With Trump gone, can we talk about the fear of fascism we had about him?
AMarch on Rome it was not. The “Million Maga March” attracted an estimated 5-10,000 people, far less than the roughly 30,000 fascists that marched from Naples to Rome in 1922, and it came nowhere near the “million” it had promised – despite the usual number-boosting from Trumpists. While Mussolini was able to use his march to grab power, this march will not help Trump cling on to power. In fact, Trump was so invested in the march, that his convoy sped past the protesters so that Trump could spend another day at his golf club in Virginia.
The Million Maga March is a good reminder of how problematic comparisons with historical fascism are. As soon as Trump became a serious contender for the US presidency, in early 2016, articles and books on the death of democracy/liberalism and the rise of fascism exploded. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century became a #1 New York Times bestseller and the self-help book for anxious liberals. In 2016, users of the term “fascism” (for Trump) were criticized as fearmongers. Four years later, those not using the term were seen as cowards and enablers.
Of course, not every recent book on fascism argues that “populism” is a contemporary form of fascism. For instance, the Argentinian historian Federico Finchelstein explicitly differentiates the two conceptually in his book From Fascism to Populism in History, while discussing both the similarities and differences. Still, along the way, during the overwhelming four years of Trump’s presidency, “fascism” became an increasingly accepted term and “lessons” from the 1930s an almost dominant media frame.
While not having used the term “fascism” myself, or the “Weimar America” framework, I have been part of the alarmist shift in public discourse too. At various times in the past months I have expressed my concerns about an “authoritarian turn” under Trump, more recently, even the fear of significant intimidation and violence by pro-Trump far-right gangs (from the Proud Boys to the Three Percenters).
Obviously, everything is still possible, both before and after Biden’s scheduled inauguration on 20 January, but it is time to refocus on what has (not) happened rather than what could happen. Fact of the matter is that, despite widespread fears, and the spike in the sale of guns and toilet paper, there was no widespread election violence or voter intimidation on election day. In fact, in part because of Covid-19, which led to record early and mail-in voting, election day was smoother than in the past few national elections.
Similarly, post-election violence, predicted by conflict scholars and international NGOs alike, has not happened either. There have been small groups of pro-Trump protesters outside ballot-counting sites, demanding to either “count those votes” or “stop the count”, depending on how Trump was doing, but they have largely stayed within the law. Appallingly, poll workers and election officials have been verbally abused and threatened with violence, but there was little to no actual physical violence.
And for all his grandstanding, Trump and his Republican lackeys have mainly challenged the results in (incompetent) legal ways. Sure, the emails keep coming, trying to fleece the Maga base for some last dollars before they will also realize that the dream is really over. But slowly but steadily everyone is moving on, from Fox News to Republican senators and Trump himself. Confronted with “a lame duck outside of its control”, Republicans will continue to tread carefully, as long as Trump is keeping up his grift – mainly focused on setting himself and his family up for a profitable post-White House period and on trying to pressure Biden into protecting him from criminal prosecution (itself an interesting insight into how little Trump still understands about the US political system).
And it is time for journalists and pundits to move on too, and to start a critical self-assessment of our analyses
and commentary of the past years. Where were we right and where wrong? Just because something can happen, or has happened in another region or time, does not mean it will happen in 21st-century US.
This is not to say that the Trump experience proves that US democracy is too strong to be toppled by a “strongman” – or any other type of “American exceptionalism” argument, which is usually steeped in national chauvinism and international ignorance. Sure, the current political culture and institutions in the US are a unique combination of norms and rules, as is the case for every country, but we can learn from other countries and other periods. Not by simply imposing their frames on the current situation, but by applying insights to the specific context of contemporary America. In other words, we have to assess what went right and wrong without trying to force 21st-century politics into rigid frames of 20th-century Europe or Latin America.
For instance, even if Trump were a new Führer, the vast majority of Germans did not support democracy in the Weimar era, when it was still a highly contested and untested ideal and system. Today, the vast majority of Americans believe that democracy is the best political system, even if they have different, and often imperfect, understandings of what the term exactly means and are, partly therefore, increasingly dissatisfied with the state of democracy in the US. And while US democracy has always been far from perfect, weakened by gerrymandering and voter suppression, to name just a few of the key undemocratic legacies, its institutions are much better grounded and protected against a caudillo than in the fragile Latin American democracies of the late 20th century.
Does this mean that “it can’t happen here”? Of course, it can – although not in the way Sinclair Lewis laid out in his reissued bestseller. And, perhaps, the “next Trump” will make it happen, as pundits are so eagerly predicting. And this is exactly why it is so important to learn the correct lessons from the past. As Mark Twain famously said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” How much it rhymes, is up to us learning the right lessons of history.
Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is also a Guardian US columnist
Just because something can happen, or has happened in another region or time, does not mean it will happen in 21stcentury US