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Yes, A Trump Presidency Would Bring Fascism To America

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POST WRITTEN BY
Robert Kagan
This article is more than 7 years old.

In response to my Washington Post column, “This is How Fascism Comes to America,” Forbes contributor Michael Ledeen takes issue with my suggestion that the incoherence of Donald Trump's policies and worldview recalls the similar incoherence of 20th-century fascist movements. Interestingly, Ledeen, a Trump supporter, does not deny that Trump is incoherent. Rather, in his May 19 post "Nobody Knows Anything About Fascism," he insists that the fascist movements in Italy and Germany did have coherent philosophies and national programs.

Discerning the true nature of fascism, including whether it shows common characteristics across national boundaries, has been a problem for historians ever since the birth of the movement. Ledeen has taken active part in that discussion, beginning with his 1972 book Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928-1936. I’m sure he would agree this remains contested terrain.

My guide on the subject has been Robert O. Paxton. In his book, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), Paxton writes, “Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in the absence…. Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine…. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned consent.” Paxton cites Hannah Arendt’s observation, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.”

An incoherent governing philosophy

Contemporary observers of Mussolini saw the same incoherence. The Dartmouth scholar, William Kilbourne Stewart, wrote in 1928 (in the American Political Science Review) of the twists and turns of Italian fascism:

What was proletarian is now bourgeois. What began as radical has ended as conservative. Sedition has changed into loyalty. Left has turned right. The only constant quantity, the sole continuum, in this bewildering reversal has been Mussolini himself. It is not unnatural that Mussolini has been accused by his adversaries of being the arch-turncoat of history, outdoing all other famous renegades in the vast and devastating effect of his treachery to the cause of popular liberty. And, in plain fact, there is no denying that Mussolini was at one time a socialist, a republican, an atheist, a subverter of the government, and that he is now the opposite of all these things. He who was once against all constituted authority has become Authority incarnate.

(Some readers may notice a resemblance to the man now in the process of gaining the Republican Party’s nomination for president.)

As to Ledeen’s suggestion that Mein Kampf offered a coherent governing philosophy, that is true insofar as the governing philosophy consisted of exterminating the Jews, crushing the Marxists, and achieving the supremacy and purity of the Aryan race. It is light, however, on economic and social policy apart from those goals.

Mussolini's "embrace" of the Church

Finally, on a minor note, Ledeen objects to my assertion that Mussolini and his fascists were anti-clerical. Mussolini himself referred to the Vatican as a “nest of robbers” and to priests as “black germs.” As the scholar David I. Kertzer writes in his book, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, “the Church was one of the fascists’ early targets. Mussolini called for seizing the property of religious congregations and ending state subsidies for the Church. In a November 1919 article … he invited the pope to leave Rome, and a month later he expressed his hatred for all forms of Christianity.”

In his drive to assume totalitarian control of Italy, a country that was over 90% Catholic, he half-coerced, half-coopted the Church, publicly reversing his earlier statements and making a show of embracing the Church and the Pope. However, in that partnership, there was no question who was in charge and who had been brought to heel. In this respect, one supposes, Mussolini’s “embrace” of the Church was not unlike Trump’s “embrace” of the Republican Party.

American-style fascism 

In raising the issue of fascism in connection with Donald Trump and his movement, I am not suggesting that what is happening in the United States replicates in every sense what happened in Italy and Germany. Were a kind of fascism to come to America, it would not look like Italian fascism any more than Italian fascism looked like German fascism.

What I worry about is the moment when Trump, with an angry following that has no allegiance to anyone or anything but him, takes over the extraordinary powers of the American presidency. I worry that at that point our democracy will be in danger in a way that it has not been before. It will be fascism American-style. Or perhaps it will deserve a name of its own. But whatever word one chooses, it will constitute a threat to our democratic institutions.