The New Yorker:

In a new book, “Did it Happen Here?,” scholars debate what the F-word conceals and what it reveals.

By Andrew Marantz

At this point, we know everything there is to know about Donald Trump. His diehard admirers—not all seventy-four million people who voted for him in the 2020 election but his immovable base, maybe thirty per cent of Republicans—admire him still, now more than ever. Is he a racist? Sure, by many definitions. Is he a sexual abuser? Yes, according to at least one jury. Is he corrupt? Cartoonishly so. Would he like to be a “dictator”? Perhaps, if you take him at his word, although, on second thought, his word is famously unreliable. Yet he is his party’s presumptive nominee, without even having to sweat for it, and, if you believe most polls, he is favored to win in November.

Among the nonadmirers, the debate continues. Not about whether all of this is no-good, very bad news but about how, exactly, Trump and Trumpism are bad—how to put the man and the movement in historical context. “He is an authoritarian personality devoid of any commitment to the rule of law, political tradition, or even ideology,” the emeritus Columbia historian Robert O. Paxton wrote, in 2017, in Harper’s Magazine. “Are we therefore looking at a fascist? Not really.” Paxton, one of the preëminent scholars of twentieth-century European Fascism, acknowledged that many elements of Trump’s rhetorical style and political program were “fascist staples.” Still, the dissimilarities, in his view, outweighed the similarities.

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