Endless jeremiads from the mainstream media, academia and a large chunk of the political class warn that Americans are on the precipice of a fascist hell, presided over by our own orange-haired Il Duce. Some prominent progressive scholars, like Yale’s Timothy Snyder, a historian of fascism, claim to have read the Weimar-like tea leaves and have now relocated to Canada.
Trump’s vengeful actions against his well-entrenched enemies certainly invite parallels to the kind of behaviour exhibited by fascist leaders, as well as their Communist analogues like Stalin or Mao Zedong. But we are far from a Fourth Reich. Somewhere between 3.3million and 5.6million protesters attended the anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests last month and were met with no pushback from the authorities. This clearly would not happen in a truly fascist country. Nor would Trump’s political enemies still control most of the media, academia and the vast non-profit world. In Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, they would have been supplanted, jailed or even executed.
Critically, MAGA is hardly the Nazi Party or Mussolini’s Fascists or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks. It represents, rather, an ad hoc and fundamentally unstable alliance. It spans career GOP political hacks, rogue billionaire executives, rabid Evangelicals, radical populists and media screamers – including some who espouse racist themes, as well as the equally awful Tucker Carlson.
As the fallout over the so-called Epstein files suggests, MAGA’s prime chatterers are less focussed on coherent policy than on conspiratorial hysteria. It is hardly a mass movement across a broad spectrum of the population, but essentially a rebellion of the middle orders and mostly older voters – 60 per cent of the Trump base was aged over 50 in 2024. Trump himself is a blimpish 79-year-old who seems ready for serious decline, while Mussolini and Hitler were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively when they took power.
Furthermore, both Hitler and Mussolini expressed a horrific, but coherent worldview with broad appeal. Italian fascism ‘drew in all class levels, from workers to the aristocracy’, notes art historian Martina Caruso, who is writing a book about her grandfather, Pietro Caruso, who was executed for crimes committed as Rome’s chief of police under Mussolini.
Indeed, Mussolini’s rise during the 1920s was widely hailed even in democratic countries. It was fuelled by media skills acquired as editor of a prominent daily, and by a vision that many people found alluring and inspiring. ‘It stirred people with a contemporary culture including the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage (and by extension of violence), the sense of belonging to a community’, Caruso suggests. ‘That’s how he gained hegemony – through symbols, mass rituals, the media and modernist architecture.’ If that sounds far removed from the MAGA movement, then that’s because it was. Architects, artists and college students are not exactly flocking en masse to Donald Trump, much less donning uniforms.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Trumpism and fascism is that Trump stands, first and foremost, for Trump. He has no true ideological lodestone, which makes the fevered attempts to discern one just silly. His appeal lies not in the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1930s but in seemingly commonsense alternatives to the truly insane policies of the increasingly left-leaning Democrats – on issues from the border and transgender ‘rights’ to the protection of the criminal class. Economically, MAGA is more reactionary than visionary, pointing, as it does, towards a return to the torpid 1950s.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley via Flickr, Public Domain, Government Work.
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