on this tradition, the cycle of regimes was an important theme in classical political thought, discussed at length in works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero—to name but a few. The specific number and character of the regimes varies somewhat across different thinkers, but a common theme is the idea of almost inevitable decline. That is to say, there are better and worse regimes and the former over time will tend to transition into the latter. Of course, the very fact that this happens suggests that this scheme was not a Manichean one. The seeds of the worse regimes—above all, tyranny—are already present in some way in the better ones.

Meanwhile, there are important differences between their political situation, as well as their understanding of politics generally, and our own. One could fill several books with those differences, but let us just consider a few. First, they did not generally consider democracy to be a superior regime but a relatively degraded one, whereas for us it is the regime by which all others are to be judged, and our gravest political fears are concerned with its potential decay.

Second, no classical thinker of which I’m aware believed this taxonomy of regimes to be a universal rubric for organized social life; it was specific to the political communities of the ancient Mediterranean—mainly the Greek polis and the Roman republic. (The extent to which these two were ultimately more similar or different is a question of its own, I suppose, but see here.) Empires or tribes—to take two examples with which all the writers were certainly familiar—had their own structures and their own internal dynamics. The modern state, of which the classical thinkers obviously knew nothing, barring some sort of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure-type temporal excursion, is something different as well, though its similarities still lead us to look to the classics for example. As Tocqueville said: they prop us up where we lean.

The obvious points of connection between classical regimes and modern states are that both possess similarly bounded political communities and the concept of citizenship. Feudal kingdoms, for example, had neither. The differences, meanwhile, are too many to list: slavery! Militarized citizenry! Extreme limitations on suffrage even in democratic cities! And so on. But the most important distinction here has to do with the structure of the modern state. For, ancient political communities largely lacked informal and bureaucratic political structures. Politics was simply what the citizens did; the major differences between those societies had to do with the scope of citizenship, and the privileges that accrued (or didn’t) to the wealthiest of them. As such, there was a fluidity and a dynamism to their political practices that ours lacks by design. During the so-called Mytilenean Debate, as recorded by Thucydides, the citizens of Athens sentence the population of Mytilene to death for rebelling, and then swiftly reconvene to change their minds and spare the vanquished. It is a moment of high drama, and one cannot imagine decisions of such stakes being undertaken so rapidly by the citizenries of modern states.

But again, this same dynamism was also responsible for the ease with which regimes themselves could shift; oligarchies could give way to democracies, as citizens pushed for more rights and privileges; and democracy could give way to tyranny, as individuals of surpassing skill and ambition sought to dominate their erstwhile fellow citizens.

It is this last descent into tyranny that most tends to capture the imaginations of contemporary observers, who liken it to modern despotism, in the form of fascist dictatorship. But again, there are profound differences between ancient Greek cities and modern America, and the bureaucratic character of the modern state works against the fluidity of ancient politics that allowed for these kinds of transitions between regimes. The great motion at the heart of the ancient politics that drove their actions and seemed to impel the instability of their regimes is fundamentally absent for us.

What, Me Worry?

None of this should be taken as Panglossian optimism. There is much to lament about America today, and any number of undesirable futures are possible. We could see a continuation or expansion of militarism abroad that doesn’t necessarily rely upon fascist modes of social organization at home—think the Bush administration after 9/11. We could see deepening racial strife with no particular driver. We could see persistent, low-level conflict along political lines that doesn’t quite rise to the level of civil war. We could see politics decay into bureaucratic sclerosis. We could see growing inequality augmented by scientific advances that makes a mockery of democracy. We could see clientelism driven by ethnic clannishness overtake healthy multiculturalism. I could go on.

The point is that there are many, many alternatives that are bad in their own ways that are orthogonal to fascism. The endless emphasis on the F-word is the product an impoverished political imagination. It is akin to and often overlaps with those popular historians whose only case study is Munich 1938.

As for Donald Trump himself, calling him a fascist is to ascribe to him far greater political and ideological coherence than he has ever evinced. Or as that great sage Walter from The Big Lebowski put it: “say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”