Over at Raw Story, the editors reprinted an essay written by John Broich, an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, first published by the History News Network. Broich asked “sixteen historians of fascist-era Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain” if they would define Donald Trump as a fascist. Broich allowed the historians to either broadly or narrowly define fascism as they saw fit. The majority of them did not consider Trump to be a fascist for a couple of reasons:
- Trump does not lead a coherent movement with a specific ethos. “He has no normal political organization as distinct from a publicity team,” responded Stanley Payne, a noted authority on fascism history. “The major fascist movements certainly did, almost by definition.”
- Trump is not undergirded by a paramilitary or that he does not advocate more political violence, granting his comments about “Second Amendment people.”
Although the majority said Trump was not fascist, they did however find some striking similarities:
Most of the historians I asked named many similarities between Trump and Hitler, as [Michiko] Kakutani seemed to do, but almost all qualified them as particulars or matters of rhetorical style rather than sufficient proof of fascism.
About half thought a comparison with Mussolini was more apt. They cited Trump’s “I and I alone” demagoguery, his “exaggerated masculinity,” his attempt to synthesize notions of the left and right, his stress on leading a movement instead of a party, and his claim to be uniquely outside the system.
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The impetus behind Broich’s “question” was a review of the book Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, by Michio Kakutani in the Sept. 27th New York Times. As Broich stated,
“Michiko Kakutani did not actually name Donald Trump in her New York Times review of Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, but the review was hard to read as anything but a comparison. “Regardless of whether this review was intended as an article length Trump subtweet, that’s the reception it’s getting,” wrote a Washington Post observer.”
On the one hand, this could simply seem like an exercise in semantics: if Trump does not represent fascism, he represents something exceedingly vile and vulgar. We may not have the technically exact name for that, but that is what he currently represents. On the other hand, while the majority of the historians did not think Trump was/is a fascist, they note there is still a need for caution:
“ … Candidates come and go, while contexts tend to be long-lasting. Trump seems on course to lose the election, but the conditions that allowed his rise should persist. Professor [David D.] Roberts, who just published a new book, Fascist Interactions, does not think that Trumpism is fascism, but “that doesn’t rule out the possibility,” he wrote, that from the Trumpist atmosphere, “something as bad as or even worse than fascism could emerge.”
Until we can find the technically exact name, “scary” seems to suffice for now.