Originally Posted by Pete F.
9. There was a glaring intellectual vacuum at the heart of Trump’s rule.
When Hitler, Mussolini, Salazar and Franco came to power, they knew exactly what they wanted to do. Trump never had an agenda beyond his own financial interests and his vanity, and into the vacuum came the orthodoxy of the Republican party since the Reagan years: tax cuts for the rich, conservative justices for the judiciary, and the casual strangulation of the regulatory state. Trumpism is an ideology that never was, an empty signifier that provided thin camouflage for a ruler who never cared about his people. The Nazi Party was never too religious about its 25 point party platform of 1920 – but at least it had a platform. The Republican party declined to adopt a new platform at its 2020 convention and simply used their platform from 2016, and when Trump was asked about his goals for the second term, the answer was mushy even by his own generous standards.
Rush Limbaugh receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor
These points come down to an obvious point: against the backdrop of Fascism in the interwar years, it does not make any sense to speak of Trump as a Fascist. But there is a second point that is perhaps less obvious. Viewing Trump through this lens also provides us with a terribly insufficient idea about democracy and what we need to do in order to save it. In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder offers the following as one of twenty lessons from the twentieth century: “defend institutions.”[2] On first glance, it makes perfect sense. If it were not for civil servants like Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower on Trump’s shenanigans with Ukraine, and the checks and balances from the federal bureaucracy, the states, and the judiciary, we would probably be in a very dark place by now. But should we really heap praise on the American system of law and order? After all, this is the same judiciary that put more than two million American citizens behind bars, the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world, where access to a well-paid lawyer and the color of one’s skin makes a world of difference, and where decisions on many important matters are delayed ad nauseam. Is that an institution that we should defend in the name of democracy? If anything, we should seek to change it in the name of democracy.
Thinking about democracy and Fascism invites thinking in black-and-white mode: it’s about democracy or authoritarian rule, institutions or anarchy, Biden or Trump. But a living democracy is rarely about black and white. It is about compromise, about a balance between different interests, and that makes for many different shades of gray. Democracy is complicated, a kind of decathlon with different events that require different skills, and there is no guarantee that it all fits together. But you would not know that from looking at Fascism.
Donald Trump addresses a military audience from in front of a giant US flag
So is it wrong to call Trump a Fascist? The question misses the crucial point. The ghosts of the twentieth century are still with us, and so is the moral shame that goes along with that epithet. But while it may not be morally wrong to call Trump a Fascist, it is obviously not very clever, and maybe that matters more as we look to the future. The last four years have shown the weakness of democracy, particularly when it is challenged by someone like Trump. Democracy does not look as decisive as the strongmen of our times, it is not terribly entertaining (and often pretty boring), and democracy looks rather helpless in the face of widespread anger. But here is one thing that you can say in defense of democracy: it can be really smart – way smarter than the intellectual deadwood that was pervasive in the Trump administration.
So this is my tenth and final point by way of comparing the Fascists and Trump: unlike the outgoing president, the Fascists were not dumb – as shown in the fact that they were smart enough to set an entire continent ablaze. Being smart is not a privilege of democracies, but it works the other way around: it is hard to imagine a thriving democracy full of dumb people. And maybe that is something that we should keep in mind as we search for a path through the rubble that the last four years have left behind. If we want to keep the flame of democracy alive, we need to get smart about Fascism, get smart about Trump – and get smart about what democracy really is.
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