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Is Trumpism fascism?

Yes, there are the Prouds Boys, et al, but Trump does not actually have a party militia at his disposal that is battling for control of the streets, and that is one of the crucial defining characteristics of fascist movements. However, that does not mean that he is not dangerous. The key things are: what is Trump going to do? Not what we call him, but what he plans to do. Was the previous Trump governmen fascist? If so, then how do we account for the Black Lives Matter protests? Will he outlaw political parties, and ban protests?
He's a wannabe fascist dictator, but the US system didn't grant him those kinds of powers first time around. So you account for the previous government quite easily really - he wasn't omnipotent, as shown by his failure to cling to power. His first period in office, I would argue his biggest achievement was the way he stacked the courts. This time, he's stacking his administration with loyalists who owe him a personal loyalty (a very fascist thing to do) and potentially he is very dangerous indeed with those previously stacked judges now in place. We'll see what kinds of political violence take place. Too early to say definitively what shape the violence will take, but I'll be very surprised if there isn't any.

I think it's ok that we don't have all the answers here. Depressing certainly, but ok.
 
The key things are: what is Trump going to do? Not what we call him, but what he plans to do. Was the previous Trump governmen fascist? If so, then how do we account for the Black Lives Matter protests? Will he outlaw political parties, and ban protests?
you're right, and at present this is very much 'elements of fascism' without full ideological fascistic drive comparable to examples from the 20th century .... but the signs so far are that the current upcoming term will attempt to go much further to dismantle the state and its safeguards

We can come back to the thread in five years and ask And what about now? but surely antifasicsm is all about nipping it in the bud as much as is possible before the roots take hold

theres a global direction of travel here
 
I think the fascist frame is useful for analysing Trumpism, but it's not the only useful frame. The Mob Boss, the Con Artist and the Corporate Raider are also apt for analysing what Trump 2.0 will unleash in government. Corruption is hardly new to US politics - think Cheney and Halliburton for example - but it will on steroids under the Trump regime. Previous Presidents in some sense saw themselves as part of the US ruling class and wanted to preserve the basic structure of governance. Trump doesn't see himself as part of anything, he answers only to one man: himself. He doesn't care about his legacy, he cares only about amassing wealth and power. In fact, I get the sense he gets a sadistic kick out of screwing people over - his family, his voters, his party members. He'll be happy to loot, pillage and destroy the structures of governance, sell them off to the highest bidder, unleash chaos leave only what is needed to protect him and people he needs.
 
I think the fascist frame is useful for analysing Trumpism, but it's not the only useful frame. The Mob Boss, the Con Artist and the Corporate Raider are also apt for analysing what Trump 2.0 will unleash in government. Corruption is hardly new to US politics - think Cheney and Halliburton for example - but it will on steroids under the Trump regime. Previous Presidents in some sense saw themselves as part of the US ruling class and wanted to preserve the basic structure of governance. Trump doesn't see himself as part of anything, he answers only to one man: himself. He doesn't care about his legacy, he cares only about amassing wealth and power. In fact, I get the sense he gets a sadistic kick out of screwing people over - his family, his voters, his party members. He'll be happy to loot, pillage and destroy the structures of governance, sell them off to the highest bidder, unleash chaos leave only what is needed to protect him and people he needs.
I think what you write is accurate. I think that Trump is more out for himself than committed to removing civil liberties. However, he is very stupid, and can be influenced by people around him. His last regime was chaotic, and I think that his next one will be too.
 
In the sort of politics that I was involved with when I was young, definitions were not abstract things, but connected to political action. What are the consequences of defining Trump as a fascist? Does it mean that activists should adopt a different approach?
There is a tired history of defining certain political figures as "fascist" in order to get people to form a united front with liberal forces. Does defining Trump as fascist mean that activists in the US should work to elect politicians from the Democratic Party? Does it mean that activists should go undergound or flee the country?
Does it actually matter how we define Trump?
All good questions although you might have the wrong audience tbh.
 
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You've seen how petty the man can be though. Who ultimately will benefit from being loyal to him personally, rather than to their own advancement? How will that all hang together. Will potentially dissenting right wing voices hang together and fall in line? He could become embattled at some stage.

And that's if things 'go well'. You see in the UK with the likes of Truss that this cultue war and half baked ideology mentality can can be brought up short in the cold face of economic turbulence and ruling class shockwaves.

He's a hell of a job to do if he's going to have the state security apparatus 'working towards' him in a full on nightmare scenario. Particularly if he's promising them milk and honey that won't appear.

Unrest is quite likely but predicting from which quarters and whether it will strengthen his hand is uncertain to me. He'll need the old hands, the competent lever pullers at some stage.

I don't doubt that there will be plenty of horrors along the way. That's all thinking in terms of his upcoming term domestically. Abroad I think flattery and photo ops will mostly keep him buttered up. He might even be better in some ways. Although I'm reluctant to say I'm very convinced either way.
 
Fascism is a product of modernity, originally flourishing in the era (and novelty) of mass politics. Despite the obscuring classism on both sides of the Atlantic, it's still a pseudo-revolutionary mass movement of its core constituency, the immiserated middle classes in defence of its own status and petty property. It's a useful tool for the ruling class to manage economic crises that could potentially threaten its own power, while still seeing the pseudo-revolutionaries as a load of plebs, but the absence or defanging of a coherent and large enough radical left or even vestigial social democratic movement, despite some nostalgic desire for the latter among the broad masses, is worrying. Is a Tory/Reform coalition going to be our political reality in a few years?
 
Yes, there are the Prouds Boys, et al, but Trump does not actually have a party militia at his disposal that is battling for control of the streets, and that is one of the crucial defining characteristics of fascist movements. However, that does not mean that he is not dangerous. The key things are: what is Trump going to do? Not what we call him, but what he plans to do. Was the previous Trump governmen fascist? If so, then how do we account for the Black Lives Matter protests? Will he outlaw political parties, and ban protests?
There were far-right militia members terrorising black schoolchildren during the upswing of BLM protests and demonstrations. Our American posters may have more info, but I distinctly remember a group of black Army veterans, men and women, arming themselves and patrolling neighbourhoods, including schools and playgrounds, FFS. It shows just how cowardly a lot of these fascists are. When emboldened to openly express themselves they go for who they see as the weakest, including kids.
 
There were far-right militia members terrorising black schoolchildren during the upswing of BLM protests and demonstrations. Our American posters may have more info, but I distinctly remember a group of black Army veterans, men and women, arming themselves and patrolling neighbourhoods, including schools and playgrounds, FFS. It shows just how cowardly a lot of these fascists are. When emboldened to openly express themselves they go for who they see as the weakest, including kids.

 
There were far-right militia members terrorising black schoolchildren during the upswing of BLM protests and demonstrations. Our American posters may have more info, but I distinctly remember a group of black Army veterans, men and women, arming themselves and patrolling neighbourhoods, including schools and playgrounds, FFS. It shows just how cowardly a lot of these fascists are. When emboldened to openly express themselves they go for who they see as the weakest, including kids.

This is true, but they weren't specifically Republican party (or even Trump controlled) militias.

Both Mussolini and Hitler had strong party militias before they were elected to power, which enabled them to expand the reach of the party into almost all sectors of society.

Trump doesn't have anything like that; he doesn't even have complete control of the Republican party.
 
Trump isn't what some fascists would see as one of their own. He's a vulgar billionaire of the ruling class, not the self-mythologised upstanding and respectable middle class guy stretched by unfair market forces but who'll quite happily see the enslavement or mass murder of the lower orders if it means they don't have to join them. He facilitates the spread of fascism with his hollow promises and scapegoating rhetoric in that sense.
 
This is true, but they weren't specifically Republican party (or even Trump controlled) militias.

Both Mussolini and Hitler had strong party militias before they were elected to power, which enabled them to expand the reach of the party into almost all sectors of society.

Trump doesn't have anything like that; he doesn't even have complete control of the Republican party.
This is the mistake I think scholars and professors of classical fascism make, they compare everything directly to what happened in the 30s and if it doesnt match precisely then it can be ignored. They also have the benefit of hindsight to see where those regimes got to...here we are at potentially an early stage.

There are militias in the USA and when Trump has called they answered. Is Trump in direct control of them? No. But he doesnt need to be. They are broadly loyal to him. Its a more complex world with more subtle relationships of control and allegiance.

The degree to which Trump has "control" will be made clear over the coming term. The signs are he is going to consolidate power, dismantling parts of the state, global institutions, and purging those deemed disloyal. We can only hope how much of that may come to pass or not.
 
Arguments that Trumpism is fascism are variations on the walks like a duck argument. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck must be a duck. This is always a bad argument.

Likeness is not something that has any control on it, it can be stretched to purpose. Likeness is fundamentally about appearance. Surface over substance.

Will a Trump government shut down working class organisations using a mobilised plebian base? No they mobilised in the normal way to win an election. The answer to the OP question is a plain no.
 
This is the mistake I think scholars and professors of classical fascism make, they compare everything directly to what happened in the 30s and if it doesnt match precisely then it can be ignored. They also have the benefit of hindsight to see where those regimes got to...here we are at potentially an early stage.

There are militias in the USA and when Trump has called they answered. Is Trump in direct control of them? No. But he doesnt need to be. They are broadly loyal to him. Its a more complex world with more subtle relationships of control and allegiance.

The degree to which Trump has "control" will be made clear over the coming term. The signs are he is going to consolidate power, dismantling parts of the state, global institutions, and purging those deemed disloyal. We can only hope how much of that may come to pass or not.

I'm not a scholar or a professor of classical fascism, and I'm not saying Trumpism should be ignored.

But I don't think it's correct to call Trumpism fascism, unless you lose the specifics of what made fascism what it was and instead call any sort of right wing populism fascism.
 
This is the mistake I think scholars and professors of classical fascism make, they compare everything directly to what happened in the 30s and if it doesnt match precisely then it can be ignored. They also have the benefit of hindsight to see where those regimes got to...here we are at potentially an early stage.

There are militias in the USA and when Trump has called they answered. Is Trump in direct control of them? No. But he doesnt need to be. They are broadly loyal to him. Its a more complex world with more subtle relationships of control and allegiance.

The degree to which Trump has "control" will be made clear over the coming term. The signs are he is going to consolidate power, dismantling parts of the state, global institutions, and purging those deemed disloyal. We can only hope how much of that may come to pass or not.
This last bit is key. He will try to dismantle/reshape parts of the US system. He's already subverted bits of it.

How far he'll get, we'll see. Individual states will assert themselves against him. He'll fail in much of what he attempts, no doubt. I do think it will be a chaotic administration, probably right from the start. (He'll be a failed fascist in that regard. ) But he's not going to leave the US in a good state.
 
I'm not a scholar or a professor of classical fascism, and I'm not saying Trumpism should be ignored.

But I don't think it's correct to call Trumpism fascism, unless you lose the specifics of what made fascism what it was and instead call any sort of right wing populism fascism.
I get you, I would call it fascistic rather than fascism. I also think in a many cases a single word cannot summarise the complexity of politics that happens in the modern world. Agree with Jeff above that there are other useful currents to add to the understanding and definition of what is going on with Trumpism. And more besides. But where this ends up in the coming decade is far from certain that it will not develop into a much more 1930s characteristic.

There is also the question of what comes after Trump. Some are convinced it ends with him. He is certainly a unique person. But there's every reason to imagine things could get even nastier down the line, building on these new foundations.
 
I'm still generally of the view that is doesn't matter much if he fits the label fascist or not, I'm not sure what changes if he does or doesn't.

But something maybe worth thinking about is that fascism in Europe was about smashing a powerful left that actually posed a threat. At the moment the left poses no real threat it's just an imagined one, a product of their delusional minds.

Absent that threat I'm not sure if makes sense to call anything fascist. And I think the Abscense of that threat is what would stop the US as a country becoming fascist regardless of who is in charge, without that threat there is not the final push that is needed.

There are plenty of other perfectly good words or phrases, authoritarian, far right, dictatorship are just three. We tend to only talk about fascism in western countries we don't think of other countries around the world as fascist just as authoritarian or as dictatorships even when far less democratic than the US will be even under Trump. And I think we are right not to but should maybe ask why?? Having said that people do seem to be starting to do that and the more widely we use the term fascism the more it just becomes a synonym for authoritarian.

Just to mess things up a bit more I also think there is a difference between analysis and rhetoric. Throwing around fascist or nazi as an insult or to emphasise a point is not the same having a analysis that a perosn / country is in fact fascist. So you can say Trump is a fascist without really believing it, and you know what that's OK.
 
I'm not a scholar or a professor of classical fascism, and I'm not saying Trumpism should be ignored.

But I don't think it's correct to call Trumpism fascism, unless you lose the specifics of what made fascism what it was and instead call any sort of right wing populism fascism.

The right wing populism equals fascism generalisation is rife I'm afraid. Sometimes it even extends to populism generally with some old guff about red/brown. I agree that trying to superimpose models of pre war fascism on 21st-century movements is too rigid approach but so is trying to shoehorn everything on the radical right into being 'new' fascists.
 
I get you, I would call it fascistic rather than fascism. I also think in a many cases a single word cannot summarise the complexity of politics that happens in the modern world. Agree with Jeff above that there are other useful currents to add to the understanding and definition of what is going on with Trumpism. And more besides. But where this ends up in the coming decade is far from certain that it will not develop into a much more 1930s characteristic.

There is also the question of what comes after Trump. Some are convinced it ends with him. He is certainly a unique person. But there's every reason to imagine things could get even nastier down the line, building on these new foundations.
What comes next is my fear, we will see what they next 4 years bring. But it feels like ground work being done.
 
There's a fairly broad historical consensus on the left that fascism demands physical confrontation. I would suggest that the fact that Trump won an election fair and square (as far as anybody ever wins an election fairly) and that his followers aren't trying to eg. control the streets, that violence is a really bad response politically right now.

I realise that the retort to the above is that it's not that sort of fascism. But then what is the political utility of the fascism analysis?
 
There's a fairly broad historical consensus on the left that fascism demands physical confrontation. I would suggest that the fact that Trump won an election fair and square (as far as anybody ever wins an election fairly) and that his followers aren't trying to eg. control the streets, that violence is a really bad response politically right now.

I realise that the retort to the above is that it's not that sort of fascism. But then what is the political utility of the fascism analysis?
Jan 6th cannot be ignored
The idea that Trumpists believes in democracy is an illusion. They openly discuss dictatorship.
They've been learning on the job though, and their thinking is developing
Look to Putin
 
Matthew Lyons and Three-Way Fight always worth reading on this stuff, here's their most recent big piece from shortly before the election:

Donald Trump has been called a fascist since the early days of his presidential candidacy for 2016. Over the past nine years I have repeatedly argued against this description, while noting that both his campaigns and his administration had important fascistic tendencies. But I’ve also argued that we need to treat the question dynamically, being alert to both changes in Trump’s politics and the interplay between his politics and other forces.


Fascism is a category we impose on political phenomena to help make sense of them. The question isn’t whether a given conception of fascism is “true,” but whether it’s more or less useful, both analytically and strategically, for understanding political connections and differences. A three way fight approach argues that it’s most useful to think of fascism as an autonomous political force that makes a radical break with the established order, intensifying existing hierarchies in many ways but also challenging established elites for power. Three way fight politics also warns that there is nothing inherently fascist about dictatorship, racial oppression, or even genocide, and that even anti-fascism can be used to advance political repression against liberatory forces.


Trump has promoted many elements of fascist politics, such as political demonization, supremacist attacks on oppressed groups, authoritarianism, and a distorted kind of anti-elitism based on conspiracist scapegoating. As noted above, he also cultivated a symbiotic relationship with organized fascists and other far rightists. But some key pieces of fascist politics were always missing. Trump didn’t offer an ideological vision to systematically transform society, he didn’t try to build an independent organizational base, and he didn’t challenge the legitimacy of the established political system—at least for a while.


The changes I outlined in the previous sections above have brought the MAGA movement significantly closer to fascist politics, although important differences are still there. Trump and his supporters have brought a kind of system disloyalty into mainstream politics in a way we didn’t see in 2016, and have intensified the shifts toward authoritarianism and supremacist scapegoating. MAGA forces haven’t built a new, unified mass organization, but they’ve spent the past eight years developing an extensive, if loose political network, and they’ve gained much tighter control of the Republican Party than they ever had before, at least temporarily. Initiatives such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 have helped flesh out an overall ideological vision for the movement. And having tried once already to overturn the results of a presidential election by force, MAGA forces can be expected to do so again if they don’t win outright, as in 2020-21 using some combination of propaganda, bogus legal challenges, and physical attacks to discredit and challenge the election—but this time in a more organized and systematic way.


These developments mean that Trump’s presidential bid is even more dangerous than it was four years ago. At the same time, in my view they don’t represent fascism’s full-scale, radical break with the established order. Fascism aims to impose a unified ideological vision on all spheres of society, from politics to the workplace, from mass media to family life. This goes far beyond the kind of policy prescriptions we see in Project 2025. Some of the forces that support Trump, such as the powerful New Apostolic Reformation network, have that kind of comprehensive vision, but they don’t control the MAGA movement as a whole—witness Trump’s retreat from staunch opposition to abortion rights to a “let the states decide” position.


The MAGA movement is part of a new international wave of right-wing populist initiatives that have surged over the past two decades and especially since the 2008 global economic crisis. These initiatives have a lot of fascistic features, notably authoritarianism, aggressive nationalism, and ethnic or religious scapegoating. In power, they carry out supremacist policies and intensify repression, but they work within the existing governmental framework in a way that limits their power to some degree. For example, Poland’s Law and Justice Party was voted out of office in 2023, while India’s Bharatiya Janata Party lost parliamentary seats in 2024—despite jailing or threatening many opposition leaders—and was forced to govern in coalition after ten years of single-party governance. That’s not how fascist states work.


To be clear, a second Trump presidency would be disastrous. Recognizing and countering that danger is more important than whether we call it fascist or not. And Trump doesn’t have to dismantle the US electoral system to wreak massive damage. That “democratic” electoral system, in its various incarnations, has provided the framework for witchhunts and lynchings, roundups of political dissenters, the enslavement of African people and genocide against Indigenous nations. It can be turned to such ends again.
Their "On Fascism" guide also probably worth a look:

And various older writings linked in that quote above, eg:
 
Jan 6th cannot be ignored
The idea that Trumpists believes in democracy is an illusion. They openly discuss dictatorship.
They've been learning on the job though, and their thinking is developing
Look to Putin

Putin also puts fascists in prison, outlaws their organisations and causes some of them to flee into exile where they take up arms against the Russian state. He's also done what centre-right liberals in the West have done, which is to co-opt in revised form some of their nationalist positions in order to attract support away from them. He favours a conservative society emphasising pre-1917 tradition and imperial history with a strong, authoritarian state. But then, isn't that an historical cliche when it comes to Russia?

He's also grown rich due to neoliberalism and presides over an oligarchy. Something fascists out of power romantically see themselves as being the heroic revolutionaries fighting against, in their bid to fashion a new state that uplifts that decent layer of society defending the nation from the degeneracy of the upper and lower orders.

That fascists, attracted by the prospect of glory through violence for higher national aims which the ideology promotes to men especially, have fought as paramilitaries since 2014 or in private security like Wagner, means they're also useful and expendable.
 
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