by Alexander Reid Ross
The Debate
With The Atlantic’s latest foray into the fascism debate, a whole deluge of discourse spilled out over the social medias about what to do with its changing contours. On one hand, there are “late-comers” who now believe that it’s adequate to call the Trump administration “fascist” by definition. On the other hand, there are those who have warned about Trumpist fascism since 2015 (achem, achem). Lastly, there are those who continue to cast doubt on the label’s use. This essay will attempt to clarify important elements of the debate that have yet to be explicated, thus outlining greater context and potential developments—i.e., “where do we go from here?”
In the “late-comer” camp, I include thinkers like Yale’s Sam Moyn, Brooklyn College’s Corey Robin, and more recently, Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic. This article is not intended as a recapitulation of the violence and discord of the lacerating “Fascism Debate” over the last ten years. Sufficient to say that, in the months after the 2020 election, Robin declared Trump “almost the complete opposite of fascism,” and Moyn wrote an article for The Nation titled, “Allegations of Fascism Distract From the Real Danger.” When Moyn was declaring allegations of fascism a “distraction,” he openly confessed, “my reluctance was and is rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of the likely political consequences of certain framings.” Honestly, that feels bad to me.
They have since changed their minds, with Moyn declaring during the 2024 campus protests, “Okay, maybe there is U.S. fascism,” and Robin stating that he had been “shaken out of my skepticism.” Asked by Arash Azizi if “everybody who warned about fascism actually had a point,” Moyn responded with an Orwell quote, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” Rauch wrote the exact same thing: “when the facts change, I change my mind.”
To be fair, I don’t think Rauch belongs in the same grouping. Rauch bucketed Trump in the patrimonial category, which I have also put forward based on my read of Max Weber’s categories presented in his Political Writings. Nothing about patrimonialism prevented me from setting my own terms outlining the fascism within the Trump coalition in 2015-2016. Rausch followed Biden’s description of Trump’s administration as “quasi-fascist,” which is obviously not even necessarily wrong. He’s now describing the administration as “fascist,” tout court, which I think is also not necessarily wrong. I think there are aspects of both engaging in “mimetic rivalry” (to use René Girard’s term) within his administration.
The academics who Moyn, Robin, and others argued against included prestigious scholars involved in a special series by the New Republic called “What American Fascism Would Look Like” in 2024, which feels eerily prescient today. (Moyn called their work a “symptom of inability to imagine and therefore promise a better future.”) These include Jason Stanley, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Brian Stelter, and Federico Finchelstein; I think I would include also scholars like Cynthia Miller-Idriss, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, and Richard Steigmann-Gall. That’s a prestigious group, and of course I am not leaving out Robert O. Paxton, who changed his mind after January 6, 2021, saying that fascism was a potentially useful descriptor. To my knowledge, the academics who continue to insist that Trump administration isn’t fascist include prominent scholars like Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, and Bruce Kuklick.
I actually liked the way that Paxton did it: setting terms for discourse by disinhibiting a given categorization. Paxton didn’t pronounce, “ah ha, it’s fascism now!” He said that January 6 “removed his objection to the fascist label.” Technically, Paxton was kind of a mid-late comer, having argued against the fascism label in a 2017 Harpers article, but whatever. This helps with the implications of the discursive shift, because I’ve always felt like we need to accommodate a broad discursive field rather than try to hush up those who don’t agree with us on the level of categories, definitions, and what have you. At the same time, I’ll put forward my own position on things, which hasn’t really changed for more than a decade now, perhaps because it requires a fair amount of intellectual flexibility.
My Own Contributions
To provide an account of myself, I like to think the list also considers people like myself, who are relative non-entities but have a fairly good track record in making predictions. In 2015, I published an article called “Trump the Fascist,” analyzing a stump speech by Trump on the campaign trail in Alabama. The double entendre was intended to encourage people to overcome “the fascist in their heads,” to immediately organize to resist fascism as it appeared across society and not merely in the Trump coalition. That was probably too buried for anyone to get it, though. Following that piece, I wrote a series called “Trumpism,” which was turned into a zine in 2016. Taken together, those two texts attempted to show that Trump’s mass movement was developing a remarkable coalition of radical and extremist actors who certainly included fascists in its hegemonic equation. As respected scholars like Matthew Lyons criticized me for throwing around the word “fascist,” I broke down my argument into its basic components: Trump had compiled the pieces required for fascism, I argued, but he had not assembled them fully into place yet. In short, you cannot expect fascism to break out, fully formed, doing Nuremberg rallies during its formative stages. What we saw on the social level from 2015-2020 was the growth and development of a violent shirt movement (Proud Boys), a loyal, pro-government paramilitary force (militias including but not limited to the Oath Keepers), a leader cult (QAnon), and a haze of general disinformation.
My book Against the Fascist Creep was published in early 2017, making it, I think, the first text published on the rise of American fascism in the Trump era. I basically made this argument—you can’t trust a coalition with fascists in prominent positions and no clear ideological resistance to fascist ideology, because fascism has a tendency to infiltrate and take over movements from within. Well, going back to my earlier usage of the word “equation,” I think coalition politics work as a kind of formula, with demographics and ideological commitments functioning in a matrixial space wherein coefficients, or weights, interact with one another. Within this dynamic matrixial space of coalitional politics, ideas, symbols, and constituent groups gain or lose hegemony, and that hegemonic rivalry determines the agenda of the coalition. Maybe think of a graph with different lines representing the strength of different tendencies within the coalition. Washington Post has six factions: MAGA populists, small-government conservatives, traditional Republicans, Christian fundamentalists, the tech right, and “MAHA and other converted Democrats.” So let’s think of how they share power or compete with one another over time, assessing the shifting dynamics of their ascent or descent in rankings.
If I’m not making sense at this point, it might be because even I feel like I’m making up words, but basically I’m just saying that the external power of a coalition comprises diverse coalition partners who each hold differing degrees of power internal to the coalition. And these internal power dynamics are interdependent and inter-relational, such that power increases or decreases in relation to the other members. They also often engage in external network development outside of the coalition in order to gain advantage (e.g., finding international support from Russia or networks of Christian fundamentalists) Hegemony here is simply my word for the “weights” or relative internal power of discrete coalition members as partners in a kind of polynomial index (and sure, that’s a simplification or a discretization or whatever, because harping on the continuity of subjectivities and the ways that rivalry engages in mimetic struggle and change is a bit trifling in this context). Internal thresholds within these coalitions are always being renegotiated, conquered, pushed back, due to changes in constituent feelings about policy impacts, causing new changes, and feeding back into the coalition’s hegemonic formulations. We can follow fascists engaging in this coalition—it stands to reason that the “Roman saluters” of the tech right and the MAGA populist wings are more clearly fascist, but also not totally representative of their factions, per se. And from 30,000 feet we can assess the totality of the coalition, appreciating the rough synthesis of forces, and assess the level of fascism in general. For instance, one might argue that the increase of hegemony of traditional Republicans would lead to the decrease in hegemony of other forces, potentially causing overall fascism to decrease, all things being equal.
So when I said that Trump’s coalition had fascism in it like we had never seen since America First in the early 1940s, and when I said that he had the pieces necessary to assemble fascism but hadn’t done it yet, I was also doing that in light of what I called the “fascist creep.” If you remember my book from 9 years ago, that’s likely because of the badass cover created by the fabulous artist NO Bonzo. Most of what I wrote came out of long hours spent in my bedroom with lots of coffee and a constant stream of “WhaaaaaAAaaah?” as I pawed through volumes of mind blowing research created by scholars who have done far more agonizing and intricate work than myself. My main takeaway was that we had to understand fascism as a process rather than a fixed, turnkey-style ideology, and that meant trying to hit a moving target with the Trump administration. I defined the “fascist creep” as a kind of strategic tendency: “(1) it draws left-wing notions of solidarity and liberation into ultranationalist, right-wing ideology; and (2), at least in its early stages, fascists often utilize ‘broad front’ strategies, proposing a mass-based, nationalist platform to gain access to mainstream political audiences and key administrative positions.” My book was attempting to show that, while fascism typically originated as a force of extra-parliamentary, counter-revolutionary reaction, it tended to enter politics as a coalition partner with nationalist parties, using these partners as stepping stones toward aggressively but methodically accruing power. This was a warning as much to the mainstream right as to the radical left that adding fascists to any type of anti-establishment, illiberal movement was going to bring about their destruction and the rise of fascism. Returning to the “equation,” the “weights” of fascism, once they are afforded coalitional credibility, will rise as they thrash their coalition partners and degrade the coalition as a whole in favor of their own totalitarian ends.
Complexity
Here we encounter an important place for diremption, or teasing out of opposing qualities. Do we consider the fascists within Trump’s coalition discrete, separate entities or do we consider them linked to ideas that also vie for hegemony in a broader kind of intellectual matrix? I am inclined to think that we ought to consider them both together, and once that matrix emerges with solid fascist concepts and ideas, we can see how the fascist individuals and groups begin to develop and define different and competing ideas within it. So, fascism can take over a coalition without its members gaining a lot of ground in terms of offices and positions, simply by having its ideas adopted more broadly by those who are in power. In such cases, we can examine the terrific book by Pinto and Costa about hybridization and fascist politics during the inter-war period. Here, we see authoritarian governments like those of Metaxas or Piłsudski, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Vargas, or even Dollfuss adopting a lot of the fascist trappings without cutting the chord of continuity and fully installing the “New Order.” On the other hand, we find the bottom-up movements that are often suppressed by such governments—think, perhaps, of the Brazilian or Portuguese models of Integralist and national syndicalist movements. Others to think about, perhaps, are the fascist-adjacent movements like the Rexists and other assorted monarchist groups such as Action Française, who would later find themselves compromised over the Nazi invasion of France. In short, political coalitions and social movements are complex and adaptive, labile and even volatile, and we must study them as such.
The question of whether Trump is a fascist is different from whether the Republican Party is fascist and whether the executive branch is fascist and whether the whole government is fascist. Those are all different questions. Just saying, “It’s fascism,” doesn’t offer a whole lot of clarity. Things are very difficult, fascists are always creating tension, shying away from “showing their power level,” and this has been clear from the beginning. It opens a lot of important strategic concerns that I am, albeit indirectly, also contending with in this essay. Looking at the independent judiciary and the persistence of civil society, we have to consider complexity and hybridization in greater detail.
When we analyze these hybridizations, the issue of hegemony within coalitions becomes more useful. Some Belgian Rexists, for instance, became increasingly fascist until they were basically synonymous with Hitler’s most extreme supporters. Francoism included a whole fascist faction and adopted a lot of their positions (autarky and “the Caudillo and the Fuhrer” side by side), but their influence decreased over time. As mentioned earlier, the monarchists of Action Française experienced splits over fascism after embracing it, and the original Faisceau turned violently against the Nazis. So you have these organizations and hybrid regimes that can include fascism or become partially “fascistized” without actually transforming; they can become increasingly fascist or decrease their interest in fascism based on endogenous or exogenous stimuli; they have agency and align with whomever based on a combination of interests, ideology, and affinity, etc. It’s helpful to think of the New Right and Trumpism in this regard as well, because proving their policies deleterious to the national interest can help “defascistize” those who might have been somewhat convinced of their potential efficacy in the past.
If we think about this further, it can offer some hope. Are we in a place to defascistize the Trump coalition? I can’t say definitively yes or no, but I do think we can do whatever we can to try. I mean this not as ultimately reaching true believers but by eroding the base of support that seems to have locked into stuff like economic protectionism or immigration enforcement. These have not been effective at all, and it’s worth while to expose that. If we say, “no, the Trump coalition is turnkey fascism at this point and people who support Trump are fascists,” we make the same mistake people made in 2016 when they said, “we can only confirm the fascism theory if the turnkey attributes are all already in place.” Fascism is not today a finished phenomenon, and perhaps it’s never a fully finished phenomenon; it’s more of a movement. This means we can intercede, break up the fascist tendencies to crush dissent and disintegrate a pluralist political society, and work both electorally and within civil society to protect our rights and make real progress toward liberty and equality, meaning affordability, socio-ecological innovation, and so forth.
Fascism and the Clarifying Contours of Trumpism
I’m not trying to rewrite the same essay on the history of America First that everyone’s read a thousand times at this point. I’m leading up to the problem that fascism involves specific ideas and qualities, which continue to persist and have only grown within the Trump coalition. My definition of fascism from 2017, which I still think fits the bill, by and large, is that “fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual palingenesis (‘rebirth’) of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and cultural tradition.” I put ultranationalist in bold type there, because I think it’s really a fundamental thing that often gets lost when name calling comes about. However, seeing the organic food loving “crunchies” like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard alongside the neoreactionary, techno-futurist influences is demonstrative of the general ideological coalition I’m talking about. It’s syncretic; it carries many contradictory aspects. We’ve definitely seen “palingenetic ultranationalism” (per Griffin’s “new consensus”) in the most important media of the New Right, including open calls for “palingenetic” conquest of Greenland and weird Caesarism advocacy. But the question remains: “What’s different?”
In fact, I think that there are a number of issues that are qualitatively different in this Trump administration that makes it definitely “more fascist” than the previous one. For that reason, I think people who are “changing their minds” are completely welcome to. I’m not one to say, “you were wrong, so f*ck you!” I’m wrong a lot, and I make mistakes. As I was saying in 2017, the pieces are all there, but it’s still “assembly required.” If you go back and read those Michael Wolff books, they share the same narrative of a kind of madman being held back by institutionalists within the administration who, from 2018 on, were weeded out until we were all left at Four Seasons Landscaping and January 6. That seems to me a lucid enough story about the way that Trump may not have completely assembled the components of fascism by the time he was out of office, but he did disassemble the ballasts within the Republican Party that guarded against doing so. He attempted to assemble the pieces into a coherent, authoritarian regime, but was prevented from doing so. What I called the “putsch” of January 6 was, to my mind, certainly a top-down effort to overthrow the US government, which failed likely due to the opposition of the National Association of Manufacturers and the fidelity of law enforcement to the constitutional republic. (Although, perhaps, even if it had succeeded, it would have ultimately failed to maintain power due to popular resistance.)
From the beginning of Trump 2, we have seen the assembly process at work. I think there are qualitatively important steps that tick the protectionist, expansionist, and isolationist boxes, yes. The attack on Venezuela, the pressure on Canada, the tension with NATO over Greenland, and the threats against Mexico—these fit an obvious expansionist ethos that thankfully remains unpopular. Isolationism is a clear aspect of Trumpism 2, as he berates our allies and absolutely opposes the internationalist vision of the US as a force for freedom and equality in the world. (Even the Venezuela intervention was pitched as an oil shakedown, causing one Blueskyer to comment ironically, “I do not feel properly lied to.”) And of course, Protectionism comes up as the president applies draconian tariffs in what I interpret as an extra-constitutional fashion. Well, I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that all of these things have been practiced by the US before, and were baseline features of the Old Right from McKinley to Robert Taft.
There actually isn’t necessarily anything exclusively fascist about any of that; in fact, I don’t think that Lawrence Dennis, the old “dean of American fascism,” would have approved. At the same time, the New Right’s obsession with the Gilded Age (which was supposed to have been the “Golden Age” in the grand style) does bear a whiff of palingenesis, for which Trump’s architectural flare for the neo-classical offers an intimation, apropos endless references to Greco-Roman antiquity. And before people start getting frustrated about how Golden Ages and neo-classical art doesn’t add up to fascism, I am well aware of that and not trying to make an argument by insinuation. These things add up to frame what follows.
Dual State
There are some things that Trump is doing that go above and beyond the politics of the Old Right or even Cold War interventionism, actually checking fascism boxes, and I think they mostly settle around the forging of the “dual state.” This is a concept developed by Ernst Fraenkel and popularized more recently by Jens Meierhenrich. It’s really an elegant theory, and Meierhenrich preserves its basis very delicately. It breaks down to the coexistence of two simultaneous and overlapping juridical states: the “normative state” that feels continuous from the prior regime and applies a law everyone has to follow, and the “prerogative state” that the elites enjoy, which can intervene and discontinue the normative state at any point for whatever reason. Fraenkel developed the theory while working as a jurist in Nazi Germany for as long as he could before being forced into exile due to his Jewish descent. His primary interest was Carl Schmitt, the “Nazi crown jurist” who developed the concept of the “state of exception” ably commented on by Giorgio Agamben, among others. From 2020-2024, the New Right reconstructed itself out of the detritus of the first Trump administration, and one of the fundamental pillars of this reconstruction was the reintroduction of Carl Schmitt into America juridical theory.
So, when we see JD Vance saying that ICE agents were “protected by absolute immunity,” we see the prerogative state at work. Vance later denied having said this in a provably false statement, but that’s okay, because making provably false claims is another part of the prerogative state, totally untethered as it is from facts and norms. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. The hefty stacks of judicial judgments against the Trump administration groans under phrases like:
- “an unconstitutional conspiracy”
- “lacks the constitutional authority to unilaterally change federal election laws”
- “unlawful attempt to reorganize the federal government”
- “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this […] The Constitution will not permit that. […] Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
- “we are confronted again with the efforts of the executive branch to set aside the rule of law in pursuit of its goals”
Those are direct quotes from judges ruling against Trump’s administration, some liberal and some conservative. Boasberg famously likened Trump’s immigration crackdown to a Kafka novel. Clearly, the Trump administration is attempting to consolidate power for the leader, and the judiciary has heroically attempted to fend off the unconstitutional prerogative state that he’s setting up. There’s the issue that the continuation of a normative state, as seen above, is actually a part of a fascist state. However in the fascist state, the normative state has no authority over the prerogative one, and can directly challenge it only in extraordinary conditions.
Trump has been able to get this far with the supine behavior of the legislature, because voters handed a trifecta to the Republican Party. Even Steve Bannon has admitted this much, supposedly comparing the Republican-led legislature to the largely-ceremonial Russian Duma under Putin. His administration does not include people who obstruct his agenda any more, and the legislature is in his pocket; at this point the executive branch is being held back solely by the judiciary, public opinion, and progressive social movements. Sure seems like Trump wants authoritarian, even dictatorial, powers to restore his mythical idea of the “Golden Age” grounded in white, male supremacist “tradition” with the dreams of a techno-futurist oligarchy. Well, what can one say at this point without sounding like a child in the back of a car growing increasingly impatient about the long drive: “Is it fascism yet?”
Conclusion
I think the wrong point to make at this conjuncture is that “It was fascism all along, and everyone who didn’t believe it was stupid.” I think the other wrong point to continue making is, “Calling it fascism has been crying wolf, and arguably a bigger problem than Trump, himself!” Again, fascism is a creeping process that takes hold over time. If the whole point that academics wanted to establish in 2017 was that it wasn’t fascism, perhaps they ought all to have appended the word, “yet.” Similarly, in 2022, the academics who saw their reputation vindicated and announced, “you see, it wasn’t fascism!” might have recognized that it had not been allowed to attain that level of authoritarian power. The point is still, in my opinion, that fascism has not won.
We can go back to Putin for our conclusion, because the case is very similar. Even after 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine, experts continued to hammer away at the fact that the Putin regime maintained some elements of liberalism in civil society. The administration allowed a diversity of opinions on several matters of importance, and intervened technically, indirectly, using fronts, prestige, and economic incentives to garner public support. This was not fascism, but perhaps it was authoritarian conservatism—a kind of para-fascism. Well, yes, and if you look now at Russia, it is a totalitarian state using social media to box in any anti-authoritarian sentiment while threatening people with years in penal colonies for publicly opposing the government. Some thinkers, like M. Gessen, saw this coming, blaming Russian society for a kind of bottom-up totalitarianism, but again, we’re talking about hitting a moving target here, making predictions about what will happen in a country given its present trajectory.
The Trump administration is a composite of coalitional forces that, last week, looked more fascist than it does this week. That’s the enormous complexity of the situation—one we shouldn’t take lightly, due to our agency in pushing back against the fascist creep. If civic opposition does not persist, Trump can do whatever he wants, and what he wants is clearer now than ever (“sometimes you need a dictator”). Whereas the Old Right sought to forward their protectionist and isolationist agenda through normal institutions, and got pretty far doing so until FDR, the New Right has decided that it can discard those institutions completely and establish the prerogative state, which is more arbitrary and even informal. Think of his recent tone-shift around Minneapolis; his administration went from accusing Good and Pretti of being terrorists to Trump saying that he feels “terrible.” And that takes us back to my admittedly-clumsy double meaning “Trump the Fascist”—Trump is more a litmus test for the people of the US than anything else. What’s holding fascism back in the US—the only thing that has ever held fascism back in the US—is its people. Not the institutions or specific individuals, but a proud people who have refused thus far to accept bottom-up totalitarianism and who continue to defend their constitutional rights. Hopefully when historians look back at this period and try to answer the question, “Did the US have a fascist government?” the answer will be, “yes and no—it was never allowed to fully form, because the people defeated its core mission.”
That might feel deflating for some folks, because triumphing over fascism is a heroic thing. Having a fascist government is humiliating, though. I guess both are irrelevant, because we need to be empirical about things. I respect those who say it’s fascism now, and I appreciate those fighting to prevent it from becoming that. We still have an independent judiciary. We still have a civil society. There is fascism looming, but we cannot accept it. That doesn’t mean “go into denial,” it means we must, as antifascists, create spaces of democracy wherever we can, turn fascism inside out, and live our lives like we actually have a lot to lose in November. We have the power to stop the assemblage of a fascist state.
Alexander Reid Ross 