Cartoon by Luc Descheemaeker

Trump is a racist demagogue. But he’s not a fascist.

By David A. Bell

The Washington Post: Is the year 2020 or 1933? It is unclear judging by the sudden ubiquity of the word “fascism” in our political discourse. Even as President Trump warns of “a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance,” his opponents insist that he is the true fascist dictator-in-waiting. Such charges have appeared since the 2016 election and have been made by credible authorities such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. The deployment of armed federal agents against protesters in Portland and other cities gave further credence to these accusations.

In the modern political lexicon, at least for secular people, “fascism” has taken the place of the devil. But it is not appropriate for describing the United States in 2020.

Undoubtedly, some of Trump’s supporters — in their racism, their attraction to violence and their contempt for democratic norms — have things in common with European fascists of the interwar period. They belong to a long and sinister American tradition that includes the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that the great historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, called “the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism.” And Trump’s extreme nationalism, his praise of violence, his not-so-coded racism and his insistence on absolute loyalty from his followers all recall elements of fascist ideology.

How fascist is President Trump? There’s still a formula for that.

But the existence of these echoes and connections does not mean that the United States is in danger of a fascist takeover. The accusations of fascism leveled against Trump and some of his supporters distract attention from the real threat to democracy that Trump poses, which is a far older and more common one. The accusations are also highly unlikely to convince anyone other than liberals. It may indeed prove counterproductive.

Fascism, as it took shape in Europe between the world wars, was bound up with a unique phenomenon that has had no real equivalent in American society: a regimented mass movement, with a uniformed paramilitary arm, committed to the radical remaking of society as a whole. Even before Hitler came to power in Germany in early 1933, his SA paramilitary force had hundreds of thousands of members. Fascist seizures of power depended on these mass movements effectively merging with, and taking control of, the state. Only then could the party leader’s rhetorical violence be transformed into mass violence, the suppression of all opposition, the nullification of civil rights and the vicious persecution of vulnerable minorities.

But Trump not only lacks a mass movement at his command; he has made no attempt to create one. The various far-right militia groups, including the armed protesters who marched into the statehouse in Michigan after Trump’s call to “liberate” the state, remain small, disorganized fringe movements. The few hundred federal agents sent into Portland and other cities, while threatening and abusive, do not amount to a fascist paramilitary. Even as Trump threatens to involve new cities in the program, the Department of Homeland Security is already starting to remove agents from the Portland hot spot, in a sign it may be retreating from its blundering attempts to use them as a political police. At best, as Yale political scientist Jason Stanley puts it, Trump has been “performing fascism.” But the performance — perhaps better-called playacting — is far from the real thing.

Trump’s speeches may sometimes recall the rhetoric of fascist leaders in his praise of violence, his demands for obedience and his disregard for constitutional restraints. Nonetheless, his actual abuses of power fit into a very different, older pattern. From the start, the history of modern democratic republics has been inseparable from that of charismatic political leaders who can forge intense emotional connections with committed cadres of followers. Indeed, modern democracies have often depended on such leaders to bind together their fractious polities.

Some leaders have a greater ability than others to inspire emotional responses, but in many cases followers project hopes and fantasies onto surprisingly unlikely figures (as with the relationship between many Christian evangelicals and a president who embodies the seven deadly sins). The charismatic bond takes shape through, and is shaped by, media such as print in the 18th and 19th centuries, supplemented by radio, film and television in the 20th, and by the Internet and social media today.

If powerful enough, the bond forged with supporters allows the leaders in question to run roughshod over constitutional restraints. In what is often misleadingly called the “age of democratic revolution,” democracy soon failed in most of the revolutions in question: in France, in Haiti, throughout South America. It was not just a matter of the fragility of new constitutional systems in the face of civil war and social collapse, but of the positive attraction of charismatic authoritarianism, especially in moments of national crisis when figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Simón Bolívar exploited widespread popular acclaim to usurp extra-constitutional powers >>>

David A. Bell is a professor of history of Princeton and the author of "Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution."