With Donald Trump ending 2015 well ahead in the Republican primary polls,
the debate about what his candidacy represents is intensifying.
Pointing to favorable remarks about Vladimir Putin that Trump made
recently, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W.
Bush, said Sunday, on “Meet the Press,” “This is a man now flirting with authoritarianism. . . . This is a serious, serious matter.”
Some
people have gone so far as to suggest that Trump, in whipping up
popular resentments and stigmatizing immigrants and Muslims, is
exhibiting Fascist tendencies. During the last Democratic debate,
Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, said that America
must never surrender its values “to the Fascist pleas of billionaires
with big mouths.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has argued
that “Fascist” is the label that best fits Trump, and the word has also
cropped up in New Hampshire, where Trump is the front-runner. In a blog post, Jonathan P. Baird, an administrative law judge, noted that the candidate is popular with white supremacists and other hate groups,
and wrote, “Trump is no conservative. He is not about conserving what
is valuable in America’s laws and heritage. He has crossed enough lines
to indicate he is something else altogether.”
That
last statement is indisputable, but is “Fascism” the best way to
describe the Trump phenomenon? I don’t think so. Originally used as a
collective noun for the murderous, revolutionary hypernationalist
movements that emerged in Europe from the embers of the First World War,
the word is often employed today as a catch-all term of abuse for
right-wing racists and rabble-rousers. Trump certainly qualifies as one
of the latter, but calling him a Fascist serves to obscure rather than
illuminate what he is really about.
Part
of the problem is a definitional one. Even historians who have spent
their lives studying Fascism can’t agree on what the word means. Were
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini Fascists? To be sure. What about
Francisco Franco or António Salazar, or the colonels who seized power in
Greece in 1967? Some historians would argue that these were
old-fashioned military dictators who lacked the populist, revolutionary
aspect of true Fascists. One voluminous collection of academic writings
that I consulted over the Christmas break listed thirteen
interpretations of Fascism. In a splendid piece of understatement,
Stanley G. Payne, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
an expert on Franco’s Spain, remarked, “The absence of an empirical
definition of what is meant by fascism has been an obstacle to conceptual clarification.”
But
if historians of Fascism can’t write down on paper what it is, they can
recognize it when they see it. And when Vox’s Dylan Matthews interviewed
a number of them before Christmas, they agreed that Trumpism doesn’t
meet the standard. Fascism, in its original form, had no time for
parliamentary democracy, peace, or limited government. It exalted
“direct democracy”—the incarnation of the popular will in a great
leader—war, violence, and popular engagement in a totalitarian state.
Trump, for all his bluster, hasn’t yet called for the repeal of the U.S.
Constitution. He has expressed deep skepticism about U.S. military
interventions overseas. And, despite his infamous comment that a Black
Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies deserved to be roughed up,
he hasn’t endorsed the sort of systematic violence that characterizes
Fascist movements.
Plus—and
this is something that Robert Paxton, of Columbia University, pointed
out to Matthews—Trump is too much of a hedonistic individualist to
endorse the sort of collective action and political mobilization that
lay at the heart of Fascism. Far from creating an organized political
movement that could overthrow the established order, Trump hasn’t even
bothered, so far, to set up a decent get-out-the-vote operation in Iowa
and New Hampshire—a failing that some political experts believe could be
his undoing.
So, if Trump isn’t a Fascist, what is he? Something old and something new.
On
the one hand, he is the latest representative of an anti-immigrant,
nativist American tradition that dates back at least to the
Know-Nothings of the eighteen-forties and eighteen-fifties. On the other
hand, Trump is a twenty-first-century celebrity politician who
ruthlessly exploits his fame and his insider knowledge of how the media
works to maximum effect.
The
Know-Nothings originated as secret societies of white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants angered by an influx of immigrants, particularly Irish Roman
Catholics who were crossing the Atlantic to flee poverty and find work
in the rapidly industrializing U.S. economy. The Know-Nothings got their
name because, when asked about their clandestine activities, they often
said, “I know nothing.” Fearful of popery, liquor, and big-city
political machines that harvested the votes of new arrivals, they called
for restrictions on immigration, the closure of saloons, and a ban on
foreign-born people holding public office. “Americans must rule
America,” they said.
Prefiguring
Trump’s remarks about Mexicans, the Know-Nothings also portrayed many
immigrants as criminals. In his book “Nativism and Slavery: The Northern
Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s,” the George Washington
University historian Tyler Anbinder quoted
contemporary newspaper articles that fixated on this subject. In
Albany, a Know-Nothing paper called immigration “the chief source of
crime in this country.” In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a like-minded
publication said that crime had reached epidemic proportions, and that
the perpetrators “are FOREIGNERS in nine cases out of ten.” In
Cleveland, the Express identified one of the sources of the
crime wave as the Roman Catholic confessional box, whose users “know no
matter what the deed, they will be forgiven.”
In
early 1854, Know-Nothing candidates won citywide offices in Boston,
Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Coming together as a formal political
organization for the first time, they adopted the name the American
Party and swept statewide offices in Massachusetts, Maryland, and other
states. In the run-up to the 1856 Presidential election, the
Know-Nothings put together a Trumpian platform that demanded the repeal
of naturalization laws, the banning of the foreign-born from public
office, and the deportation of foreign-born paupers, including children.
As
with the Trump phenomenon, economic concerns reinforced the
Know-Nothing movement’s ethnic, religious, and cultural underpinnings.
In Massachusetts, for instance, Know-Nothing politicians did best in
industrial areas, where native workers were competing with Irish
immigrants. With the rise of the Republican Party and the onset of the
Civil War, the Know-Nothings entered a precipitous decline, but the
prejudices and anxieties that motivated them never fully went away.
During
the early decades of the twentieth century, another big wave of
immigration, this one originating predominantly from southern and
eastern Europe, produced a fresh burst of anti-immigrant feeling.
Something similar has happened in the past couple of decades, following a
surge in immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. With
demographers projecting that white Americans will be a minority within a
generation, nativist sentiment has returned, presenting Trump with his
opportunity.
Since his
non-campaign in 2012, when he publicly questioned whether President
Obama was born in the United States, Trump has sought to fan fears that
America is losing its heritage, and that the political establishment is
complicit in a betrayal. The image of a big wall across the southern
border is central to Trump’s campaign—not just in policy terms but also
psychologically. It represents a physical manifestation of the desire to
place a large stop sign before the onward march of history. As the
campaign has progressed, Trump has added other elements that complement
this proposal, such as a ban on Muslims entering the United States. His
message may not be coherent, but it is consistent.
Over
the years, of course, other Republican politicians, such as Pete
Wilson, Pat Buchanan, and Tom Tancredo, have sought to exploit nativism
and anti-immigrant sentiment. But none had the celebrity or media savvy
of Trump. And each of them, unlike him, had to bear the heavy burden of
being perceived as a career politician. Trump, with his money and name
recognition, is largely liberated from the normal conventions of party
politics. And, with his background in entertainment and television, he
knows how to exploit a chaotic nomination process that has been
transformed, over recent election cycles, into a daily reality show that
runs for more than a year.
Other
Republicans structure their campaigns around establishing a presence in
the first primary states and doing well in the national television
debates. According to the conventional wisdom, that is what you have to
do. Trump, however, concentrates on something else: dominating the daily
news cycle. To this end, he maintains a constant presence on social
media and cable news channels. Over the holiday season, for example, he
has been picking a fight with Hillary Clinton, starting out with some misogynistic (and inaccurate) comments about her bathroom break during the last Democratic debate; following up by suggesting that she is too weak and tired to be President; and, in recent days, threatening to bring up Bill Clinton’s sexual history.
None
of this unseemly barrage has much to do with Trump’s central message,
and, particularly among non-Republicans, it has probably accentuated the
already vast gender gap in his support. But Trump’s onslaught has kept
him in the news, served notice to the Clintons, and deprived other
Republican candidates of media attention, which is what his strategy was
intended to do. If it costs him a few points among females likely to
vote in the general election, that is a price that Trump is willing to
pay. Even some of his victims acknowledge the success of his strategy.
“Look, nothing’s backfired on Donald Trump yet: I’d put my money on
him,” Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said on Fox News
on Monday. “Frankly, he’s played the whole media game like a kid on
Christmas morning with a toy drum.”
Of
course, the genuine Fascists were pretty effective at using the media,
too: that was one of the things that made them so dangerous. Trump, for
reasons that historians have rightly emphasized, shouldn’t be compared
to a Goebbels or a Mussolini on this front. But, in the six months since
he launched his campaign, he has revived the Know-Nothing movement,
plumbed new depths of divisive rhetoric, and established himself as a
shameless demagogue. With five weeks left until the first vote is cast
in Iowa, that is more than enough to be getting along with.
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