We Don't Need Hitler in Order to Explain Trump

with Daniel Bessner

Tarring conservatives with the fascist brush has a long history on the left. Since the early twentieth century, factions of the left have attempted to demonstrate that American conservatism and European fascism have natural affinities. Occasionally, in specific cases, like that of Montana congressman Jacob Thorkelson, the description has been apt—Thorkelson was a blatant antisemite and Nazi sympathizer. The slur has a way of getting under conservatives’ skin. Famously, Gore Vidal caused William F. Buckley to lose his cool by calling him a “crypto-Nazi” in a televised 1968 debate—Buckley replied by hurling a homophobic epithet at Vidal and threatening to punch him in the face. Unlike fascism itself, the label has managed to endure. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden tried rolling it out last year out in a dubious last-ditch effort to defeat Trump.

To be fair, conservatives can be guilty of the same thing, though their ideological slur of choice is usually “communist” or “Marxist,” no matter their target’s politics. There are some lefties who would describe themselves with those terms, of course. But I leave it to the political philosophers to determine whether a progressive tax policy amounts to communism.

There is, however, a more serious ongoing debate among academics about whether Trump’s policies are accurately described as fascist in nature. Is Trump best described as an early-twentieth-century-style fascist? Or is that ahistorical alarmism dressed up in scholarly robes? The historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins provides a useful primer on who thinks what, or at least who thought what as of a year ago. Some of the “yes, he’s a fascist” crowd seem to be taking their own words more seriously than Harris and Biden took theirs. Philosopher Jason Stanley and historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore have left Yale for the University of Toronto, all of them citing Trump’s actions against universities as one of the reasons for the departure.

On this week’s show, I brought in one of the most prominent “no, he’s not a fascist” historians to get his side of the argument. Daniel Bessner argues that the historical conditions that gave rise to European fascism are so different from our own that it makes little sense to apply the term to the Trump administration. Not that he’s any fan of Trump. Rather, Danny points to America’s own history of authoritarianism and opposition to immigration as Trump’s true political lineage.

While I’m more of an immigration skeptic than Danny, some of the examples he cites in this conversation and his Jacobin essay “This Is America” are chilling. I had not known about the mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s—many or even most of those “repatriated” were American citizens. Trump has promised even broader sweeps of illegal immigrants, and it’s hard to imagine that would be possible without deporting, or at least severely inconveniencing, people who are here legally.

I am all for strong borders. A migrant who evades the legal immigration process has no inherent right to be here, especially not while others go through daunting, time-consuming, and costly legal immigration routes. Sometimes enforcing our policies means arresting and deporting people who have crossed illegally. It’s not pretty, but affirming that it’s legal and proper doesn’t make me a fascist or an authoritarian.

What worries me is the prospect of a reasonable strong-borders position getting sucked under a wave of wholesale anti-immigrant politics, one that demonizes immigrants and weaponizes immigration policies to suppress political speech. Immigration enforcement should be just that: the enforcement of our laws, not a cover story used to justify measures that, in truth, have nothing to do with immigration. In that sense, concerns about authoritarianism seem, if not reason for panic, then certainly worth taking seriously. I don’t think we should let our most egregious failures as a nation—deporting citizens, interning Japanese residents and Japanese American citizens during World War II, persecuting people for their beliefs, and so on—define us. But we must remain vigilant, lest we repeat past mistakes.

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GLENN LOURY: Now, the reason I called you up and said we should talk is I saw your piece in Jacobin about Trump being a fascist and you taking the surprising view, in my initial perception, that no, that was a mistaken application of the category, and it misses the point. I don't mean to speak for you, but the point being Trump is an American authoritarian, and there's a looooong tradition of that.

DANIEL BESSNER: There's a long, proud history of that.

You don't need Hitler to explain this motherfucker.

No. And actually, Glenn, you've probably heard of this book, Hitler's American Model by James Whitman. Have you heard of this book?

I've heard of it. I haven't read it.

I don't think it's his fault whatsoever. I think it is a very carefully argued book. But there's been this strange turn amongst liberals and leftists who essentially explain Hitler and the Holocaust through US history, which I find to be an incredible perversion of the history of Nazism and the Holocaust that actually degrades the victims of the Holocaust.

So I think this fascist application is inappropriate to describe Trump and Trumpism for several reasons. If you want, we could talk about them or we could go in a different direction.

I wanna talk about that.

Sure. Briefly, the historical contexts between the 2010s and 2020s United States are just vastly different from the historical context that gave rise to Italian fascism and Nazism in 1920s and 1930s Europe. We were not in the wake of a world-ending war, the ending of governments—the Kaiser's government and the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary—a mass war in which hundreds of thousands of people experience combat, come home with literal combat experience. Very different. Whatever economic travails that we've had do not relate to the hyperinflation experience in somewhere like postwar Germany.

We don't have gangs of violent young men with combat experience roaming the streets attached to political organizations that just think any form of democracy is politically illegitimate. We don't have a state that is, in terms of the evolution of literal state institutions, relatively immature and is able to be taken over by an outside political organization like the Italian fascists or the Nazis.

We don't have a powerful left in this country. Sorry to say, listeners, we don't have a communist party, let alone a social democratic party that actually rules in Germany. The Social Democrats were actually part of various Weimar coalitions over the course of the 1920s, necessitating an alliance between capital and extraordinarily far-right ideologies that occurred in Nazi Germany. So the context is just incredibly different. I think that's the major reason.

Beyond that, the question is, why is fascism used? And we could get into that. To my mind, when liberalism became hegemonic in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century and you got the creation of the American political spectrum—which wasn't used in this country until the 1930s, but really not until the 1940s—one of the liberal arguments in favor of its hegemony was that it had defeated fascism on the right, communism on the left, and it defined itself as the moderate center.

I think this is actually one of the major claims amongst the Democratic Party and American liberals to governance. Their legitimacy rests on the defeat of fascism, which is why I think it was really embraced during the Trump era because I think ultimately Trump is, to some degree, a reflection of the rise of the far right.

But I think, going back to this post-Cold War era, he's ultimately a reflection of the fact that in this moment of liberal hegemony, liberals weren't able to create the type of “technocratic utopia” that Fukuyama was himself a bit ambivalent about. It has failed to solve a lot of the social problems that were supposed to be solved in the wake of the Cold War. So that's why I think the appellation was applied to Trump by so many people. Even Kamala Harris, in the last couple of weeks of her campaign, to the point where I think it was Vox, maybe it was the Times, who described it as her campaign's closing argument, that Trump was a fascist and that you couldn't do that. And so that's why I believe that it was adopted.

There's also psychological reasons. People wanna believe that they're part of this grand resistance in a moment when, as we talked about earlier, there's less and less ability for ordinary people to affect politics. Imagining yourself as a French resistor is probably psychologically appealing. And there's other reasons.

You're talking about the liberals. But what about what Trump was actually for? What about his denial of having lost the 2020 election? What about his anti-immigration crusade? What about his subverting legal institutions by taking out revenge on his enemies? Why isn't that proto-fascistic? What about the Proud Boys and this kind of stuff?

Oath Keepers.

Yeah.

Everyone loves referencing the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Fascism also provides a type of othering function. You're referring to an ideology from Europe that arose, I believe, from a particularly European context to explain what's going on in the United States. And it ironically winds up othering Trump, presenting him as an aberration to a lot of things that have a very deep history in the United States.

Go back to the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution. You could describe that as proto-fascistic. You could just describe that as American.

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Wait a minute, let me stop you for a minute. Because I'm a descendant of slaves. But I thought that was meant to limit the influence of the slave-holding states in the new government. By doing the census and not counting the enslaved people a hundred percent, they ended up with less congressional representation. It would've been better had they not counted the slaves at all, since the slaves didn't have a vote for representation in the federal government.

That's why it's the three-fifths compromise. This is one of the major issues of the constitutional convention.

The nature of the compromise is that the anti-slavery people would've wanted it to be zero, and yet it's invoked as if it discredits the anti-slavery people for standing up a government in which blacks weren't counted as a hundred percent. That just doesn't make sense to me.

This is the dialectic of enlightenment. There's the good parts of America, too, right? You could read the three-fifths compromise as partially liberatory. Personally, I think it's a bit hard, just because it's so dehumanizing and really reflective of anti-enlightenment. These were people who are claiming to be enlightenment philosophes. That's not humanistic.

But I see the arguments where one could come from, that it could have been worse, which is essentially the liberal argument. “It could have been worse, so go with us.” To me, it really is fundamentally anti-enlightenment, so it's hard for me to read it through a more sanguine lens. But I take the point that it wasn't zero.

But anyway, you were in the process of describing ...

The Indian Removal Act of 1830, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, red-lining, the incarceration of Japanese civilians, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late eighteenth century, the Alien Enemies Act, the late-World War I Sedition Act, which allowed for the arrests and deportation of someone like Emma Goldman, the Internal Security Act of the early '50s, the Registration Act of 1940, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which allowed for the arrest and sometimes deportation of communists.

You have between 1929 and 1936, the “repatriation” of Mexicans, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, 60% of whom were [citizens].

I didn't know about that until I read it in your piece, and then I went and did a little bit of research. That's mind-boggling. They were citizens!

Citizens, Glenn. They just threw them across the border.

Then you have in the 1970s and beyond these street sweeps, which—surprise, surprise—oftentimes entangled citizens and legal residents. Quite a bit. So again, Trump is authoritarian. I genuinely think that, particularly in the second term. I think that he's trying authoritarian moves based—here's another one—on the unitary executive theory advanced during the George W. Bush administration. There's a legal argument that he's making for his authoritarianism, which is that, when it comes to the executive branch, the executive has the right to determine what Congress means and what the judiciary means in its orders. That's a theory that first became popular in the George W. Bush administration, and then was embraced by right-wing legal jurists.

This is all to say that you don't need fascism or the framework of fascism to understand trump, and I would actually say the framework of fascism winds up othering Trump and will prevent us from actually preventing the rise of another authoritarian president, because ultimately I think the problem is not in fascism. The problem is in the American presidency, which has just become incredibly powerful, the equivalent, to my mind, of an elected monarch, which is not what the founders intended.

Look at Obama's kill list. Look at the killing of American citizens without due process. It's a problematic institution. Because I think what the history of modernity suggests is that power centralizes in the executive, which, if you're writing the Constitution in the 1780s, you might not be able to predict. I was listening to a friend of mine, Azia Rana, a law professor at Boston College. The big fear at the time was actually the legislature becoming too powerful, based, I think, on the English experience.

But it turns out the president tends to centralize. Calling it fascist does not highlight the problems of the American presidency or the structure of the American constitutional system, which I think is actually the cause of Trump.

So people are talking about a looming constitutional crisis, 'cause they're afraid a federal court is going to issue an edict that Trump openly defies. But it sounds like you're saying the constitutional crisis runs much deeper than that.

At the very least, it's been happening since the '40s. It is so blatant in the area of war, that Congress hasn't declared war since 1942. That is a constitutional crisis, by any stretch of the imagination. What's happening, what often happens, I'm sure you've heard about the boomerang effect or blowback, whatever you wanna call it. This is why John Quincy Adams gave his famous, I think it was July 4th, 1821, speech about “We go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” He was worried about empire coming home.

You talk about policing. Glenn, you're partially a scholar of police and incarceration. All those police are using war on terror gear. That's a literal, physical example of the empire coming home. And I think what we're seeing with Trump is that the imperial management abroad, which has always been a Schmittian state of exception is now coming home to the United States.

That's Carl Schmitt.

Yes, it's Carl Schmitt. And I should add, it's not just Carl Schmitt. This was a major strand of thought in 1920s Weimar. You have a left-wing member of the Frankfurt School, Otto Kirchheimer, also talking about this state of exception as necessary for governance.

And so Schmitt just did it short. The Concept of the Political is a short book, and I think if you wanna be remembered in history, write short and simply and clearly. I don't think you need to refer necessarily to a jurist who became part of the Nazi legal establishment for a time to make this argument. This was a common argument. Basically the notion is that governments need to arrogate to themselves a state of exception in order to govern. And I think that state of exception is now coming home.

There's a long and proud anti-imperial tradition in the United States, which was conservative until the Cold War, until William Buckley said we actually have to get onboard with the Cold War if we want to have a movement. Conservative skepticism of imperial management for the very reasons that we're worried about, basically centralization of power in the executive.

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