Trump and Fascism: A Pair of Historians Tackle the Big Question

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” Sinclair Lewis never said. The quote was fake, though many people then and now found it plausible that he might have uttered it.

Lewis was the author of It Can’t Happen Here, a 1935 dystopian novel chronicling the rise of an opportunistic and charismatic politician who rides a wave of nativism and economic populism to the White House, whereupon he dismantles the American democratic system and replaces it with a fascist state eerily similar to Nazi Germany. The title of Lewis’ book was an admonition: the United States wasn’t special, its citizenry no more virtuous or impervious to fascism than the people of Germany, Italy and Spain.

Now the 2024 campaign is ending amid debate over whether one presidential candidate — Donald Trump — is a fascist.

To better understand this question, POLITICO Magazine interviewed Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University who editeda volume of essays by leading students of fascism, past and present.

Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America lays bare fascism’s slippery nature as a term and a concept, and the perils of applying it to one’s political opponents. But it also identifies themes that might strike many Americans as uncomfortably close to home: illiberalism, hyper masculinity, blood and soil nationalism, a love of strongmen and state power — and politics driven by grievance and anger.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Social scientists have long debated what fascism means, and when you try to wedge all fascist movements into a single framework, a lot of contradictions emerge. You see some people arguing that it's a sacralization of politics, where the nation almost becomes like a sacred entity, and fascism operates as a civic religion. Alternatively, for some historians, it's been a counterrevolutionary reaction to the rise of Marxism and socialism. 

For Hannah Arendt, it was totalitarianism or one half of it. For Robert Paxton, it's been a contingent process. Is it an ideology? Is it more a style of leadership? Or, to borrow from Jason Stanley, is it more of a political method?

You just mentioned some major thinkers who all have a different way of understanding what fascism means, and I think that already reveals that it's contested. I approach it as a historian, and I see it developing through certain historical contexts. When we look at the emergence of fascism in the ’20s, it's coming on the heels of World War I, and in particular, mass disillusionment with liberal democracy as you have the collapse of the global economic system and a lot of blame shifting as to who's responsible for that. And so there are things that we can tease out from these movements that could provide key elements of what we would describe as fascism.

Charismatic leadership, usually that's one facet of fascism. It's a mass political movement led by a charismatic leader. Another thing is critique of liberal thought, enlightenment thought. Anti-liberalism is another aspect, anti-parliamentary democracy — that only one person can solve the problems of society. Another thing, and this is what I think is essential to understand which also gets completely lost today, because it doesn't really map on to a lot of the things that we're describing as fascist but it marked the fascist movements of the early 20th century, would be that they were imperialistic.

Hitler wanted to take over the world. He essentially wanted to establish a new world order marked by a racial hierarchy. Mussolini also wanted a mass expansion into Africa in particular. In other words, these were movements that were inherently expansionist and often quite social Darwinian. That's not something that we would necessarily associate with what a lot of people are describing as fascists today. So for instance, Trump, he's a critic of internationalism, he's a critic of NATO. He was a critic of the attempt to spread democracy abroad by the Iraq War. A lot of the fascists that we see in Italy today, people that we describe as fascist, [Giorgia] Meloni , for instance, or [Marine] Le Pen, are critics of the EU. They're nationalists. They don't want to expand. They want to go internal instead of being more externally oriented.

A will to power would be another thing, emphasizing strength and might over reason. So I see it like Paxton does, in the sense that it involves less of a definition, but more different elements that could be mapped onto other things that aren't fascist.

We could say, for instance, that a lot of leaders on the left are charismatic. Right? Bernie Sanders is charismatic. No one would say he's a fascist. Some movements are authoritarian, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're fascist. So, when we put it in a historical context and then we look at it in that light, we then have to say to ourselves, “OK, well, what is it about the context today that shares something from that previous context, in terms of how we understand fascism back then?” And that's where there's a major debate, right? And someone like Jason Stanley will say, “Maybe the context and history isn't so much important as the rhetoric, the language that people use.”

But I think this so-called fascism debate centers on this very issue. How much do we need to be replicating the past in order to call what we're seeing today fascist? Or do we need to do that at all? Can we just say, well, there is a timeless essence that can be downloaded on any period, and that's what we're seeing right now.

In her essay in your volume, Sarah Churchwell observed that fascism is always indigenous to the country it captures so it's specific to its native context. But she sees these other shared elements across time, many of which you arguably see today with the MAGA movement and their cultural concerns like male patriarchal authority, or a kind of blood and soil vision of national belonging, or nostalgia for a past that's usually more fiction than reality.

Do you see those as common to it as well, in addition to illiberalism and oftentimes a violent style of politics or these cultural touch points?

One of the arguments against people using fascism analogies or historical comparisons today is they say, “Well, that was Europe's history and ours is different.” And people like Sarah Churchwell and others came along and said, “Well, no, there's an indigenous history of fascism in this country.” Some will go back to the second KKK, I think Robert Paxton himself even says there’s a kind of terrorism. And then, of course, Sarah Churchwell deals with a lot of Nazi-inspired movements in the United States in the ’30s.

There isn't a question of whether or not there are fascist groups that exist in the United States. Clearly, there are. I mean, there's no doubt about it. I think the question is whether — the KKK did not refer to themselves as fascist, at least originally, right. So if we think of fascism, one of the things we'd have to associate with it is mass movement. And so how much of the movements that Sarah Churchwell is describing were mass movements. I don't think they were very mass at all. They were quite small, a lot of the groups that she describes in different pockets of the country.

Some would say that fascism takes on new forms today, we don't even need to think fascism is involving mass political movements, right? The goalposts kind of move, so to speak, and so we reformulate, and we say, well these are things that constitute fascism because something like Project 2025 is anti-liberal, wants to roll back some of the policies of the Obama administration on family equality, wants to replace, essentially, the apparatus in D.C., with an alternative in order to carry out this vision.

Now, there is no doubt in my mind that these are illiberal, authoritarian visions. It's just when we up the ante and go further and describe it as fascism, we're doing something a little bit different. I mean, people in the ’20s and ’30s readily identified as being fascist. It was a positive term, that those were involved with those groups, used in a positive way. None of these groups that we're talking about today, at least the mainstream ones, would positively identify with this at all.

Using the example of 1930s Germany, scholars have debated whether business interests used the Nazi Party as a blunt instrument to destroy the left — both the Communist Party and the Social Democrats. If you buy that theory, it was capitalists who facilitated Hitler's rise to power, either because they just preferred his vision to a left wing alternative, or they just thought that, mistakenly, they could control him.

What do you think of the relationship between capitalism and fascism? Is the case of Germany instructive? Is it possible that the business elites in the middle class would or could embrace this kind of illiberalism, either out of self interest or out of fear of the left?

You rightfully mentioned the capitalist class, the industrialists, in particular, backed Hitler because they were afraid of the Social Democrats and a communist takeover. That's key to point out. The reason for their fear was because there was a veritable left party in Germany, and the Nazis were in competition with the German Communist Party and the Social Democrats. We don't have that situation here in the United States. As we've seen with Harris, she's more than happy to align herself with neoconservative Republicans such as Dick Cheney. That's a little bit of a different situation than in Nazi Germany, where the business class was happy to align itself with the right.

It's much more complicated today, because there'd be plenty of capitalists and neoliberals who would want very little to do with Trump. And then there would be others who would. The major difference is that there's no Marxist or major left party in this country that would allow some of the more market-oriented capitalists to pick Harris or Trump for whatever is their bottom line. I think if there was a Socialist Party or Communist Party, the choice would be much easier probably for someone like Donald Trump. But that doesn't really exist.

Arguably, the analogy today would be Silicon Valley investors and CEOs, at least a number of prominent ones who clearly prefer Trump tax cuts. In their mind, the Democratic Party might as well be the SDP, because they've so typecast it as being socialist. And anything involving higher taxes or greater regulation of anything from health and safety to AI, they’ve considered it socialist. So you could argue that there is a strata of business leadership in this country that certainly is willing to take him over that.

That's 100 percent the case, that group of what you would describe as venture capitalists. There were a lot of venture capitalists like this who did back the Nazis in the United States. We know that Henry Ford, for instance, was an admirer of someone like [Hitler] and fascism. But is Wall Street backing, for instance, Trump or Harris? Right? That's a different question.

You just don't see it today.

But you're right that this group of people like Peter Thiel, or people like Elon Musk, or this Silicon Valley cohort, which is more than just economics — they have a whole world view of being elites. There's a racial component to them that does dovetail with huge ideological support with Trump.

Traditionally, are fascist movements likely to succeed in the wake of economic disaster, or can prosperous societies backslide into fascism as well? 

There are arguments that it's not by coincidence that this global economic crisis in 2008 led to the rise of populist, nativist thinkers. That would suggest that growing economic inequality would be one of the main factors of the appeal of fascism. But we generally live in a prosperous society here in the United States, all things being equalized.

It does seem one thing that's kind of across the board, and maybe this is why Trump just won't stop beating this drum, is issues involving immigration. That's something that all nativists in Europe rail about. That's something that all right-wing populists and authoritarians, or fascism, or however you want to call it, this is something that is common, no matter where they lie in terms of their GDP, that seems very clear.

You have hedged in calling Donald Trump or the MAGA movement fascist for reasons you've articulated. You had a couple essayists who took the view that it wasn't — that what you're seeing in the United States does not qualify as fascism. Succinctly, what is their argument against calling it fascist?

I already kind of mentioned one or two things. Again, I'm a historian. I look at this historically, and I actually think a lot of historians don't even want to make historical comparisons. They just think different areas are so different that it's politicized, whenever you try to make arguments from the past and say we're replicating those. So there's just a philosophical argument where it's always politicized when you do these kinds of things. There's a book that came out by Bruce Kuklick, it's a history of the fascist rhetoric in the United States, from the 1920s all the way to the present. Essentially, the indications of fascism are just polemical attempts to discount one's opponents, and this has been done on the right and the left for decades in this country. So that's an argument against it. I mentioned the imperialism thing.

And then I think it has a lot to do with some of the people who are, not everyone, but some of the people who are promoting it, and are not addressing issues internal to the Democratic Party. And these pundits and some historians almost take on the character of prophets or superheroes that have the keys to knowing what's going on through their knowledge or expertise, and, not really being able to understand why voters are voting in the way that they do.

Right now, one thing that puzzles many liberals — I'm on the left — I think one of the things that's puzzling to many liberals is what to make of growing numbers of Latino and Black voters supposedly giving their support to Trump. Some would say that there's reasons to call these statistics into question, but The New York Times keeps publishing on this regularly, and it seems to me that people who argue for the fascism line, which they generally see it as a form of racism and a form of white supremacy, they generally have no way of explaining that other than these are low-information voters, which is code for uneducated, or, these polls aren't true, there's no way anyone who's rational, if you're Black or if you're Latino, to support Trump. That seems to be the going explanation. It doesn't take into consideration that African Americans and Latinos are often religious, they're often moral conservatives who might not agree with the direction that the Democratic Party is going.

Why do you think the debate over whether Trump is a fascist has become so trenchant in the last couple of weeks or months? I mean, we've known who he is since 2015. He certainly ticks off a lot of the boxes, if you want. He's illiberal. He leads a mass emotional movement. He's a charismatic leader in his own way. His movement is very much rooted in blood and soil, a really bizarre fascination with masculine supremacy and power. I mean, check, check, check, check, check, check. But we've known this for years.

Well, I think during the 2022 midterm elections, there was the sense that this rhetoric actually helped the Democrats, that warning of the imminent demise of democracy was one of the reasons, maybe not the only one, that helped the Democrats. And I think what's happened now is that the fascism rhetoric kind of cooled off, especially after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, where numerous Republicans said that that rhetoric endangered Trump. There was a complete back-away. Then you have Biden stepping down, Harris replacing him, and the message became one of joy.

But when the recent generals came out, and said without a shadow of a doubt Trump is a fascist, and polls showed that Trump had caught up, and in certain instances, was ahead, depending on the poll, you had a strong return to — not just the normal people, the Rachel Maddows or whoever, but the president, the vice president herself — saying that he was a fascist. So I don't think it's by coincidence that, as the race has gotten tighter, that they are trying to use the playbook that they thought helped win the midterm election.

That's the best that I can make sense of it, because they totally distanced themselves [from it], upon her taking over the nomination from Biden, and now, over the last eight or nine days, I think it's been the strongest ever. It's now fully being accepted: “Donald Trump is an authoritarian, perhaps, fascist leader. There's no doubt.” I don't know anyone who's a liberal who doesn't think that.

So would you draw a distinction between Trump, who displays elements of fascistic leadership, but not necessarily the movement or the people voting for him? 

It's hard to know. We have to rely on history. There are books that would say that Hitler had willing executioners, that it was a culture that allowed for Hitler's rise, and that the culture itself and therefore the people themselves are in some sense culpable. Others would say no, he manipulated the people.

This is where it's hard to parse, because the last thing the Democratic Party wants to do is to tell swing voters that they're potentially fascist. What they're trying to say is that the candidate is fascist, therefore don't vote for him. This is why it's risky, because it seems to be suggesting that maybe the people themselves who are voting for him are fascist, or if they are even thinking about voting for him, they are knowingly and willingly voting for a monster. And that can be alienating, I think, to voters.

I just want to reiterate, there is a view that if you were a liberal or further left of that, if you don't call this fascist, you're somehow complicit, or you're somehow mitigating the real problem. And I think that's wrong.

I teach at a liberal arts school, everyone I know is terrified about what's happening. They do not want Donald Trump to be president of the United States. It's just how we go about managing to defeat him and the way that we do it, I think that is the issue. And as a historian who's trained in these areas, there's also a professional obligation. So I just want to make that point, that by not framing him this way, it does not at all mean that he is not a threat.

Things that are not fascist can also be dangerous.

Yeah, absolutely.