Is Trump fascist or populist and does it really matter?
Trump’s call for ostentatious U.S. military parades à la Red Square or any tinpot dictatorship has revved anxieties about the “comeback of fascism,” its “normalization,” an “emerging corporate fascist state . . . the new U.S. fascism” and “the abyss of a fascist nightmare.”
That’s from one recent article by McMaster professor Henry Giroux, a prolific writer on the left. A more bucolic version is Dutch philosopher Rob Riemen’s To Fight Against This Age: On Humanism and Fascism.
Giroux says anyone who sees mere populism confronting us, is guilty of covering for fascism. His book is oddly nostalgic; it’s largely set at conferences and symposia in ancient, elegant hotels in the Swiss Alps. He yearns and quests for the return of Europa, the spirit of humanism that alone can combat fascist barbarity and was embodied in the (European, bien sur) Renaissance.
It’s easy to get worked up about fascism since it always eludes definition. Those who lived through it tend to say they don’t know what it is, but they know it when they see it. It involves tyranny and authority, and may or may not be racist. It also may attack capitalism. And/or socialism. Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) said fascism is always A and not A. He’d seen lots of it.
It’s been spotted before in the U.S. President Richard Nixon was considered a fascist by many in his time. He incited white working-class violence against students and Black people. He was antiSemitic.
President Ronald Reagan — same designation. Bertram Gross wrote a persuasive book called Friendly Fascism about him as the perfect American face of the beast. Thomas Mann said when fascism comes to America it will come in the name of freedom. A and not A. The label didn’t stick in their cases.
On this intuitive, personalized basis, I look at Trump and don’t see it. He has no ideology and isn’t interested in acquiring one (to the despairing contempt of Steve Bannon).
He adores provoking violence (“Get ’em outta here!”) but hasn’t the organizational kit to recruit and outfit paramilitaries. All he’s really interested in is having everyone look his way. He lacks the revolutionary impulse that belongs to fascism — as a thoughtful millennial I know puts it: the will to blow up society as it is, including its moneyed rulers.
Instead, he yearns to be accepted by the rich and pouts that he’s not. The night after his election victory he pined for Rupert Murdoch to show up at a party he threw.
Does it matter whether you call this fascism or not? Only in the sense that it might lead you in the wrong direction or none at all, over what to actually do.
Giroux peters out with a listless call that “now is the time to talk back, embrace the radical imagination in private and public,” etc. I don’t know what that means if you’re not a writer or taking one of Giroux’s courses.
Riemen’s route would involve reviving the “humanist” tradition; it requires going to university and reading the Great Books under the eye of the right teacher. I don’t think that’s basically unfair to his implied solution: it amounts to, Make Europe Great Again.
The trouble with making fascism the issue is that it sounds so deep-rooted, it’s hard to think of anything to do beyond calling it names. I guess you can go into the streets, but that has clear limits given the distribution of armed power in the U.S. and other right-leaning places. I mean, who owns the firepower?
Would it help deploying another name, like right-wing populism, the term preferred by Bannon, the brightest boy in Trump’s orbit? I think so. Then you’re dealing less with hopelessly lost, depraved souls, than with real folks with real problems who’ve been offered bad answers like: it’s those immigrants who did you in.
They might respond to alternate suggestions, like “millioneahs and billioneahs” as the source of their woe, who Bernie Sanders rails at. Bernie’s a left populist; his foe is right populism. Same ballpark at least.
Nor are many Trump voters inherently anti-democratic, as fascism is. They’re more like disillusioned democrats, especially after Obama. They won’t respond to attempts to keep things as they are, but might like Bernie’s call for a “political revolution” by getting the big money out of politics.
It seems so much more doable than waging cosmic war on the atavistic forces of eternal fascism.
Rick Salutin looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t see fascism. The U.S. president has no ideology and isn’t interested in acquiring one
Rick Salutin appears Friday.