Trump in the Garden
Trump in the Garden
Eight years into the fascism debate, few skeptics seem willing to admit that they were wrong.
On February 20, 1939, the German American Bund held an enormous rally inside Madison Square Garden. The Bund, a pro-Nazi organization, was working to build support for Hitler in the United States. Speakers denounced “job-taking Jewish refugees.” But they also tried to Americanize their message. At center stage, an enormous portrait of George Washington hung alongside swastika banners. Speakers appealed to the white supremacist views shared by many in the United States and defended immigration quotas, Jim Crow, and laws against miscegenation. “The spirit which opened the West and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man,” declared the Bund spokesman, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze. “It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation.”
On October 27, 2024, the Trump campaign held an enormous rally inside Madison Square Garden. Under blood-red lighting, a comedian made crude and racist comments about Latino birth rates and a “floating island of garbage . . . I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Tucker Carlson mocked Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage and displayed his preoccupation with hereditary intelligence, calling her a “Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor.” Speakers appealed to the white supremacist views shared by many in the United States. Carlson continued: “People know in a country that has been taken over by a leadership class that actually despises them and their values and their history and their culture and their customs, really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.” Stephen Miller declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Trump repeated his claims about an “enemy from within.”
In the final days of the presidential campaign, the question of Trump’s fascism seems to have broken containment. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while Trump was in office, and Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, have both asserted that they think Trump meets the definition of a fascist. Mainstream journalists are confronting Republicans about Trump’s reported statements that he needed the kind of generals Hitler had. A group of Arizona Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Democrats, whose vote for Kamala Harris is rightly anguished, called Trump a “fascist” danger. When Harris was asked directly whether she agreed with the label, she offered a simple: “Yes, I do.” Kelly’s remarks have begun appearing in pro-Harris advertising.
Since Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015 as if he were appearing in a trashy soap opera shot by Leni Riefenstahl, academics have been engaged in a frustrating debate about whether the term “fascism” is appropriate to describe him and his movement. This conversation has been so long-standing, and people so dug into their positions, that it has been elevated to capital-letter status: the Fascism Debate. Eight years on what I find remarkable is that despite obvious escalations, almost no fascism skeptics seem to be willing to admit that they were wrong. One response in the last few days has been to anticipate a Harris loss and blame her campaign for elevating the fascism question above its economic message. Others fear that fascism is a bad analogy because it lets liberals off the hook for creating the conditions that made possible Trump’s rise to power: most prominently neoliberalism and support for foreign wars.
I can sympathize with these arguments, to a degree. The problems with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 were inseparable from Obama’s weak response to the financial crisis and Clinton’s own support for the war in Iraq. Trump, on the other hand, was able to take over a Republican Party whose mainstream factions were gutted because of George W. Bush’s failures of economic management and the pursuit of war in Iraq. When the proto-Trumpist Tea Party emerged, it combined anti-Obama racism with anti-Wall Street economic populism, along with anti-immigrant sentiment and an unhealthy cocktail of conspiracy.
And, to be sure, the first Trump presidency was not a fascist regime. The institutions of liberal democracy, imperfect though they are, prevented him from doing everything that occurred to him, such as using the military to shoot protesters or attack hurricanes with nuclear weapons. But when he lost the election in 2020, among the steps he took to try to overturn the outcome was to direct a mob to the Capitol. As John Ganz has noted, a fascism hypothesis might predict that Trump would use “street paramilitary forces” to “do some kind of extralegal attempt to seize power.” So, confirmed.
For one scholar of fascism who has publicly changed his mind, January 6 was the turning point. Robert Paxton, author of a seminal history of Vichy France and the accessible The Anatomy of Fascism, had been reluctant to describe Trump as a fascist prior to that moment. “His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote at the time. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.” Since 2020, Trump has been able to consolidate his hold on the Republican Party, which refused to convict him after he was twice impeached. Instead, Trump’s obsessions—his anti-immigrant nationalism, his disgust with difference, his belief that he should be able to act as a dictator, his conviction that his opponents are enemies—have taken over the party as a political apparatus and as a cultural movement. Other notions, such as an obsession with IQ and birth rates, have moved from the internet fringes to the party mainstream. Trump now has the cadres that he lacked when he was elected, to his surprise and that of many others, in 2016.
If eight years of debate and eight years of Trump have not moved the Fascism Debate forward, two further paragraphs will surely not make much difference. But Paxton recently told the New York Times that the “Trump phenomenon . . . has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” It is important to take seriously the emergence of a fascist “structure of feeling” that is not new in American history but has been massified at the expense of traditional Republicanism. Trumpist educational policy, for example, is to push out subjects and teachers it deems hostile and substitute them with “patriotic” education. This is the far-right authoritarian recipe, plain as day. As a cultural formation across eras, fascism has contained the seeming contradiction of offering both reactionary nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) and a militarized, hypermasculine technophilia. F.T. Marinetti’s proto-fascist Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, extols “the beauty of speed” stating that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” while also declaring against “museums and libraries,” “feminism,” and in favor of “struggle,” “pleasure and revolt.” Marinetti would have appreciated the nitwit hedonism of the Cybertruck and its creator, Elon Musk, who has donated $118 million to support Trump’s campaign and purchased Twitter to facilitate a flood of reactionary misinformation.
The glorification of violence has not been limited to an aesthetic project. Trump, supported by thousands of cheering fans, calls for mass deportations and suspending the rule of law to carry them out. He spreads dehumanizing lies about legal Haitian immigrants as easily as he breathes. Television is saturated with ads demonizing Latino immigrants and trans people (“Harris is for they/them, not you”), turning them into objects of hatred in a way that makes the infamous Willie Horton ad seem like it was produced for PBS Kids. Overturning Roe has imposed real physical violence on women who need, and are denied, medical care. Civil servants receive death threats for doing their jobs. And Trump wields the fear of the mob against his critics. After retiring, Mark Milley installed bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains in his home.
Some participants in the Fascism Debate lodge a different objection: that using the term “fascist” to describe Trump makes him seem like a foreign imposition, rather than a product of American culture and institutions. But why should it? The Nazis borrowed parts of their race laws from the U.S. South. Langston Hughes told a Paris congress in 1937 that “in America, Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know.” The United States has lived with subnational authoritarian enclaves since its founding, primarily for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. The democratic qualities of our political system (which are also real) have always coexisted with them, and insofar as we can see progress over the country’s history, it has been because of the hard work of politics to unbind its authoritarian units and exclusions. But they can be (and have been) bound up again. Instead of asking whether “it can happen here,” we can recognize that it has, but not to everyone equally. The same would presumably be true in a second Trump administration, as it was in other historical fascisms.
Some leftists fear that describing Trumpism as fascism serves a tool for disciplining the left. To label him fascist works as a kind of “threat inflation” that implies that the left must fall in line behind a liberal mainstream. This is a serious concern, but its proponents still make an intellectual and political error. As the denial appears increasingly ridiculous, so do its advocates. Of course, the fascism label can be used sloppily or in ways that are overwrought. But even under non-emergency conditions, until there are major changes to the political system, the U.S. left will always need to be in a coalition with liberals with whom they have fundamental disagreements. The lessons I take from cases where a broad coalition was able to use an election to defeat authoritarianism (such as the 1988 Chilean plebiscite that rejected Augusto Pinochet) is that doing so required minimizing elements of the program that were supported only by the left and accepting participation in a broad front. The point of preserving liberal democracy is that you can go back to disagreeing when victory is achieved. Being part of the coalition—as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know—makes it possible to continue to raise concerns, provide ideas, and demand concessions.
With its rally in Madison Square Garden, the Trump campaign dared the audience not to see the parallels to 1939. And if you can’t see them now, they can see you. If the objection to seeing Trumpism as a fascist political and cultural formation is that it lets liberals off the hook, use the label instead to persuade them of the dangers of business as usual. If the objection is based on quibbles about small differences from classic fascism, remember that the point is not that history should repeat itself, but that similar energies swirl in ever-changing streams. Evidence accumulates like logs blocking the current. At some point, the dam might burst. And when it does, what will it wash away?
Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.
