The claim that Donald Trump is a fascist was an essential feature of the Democratic Party’s electoral strategy in 2024. Despite its massive failure, the left continues to beat this dead horse and will no doubt continue. And while Trump has abundant negative qualities, being a fascist is not among them.
Seventy-six million voters knew the Democrats’ “fascist” narrative was nonsense, but it remains important to confront the assertion that Donald Trump and his followers are in a meaningful sense “fascists,” not simply because it is ahistorical and false, but more importantly, because this claim diminishes the real evil that fascism was. Those who call Trump and his followers fascists base their assertion on Trump’s populism, his nationalism, his apparent disregard for constitutional norms (especially with regard to the January 6 Capitol riot), his insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election, and his opposition to the left’s current positions on immigration and various cultural issues. These simply do not sum up to fascism. Fascism has a determinate meaning, because fascism is a real ideology advanced by political parties that once controlled governments.
So, what is fascism?
It is common to equate fascism with intense nationalism. Fascism was much more than nationalism, but nationalism was central to a fascist ideology which regarded the nation-state as the root and source of the individual’s essence. This is not simple patriotism. For fascists, the nation-state makes people what they are, so that people are fundamentally different on the basis of their national membership. The state establishes nations so that human beings, divided along national lines, have a state to organize them for antagonistic competition with other nations, which was a core idea, for example, of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Fascism glorified violence for the reason that violent conflict among states is seen as a natural and inevitable expression of the state’s power.
The idea of the nation-state as the source of the human essence distinguishes it sharply from conservatism and is part of what makes fascism a revolutionary ideology. For conservatives, culture, history, and local institutions make human beings what they are, and this kind of thought, exemplified by Edmund Burke, predates modern nationalism, which emerged in the nineteenth century in the wake of the French Revolution (which Burke critiqued so cogently). To define people by their nation, an ideological nationalism must break with parochial tradition and replace it with a new invention: the nation, given both form and substance by a national state. In this, fascism is revolutionary. It seeks to effect a social and political revolution to replace all that was with a new human being and society modeled on fascist ideology. Thus, it must destroy and replace all that has gone before, and this requires a total revolution and a total state. Burke had presciently observed this about the French Revolution, but fascism magnifies this revolutionary character dramatically.
But the state does not simply represent the nation for fascism. For fascism, the state creates and embodies the nation and is its heart and soul, because it is the state that creates a nation and gives life all its meaning and value. The state is everything for fascism, which is why fascism is a totalitarian ideology. The fascist state must penetrate and control every social institution and activity. Nothing is beyond its reach in principle, and the state seeks with all its might to ensure that nothing is beyond its reach in fact. The state’s absolute authority is concentrated in fascism’s leadership principle; the fascist state must be led by a dictator who rules with unquestioned authority. This authority is articulated through propaganda and enforced through terror, the twin political weapons of the totalitarian state. Its pervasive propaganda defines reality for its subjects, and its terror seeks to ensure through deadly violence that no unapproved thought may be held or expressed.
Fascism’s totalitarianism is reflected in its economic ideas. For fascism, property may be possessed and even legally owned by individuals and business organizations, but there is no question that the true equitable ownership of property lies in the state. The state, as the source of all value and authority, is inherently justified in appropriating, using, and directing the employment of material and human resources as it wills. Property is not a buffer limiting the state’s power but instead a means of wielding that power.
Fascist ideology is evil because it declares the human essence to be defined by an abstraction—the nation-state—and thus deracinates us from all that makes us truly human. What makes us truly human is the development of our capacities in the web of relationships that are personal and local in character, such as family, community, church, and other associations that cannot arise or be replicated at the national level or be directed by the state. These are deeper than those that identify national groups, such as language, and replacing them with a national state and abstract ideology uproots the person from most of the wellspring of their humanity. Fascism seeks to dominate and control these to incorporate them into the total state and its absolute rule by one individual who is conceived as the personal incarnation of all of these and more, including culture, history, and meaning in its broadest sense.
In these ideas, and in its glorification of violence and insistence on the necessary antagonism of different national groups, fascism is indeed evil, for it seeks to destroy utterly all that makes peaceful cooperation among human beings possible and regards the individual human being as nothing more than an insignificant bit of a vast and brutal collectivist machine.
To reduce fascism to policies Democrats disagree with is a rhetorical device that party has used to mobilize their electoral base for decades. They even accused Mitt Romney of being a fascist for the same reason. Republicans calling Democrats “communists” is the same kind of behavior. Most American voters have no idea what fascism was, but they know that it was bad, so now the left calls everything it considers bad “fascism.” This would be worth ignoring as babble characteristic of our nescient “democracy,” but unfortunately it must be confronted because it diminishes the real evil that fascism was in the twentieth century. The evil actions committed by the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy are widely appreciated, but the evil of fascist ideology is not precisely because the term has been so abused. By reading this brief essay, you now know more than virtually all Americans about what fascists believed, which is why the term “fascist” has been so regularly misused in our conceptually deficient politics.
Donald Trump does not have an ideology. His approach to politics is to say what he believes his supporters want to hear and to do much less than he tells them he will do; i.e., build the wall that Mexico was going to pay for. His statements reflect nothing like the fascist’s essentially religious conception of the nation-state. As to totalitarianism, Americans today do not even to begin to comprehend what this intense level of political direction of their lives would mean, and Trump represents nothing of the sort. His party certainly fails to acknowledge fascism’s leader principle, as it has already rejected his nomination for Attorney General.
As for violence, real fascists used paramilitary units to eliminate their adversaries on the left and employed mass street fighting to intimidate and kill the political opposition. Once in power, the level of violence that fascists employed in both Germany and Italy was, as is well-known, breathtaking. To liken the January 6 Capitol riot, outrageous as it was, to the kind and magnitude of violence that real fascist parties employed from the 1920s to the 1940s is indefensible. As for Trump’s claims about winning the 2020 presidential election, note that if lying makes a politician a fascist, then there are plenty of fascist politicians in both major parties, because mendacity is a common tool of the politician’s trade, including their claims about election results. As for cultural and immigration issues, Democratic elites in recent years, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, publicly expressed views on cultural issues that would destroy a political career today, and Obama’s administration had a more aggressive deportation program than Trump, all of which is conveniently forgotten now. None of this makes any of them fascists, including Trump. It is more intellectually honest to explain specifically what Trump’s defects as a leader and person are than it is to use the term “fascist” as a heuristic, shorthand term where it really does not apply. We can object and criticize without emptying concepts and history of their real meaning, because we lose too much knowledge by doing so.
Fascism was and is evil, so much so that its meaning is worth remembering. For this reason, we should reject categorically the efforts of those who brand as “fascist” all that is anathema to them. The frequent and prominent misuse of the term “fascism” reflects a pernicious ignorance that we must correct so that political elites, the media, and academe fail to rewrite the history of fascism as they have rewritten the history of so much else.
