Thread of What Is Fascism And Is Donald Trump A Fascist

“I don’t know any of this,” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-justice-dept-seized-post-reporters-phone-records/2021/05/07/933cdfc6-af5b-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html

this is so fucking funny, they've built him a little fake Twitter that does nothing to keep him busy pic.twitter.com/NozGe89UVa

— 📻 thomas website (@nailheadparty) May 10, 2021

As this is-he-or-isn't-he war enters its 9th year, this a good (if long!) 1-2 by Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer. He's very much on the "yes obv he is fascist" side, but mostly what he's concerned with her is the resistance/skepticism from other leftist scholars who think that worrying too much about Trump and fascism is a distraction from the defeating the real enemy — libs and neolibs.

Not shockingly, I'm on Zimmer's side here.

From Part II: The problem is that we have reached a point where their devotion to this anti-liberal struggle has led them to propagating positions that are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right. Their incessant warning that the real danger lies in liberal hysteria has turned into sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence.

Part I: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/fascism-in-america
Part II: https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-anti-liberal-left-has-a-fascism

"mostly what he's concerned with HERE"

I mean, can’t these fascist goons be fascists and neoliberal goons also be fascists? Why not both? That’s the way I see it.

Probably not — if we can't get to scholarly agreement on Trump being a fascist, you're gonna have a much harder sell on the Clintons. But they can all be terrible, sure.

Zimmer's point, which I feel deeply, is that some quadrants of the left seem rooted if not mired in a neoliberal triumphalist moment that compels them to insist that liberals are the actual Real Enemy and everything else is a distraction, which wasn't even actually true in say 2016 but was at least an easier case to make. (Albeit, primarily for those who live in liberal cultural centers removed from the realities of modern conservative American rule.)

But if you live in Texas or Florida or Tennessee, the idea that what you really need to be focused on is fighting the libs just seems bizarre.

neoliberal goons also be fascists?

They can be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.

One of the phenomena I have to explain to friends who live outside Florida is that for thousands of South Florida Democrats the idea of socialism is a total non-starter, especially the ones who actually lived in Cuba and experienced a warped personality-cult totalitarian version of it. Even with my students their paradoxes fascinate me. Growing in privation in Cuba and Venezuela and the DR, they want their phones, leased cars, streaming subscriptions, and indulge in heteronormative fantasies about the home but also want some government overseeing of basic services....so long as you don't call it socialism.

I find the entire framing questionable? I've never heard anyone on the left call Trump or the rise of far right nationalism a "distraction"; rather the argument is that neoliberal orthodoxy lead to these developments and as such is incapable of defeating them.

The cruel joke is the actual fascists are also neoliberal.

No, there is a very small contingent of leftists who still are like: “Trump’s not so bad you’re being hysterical mom and dad”.

Yeah if you read those two blog posts you'll find plenty of citations saying it is more or less a distraction, a liberal deflection, etc. Not universally on "the left," which is no kind of monolith, but there is definitely a strain of thought (to which, say, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi succumbed) that sees no greater evil on the planet than the neoliberal consensus of the '90s/'00s.

xp: I don't think the modern American right — whether you call it fascist or not — can be called neoliberal. They're anti-"globalist," anti-internationalist, anti-NATO, pro-government-intervention in the economy etc.

First we defeat Trump, then we defeat neoliberalism.

Trumps administration was still very neoliberal, he made some minor tweaks to NAFTA and that’s it.

I mean for gods sake the actual existing fascist governments of history worked very well with international capital.

Ok, didn't know this was about "a very small contingent" and Greenwald/Taibbi. Don't personally think anyone needs an academic article to know what's up with those guys but ok.

The article barely mentions Greenwald, it's mostly about much more respectably people like Corey Robin and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.

As for Trump's neoliberalism, I don't know, he threatened to leave NATO — that's not very neoliberal! He didn't do it, but one of Zimmer's points is that using Trump's failures to enact a fascist state in his four years in office as evidence that he isn't actually fascist is kind of a weak argument. It's wanting to see him as more a part of a postwar American continuum than not. And he is part of a postwar American continuum, but one that runs through the John Birch Society and the Southern strategy and paleoconservatism, not through the IMF and the DLC.

He's not anti-capital, of course not! But he is at best skeptical of any kind of international order and the multinational institutions that neoliberalism built.

Bessner's last Jacobin op-ed (not radically different from the four year old stuff he links to but a bit more timely) - https://jacobin.com/2024/04/liberals-fascism-rhetoric-democrats-election

This does not read like "fight the REAL ENEMY ie liberals" to me. Seems more like "liberals, do better."

The real objection I see from Zimmer is that the leftists are not sufficiently onside with seeing Trump and the contemporary GOP as a radical break with history rather than a continuation of the reactionary political project supercharged by the failures of (neo)liberalism over the last decades.

^ ^ ^

I don't think he thinks they're a radical break from history — quite the opposite, they're a continuation of multiple strong strands of history, which largely predate neoliberalism and have never gone away. (I mean, unless we're going to retcon history and say that slavery, e.g., was a neoliberal project.)

I think he thinks the lib-obsessed leftists underestimate the actual threats of the Trumpist/authoritarian front, because they find it politically and philosophically inconvenient to contend with.

_neoliberal goons also be fascists?_

They _can_ be, but I haven't met any. They're terrible in non-fascist ways.

But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?

Like, I am thoroughly of the belief that many of the qualities of our current state and society are fascist. Things can get much worse, of course, but part of why I don’t like this kind of shit is that it puts all the blame on obvious right-wing ideologies and their promulgators rather than acknowledge liberal and neoliberal complicity with these ideologies as demonstrative of how we got here.

But in either case, Trump probably qualifies, yes?

neoliberalism being seamlessly compatible with fascism is most exemplified by Modi imo

it's maybe worth mentioning that there isn't consensus on what "neoliberalism" is either. For example, there are interpretations of neoliberalism that emphasize "government-intervention in the economy" as being key to the neoliberal project rather than antithetical, in that the function of the government is to serve the market which often requires quite a lot of govt intervention in the economy.

I associate that view with Quinn Slobodian, and I skimmed this interview w/Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, might be worth a look? https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/quinn-slobodian-crack-capitalism-interview/. He addresses the question of whether neoliberalism has ended in the last question.

I am sympathetic to the idea that some critics of neoliberalism don't reckon enough with the kinds of overt social control and enforcement of caste hierarchies (race/gender/sexuality etc.) that animate the conservative movement in the US and beyond and aren't so easily reduced to capitalist ideology (imo)

I mean, both fascism and neoliberalism have the problem that it can tempting to start applying them to everything — is Putin a neoliberal?

But in practical political terms, what Zimmer’s talking about is a concern (which I share) that some perspectives on the left lend themselves to “there’s no difference” or even “the Dems are WORSE” rhetoric, which he thinks seriously misunderstands what’s going on.

Robert O. Paxton about 15 years ago defining fascism:

– A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

– The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

– The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

– Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

– The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

– The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

– The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;

– The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;

– The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

I tend to think a neoliberal believes in social democracy, even espousing it openly, while being a slave to market forces, whereas the average Trump voter believes in the social democratic state so long as the Right People benefit under it, thinks little of economics if at all (i.e. so long as I and people who look like me benefit I don't care what system we live under), and so long as it actively persecutes people who don't fit The Leader's paradigms.

I mean, you can argue not much separates the Dem neolib from the Trump fascist voter except the former has way more degrees. I know a lot of Dems who put their kids in charter schools and believe in capitalism and otherwise have nothing else in common with their enemies, including self-diagnosis.

See, if you're a leftist, fascists hate you and want you to die, and don't give a fuck what you think. But liberals, those dupes, want to recruit you into common struggle against the fascists. Which is why liberals are so much more fun to spit on and call no different from the fascists, because they get so hurt when you do it. They make that sad, shocked-and-betrayed face that brightens a true leftist's whole day. Look how important your approval is to them! And how wet their eyes get when you withhold it!

As a definition of fascism in full luxuriant bloom Paxton's set of criteria do wonderfully well. Looking at the best historical examples, that is where the 'pure' fascist road leads. It doesn't describe societies that have only partly traveled that road, which muddies the discussion of where the USA currently resides on the becoming-fascist progression and how Trump fits into that picture. I was trying to piece that out in my earlier posts on this thread.

You have the liberals and the leftists mixed up, but okay

Yes, libs are often not leftists.

(I was speaking to unperson fwiw. The smugness of the liberal of the species is truly breathtaking)

Ok sure but can we talk about the self-righteousness of the leftists too?

I don't think he thinks they're a radical break from history

He does, though - the antidemocratic aims of the MAGA GOP are in line of the American project since its foundation. If the desire for autocracy and antidemocratic governance is a symptom of the adoption of fascism, when have reactionaries not been fascists... in which case isn't the question pointless semantics?

If you're not looking to find reasons to be mad at those damn dirty leftists what they're all saying is not "liberals are the enemy" (though the idea that liberals just want to get along and vibe with socialists in a common project is, uh, historically laughable) but that liberalism, particularly as embodied by the Democratic Party and its op-ed wing is incapable of defeating 'fascism' and that liberalism's modern failures and compromises have strengthened it. Which shouldn't be a surprise, that's why the people in question are socialists (or more ecumenical 'leftists') rather than liberals.

Maybe you disagree with based on the great victories of liberalism over our lifetimes, but it's hardly downplaying the seriousness of the threat of reactionaries.

Do you think fascism can be defeated? If these tendencies are ingrained in our culture -- they are -- then all we can hope is to ensure its abeyance.

For me, I think fascism involves the mobilisation and participation of the public. Which is why Putin wasn't a fascist until the Z stuff in 2022 (though there had been elements of it). Prior to that he explicitly tried to avoid energizing and activating the public, preferring a strategy of depoliticisation. Even now, he goes back and forth between these poles, as an activated populace can become difficult to put back in its box

But on the other hand I think like socialism or liberalism, fascism has a much wider and much more flexible definition now, and arguing about the 'correct' definition doesn't necessarily lead anywhere

I think to some extent these all become stand in words for "people we like" and "people we don't like", which is how seemingly different terms overlap and even become interchangeable to an extent - but I think its better to meet people where they are and work with their definition rather than argue against it (for some Joe Biden is a fascist, for others he is a liberal, for others still he is a communist, are any of these definitions 'wrong'? Depends who you ask. My cousin thinks Boris Johnson is a socialist. I'm not going to say "no he isn't. In that particular conversation I'll accept the label as true, and work with his definition instead)

Do you think fascism can be defeated? If these tendencies are ingrained in our culture -- they are

Possible? Yes. Realistic, probably not - but that last bit is the key. The tendencies are ingrained in our culture - 'socialism' demands the destruction of that political and economic culture (which is why it's continually ridiculous for people to feign shock that Jacobin writers don't just hop on board with American liberalism - they don't believe the same things).

Even in terms of abeyance, liberalism isn't good at it! That's Bessner's point in the more recent op-ed I linked to - a decade of dire warnings of fascism and the existential threat the GOP poses and things have only gotten worse, as Democratic support in core minority constituencies weakens.

Gabe Winant had a good tweet about Gaza protesters - the people getting smacked around by cops today under the watch of Democratic mayors, governors and Presidents are the shock troops you'd need to flood the streets in the event of a more successful January 20th. What do Democrats say to them then about the sanctity of property rights and the need for quiet dispersal when ordered?

Ok sure but can we talk about the self-righteousness of the leftists too?

I think the other thing which is quite interesting is people are put into particular categories as though they are manifestations of each category, and fit in each box neatly, these things become almost treated as immutable characteristics. Someone is Liberal or Leftist or Libertarian in the same way they are Tall or French, its just who they are

The smugness of the liberal is never justified, because liberals are never correct about anything afaic

Depends on what yr calling liberal, doesn’t it? Was the Warren court wrong on its civil rights rulings? Were Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the EPA and the Fair Labor Standards Act wrong? You can argue they have their problems, don’t go far enough, etc, but all had significant impacts and all are legacies of 20th century American liberalism. (The term “liberal” itself being hotly contested territory obviously.)

re: neoliberalism and fascism

so when i look at queer history, when i look at how queer liberation worked, the first people my queer ancestors had to fight were the people on the left. one of the major trans projects of the '00s was Camp Trans, a protest against the trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn's Festival. and you could look at that and say "surely conservative transphobia is more of a threat to trans people, why are you doing that", and probably some people did. am i against feminism, against "women's spaces"? absolutely not. there are just people who were structurally excluded from spaces where we _shouldn't_ rightly have been excluded, and it's sad that our fight for exclusion wound up with that space going away entirely. the people i talk to, they don't blame the trans people for causing michfest to "lose". it was the michfest organizers' inflexible, exclusionary position on trans exclusion that doomed the festival, not trans people's advocating for our right to be included.

that's kinda how i feel about liberalism vs. leftism. i hear _so much_ of liberals worrying and fretting about how to win over trump voters, and i mean

to me, the liberal tradition i was raised with was compromise. it's a question of what you give up in order to get those votes. and i feel like sometimes liberals don't know what they're giving up and what exactly they're getting in return. i personally, i mean it is an emotional decision, not a rational decision. i don't feel listened to, taken seriously, _valued_ by liberals. and it hurts, you know? i mean yes fascists want me and liberals...

liberal/neoliberal (in this specific instance i don't know that there's a meaningful difference between the two) transmedicalism, "progressive" transmedicalism, kept me ignorant, kept me from living the life i needed to live in order to be, like, _happy_. i bought into that ideology and it hurt me. i was taught, by liberals, to believe and act in ways that were contrary to my own best interest. i could just as easily have been taught that by conservatives or fascists. a lot of people i know were taught that. i was taught it by liberals. so yeah. i'd say i have a strong personal sense of hurt when it comes to liberalism and neoliberalism, and i don't have those feelings about fascism, because i've always fucking hated fascists.

and to me this is what punditry misses, how _personal_, how _individual_, each person's beliefs are. what can you learn about the relationship between leftism, neoliberalism, and fascism from my story? what lessons can you take from it? maybe none, you know? maybe there's no larger narrative. i guess i tend to think so, which is why i'm hardly ever on politics threads. i don't feel like the way my brain works, the experience i have, really equips me to engage with larger political discourse.

If we haven’t mentioned him yet, I’d suggest Alberto Toscano’s work is very worthwhile. He’s an academic who’s been working on this stuff for a while and published _Late Fascism_ with Verso Books last year.

Two convos he’s had in the last year or two are particularly illuminating, one on the show What’s Left of Philosophy:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-whats-left-of-philosophy-75162835/episode/88-on-late-fascism-w-172783195/

And one with the New Books network:

https://www.podplay.com/sv-se/podcasts/new-books-in-american-politics-1050777/episodes/alberto-toscano-late-fascism-race-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-crisis-verso-2023-261821887

One of the helpful points he offers is not to focus on what he calls “the politics of crisis in the interwar era” so much as the shit that happened in Latin America in the 70s, like Pinochet, and what was done to force those economies into neoliberal set-ups

Also he’s a good interview with a droll sense of humor

xpost

fwiw I think that's an important perspective Kate, because it speaks to how most people — most of us most of the time — actually experience politics, which is not along neatly divided ideological lines but via messy lived experience of how power operates in our lives and our intimate/proximate spaces. So the leftist-vs.-liberal tensions that have characterized the American left-of-center make perfect sense, because e.g. the Michigan Womyn's Festival is a closer political space in a lot of ways for trans women than, like, a CPAC conference. So of course that's where the fight happens is over access to the Womyn's Festival, not over access to CPAC, because if you can't even gain recognition from your putative allies how can you even see far enough to fight against the Right?

I identify as a left-liberal (yes there is too such a thing) because there are things I value in traditions from both "the left" and Enlightenment liberalism (their emphases on collective action and individual liberties, respectively), and also things I question or distrust in both, so I kind of sit cautiously between. But also a lot of my ideas and conceptions of power and politics aren't rooted in theory or really even ideology at all so much as in observation and experience of the world and my perceptions of what motivates people to political action (or inaction).

And thanks kingfish, those sound promising.

i listened to about the first half of the left of philosophy podcast and i thought it was really interesting! (about halfway through the people with the chainsaws next door started up again and i couldn't focus on it anymore.) even before the chainsaws, though, it was a difficult listen to me, a lot of which i think is that i'm not an academic, i don't have that kind of background. i've learned a lot by listening to and paying attention to academic leftist discourse, particularly in terms of challenging my own biases and preconceptions. at the same time there's this video essayist i follow and one of the things she says a lot is "read theory", and i _don't_ read theory. i think it's valuable and interesting work and just isn't really accessible to probably most people - not just as a matter of paywalling and academic gatekeeping and elsevier and all of this other stuff, but because a lot of it is very jargony. it's not a dialect i'm fluent in. i struggle to keep up.

the thing about academia to me is that a lot of it is very abstract. which i think is... i mean when one is in a situation where one doesn't have a lot of _practical_ ability to put one's ideas into practice, i think one of the more valuable things one can do is work on what i'd say is a... a healthy mindset. it's interesting because drilling down to things i don't see it as an intellectual practice, i see it as kind of a moral or ethical practice. when the time comes to make radical change, when crisis comes, a lot of times a bunch of fucked up shit happens, like, not even on purpose. people are trying to do their best but it's really fucking hard to do the right thing when crisis hits, and sometimes people mean well but wind up fucking shit up anyway. yesterday i was talking to a friend who, like me, used to be a boy scout, and she talked about trying to "be prepared" in a time of often overwhelming change. and for me a lot of it is "what the fuck is going on, what is even happening".

i grew up steeped in the tradition of liberal thought, which i _do_ think is distinct from the tradition of leftist thought. the tradition of liberal thought left me completely unprepared to deal with trump's victory. like, my idea was that under liberalism, something like this Should Not Happen. and once i did that i found out liberal thought had disadvantaged me in other ways, like, i was not theoretically equipped to understand or accept my own gender identity through a liberal framework. doing that required me to understand and accept some radical concepts... there's this idea of "gender incongruence", i guess i'd say when gendered expectations are incompatible with one's own subjective well-being, and like... for me, i'd say that my gender is incongruent with the liberal political philosophy i had.

which isn't to say that i wholeheartedly and uncritically embrace leftist thought methodologically! i definitely think there's a strong intellectual and theoretical component to my own leftism. being "transgender", for instance, that's an abstract framing of a concrete lived experience, one that's more suited to who i am than "transsexual" or "transvestite" were. it's just the idea of "social science", that framing, that gives me pause. in practical terms, framing something as a "science", you know, that had a material advantage in terms of access to resources, and i think that's valuable. i mean one does have to make compromises and i think that was valuable.

at the same time i look at academia and it doesn't offer what it used to. there's not the sort of security in it that there used to be. this is the challenging thing to me is that the theoretical leftist tradition sometimes seems to me to be getting in the way of effective leftist practice. i don't think the idea of the "ivory tower" is a fair or useful framing, but i do feel sometimes that there's a layer of abstraction between academic understandings of leftism and people's practical experience.

which is why the part of the podcast that i heard was so interesting to me... because building coalitions comes from multiple different directions. like, how do you make sense of somebody's lived experience that isn't yours? that's inevitably going to involve abstraction, figuring out what's the same and what's different between two groups of people. and i think saying look, why do we have to compare everything to hitler? is a valid question. like everything bad comes down to the nazis, that's the yardstick by which everything is judged, and it's a terrible yardstick. it's like if someone isn't Literally Hitler it doesn't get seen as a problem.

one of the things that i've taken an amateur interest in is genocide studies, the way that gets framed, the way that it was inceptionally a matter of _norm entrepeneurship_, and the first people to take up that framing after lemkin's original framing, after the UN gave it the seal of approval, was _We Charge Genocide_, in 1951, where Black Americans said "ok look what you're doing to us is genocide". and that wasn't taken seriously, and that to me is a major failure of the attempt to fight "fascism". because then you have a liberal democratic norm, you know, gatekeeping. the charge was basically ignored and nothing was done, and that inaction sent the message that the way the US was treating Black Americans was, I guess, acceptable.

so like as a theoretical concept terms like "genocide" and "fascism" are only important to the point where one can, you know, perform norm entrepeneurship, in _every individual case_, to convince the people who have the power to stop it that they should use that power to stop it. that's gonna be an adversarial process. as an outsider i'm trying to convince people to put themselves at risk to support my values. and the only leverage i have is, you know, the power to walk away. to say "these people aren't my allies, they're acting against my values". and then i gotta be in community with other people aren't part of "the system". i can say that oh i'm an anarchist, i don't believe in systems of coercive power, but ultimately my goal _is_ reform, is for there to be a system that has a _place_ for me and the people whose values and interests i share. if i call myself an "anarchist" or a "communist" that doesn't mean anything other than "i am not your ally", by declaring myself a member of a group that liberals _don't_ see as allies i'm trying to communicate that i'm not on liberals' _side_, while at the same time i'm declaring that people with a certain set of values and beliefs, i do work to ally with them. people who will not compromise on trans rights, people who oppose what the israeli government is doing to the palestinian people, people who oppose the racist carceral justice system, these are people whose values are congruent with mine, whose goals are congruent with mine.

of course by doing that i'm taking a risk, but it is a calculated risk, an intentional risk. the less people have to lose, the more extreme risks we're willing to take. in general, most liberals probably have more to lose than i do.

idk. i don't think about politics a lot, i don't know if that's coherent. just some random thoughts. these fucking chainsaws are giving me a headache. i'm going to lie down.