A Republican Congressional candidate called Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need today.” In a 2021 radio interview, Carl Paladino, the former Republican candidate for New York State Governor explained, “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.”
The Texas Republican Party platform recently declared Joseph Biden’s election in 2020 “illegitimate,” opposed any legislative restrictions on the “wearing of arms,” rebuked one of the state’s Republican Senators for supporting very moderate gun regulation, branded homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” called for a repeal of the federal income tax, and demanded that students “learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child” and requires them to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
In Missouri, Eric Greitens, a former Governor who is running to be the Republican Party candidate for the United States Senate, released a campaign video where he leads an armed SWAT team hunting for “RINOs,” candidates and party officials he brands “Republicans in Name Only” because they insufficiently kowtow to Donald Trump. In the video, Greitens carries a shotgun and tells Republican voters to “Join the MAGA crew” and “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Crazy can be very dangerous.
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a leading expert on the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy between World War I and II. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Snyder argued that Russia today, under Vladimir Putin, qualifies as a fascist state. According to Snyder, “it’s impossible to define [fascism] satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply.”
While I have great respect for Timothy Snyder as a historian and I agree that a revival of fascism is a threat to freedom and democracy, I found his discussion of fascism disappointing. I agree with his claim that fascism is a force in Russia. But because of his narrow definition of fascism, Snyder avoided addressing the fascist threat in the United States today.
Snyder lists a number of identifying markers he sees present in Russia today including a cult-like following of a single leader, belief in a mythical golden age, and celebration of prior military greatness and sacrifice. Putin has justified the invasion of Ukraine as a war against fascism, as Stalin claimed the Soviet Union was anti-fascist because it fought against Germany, but Snyder argues you can claim to be anti-fascist, but he calls “Fascists calling other people ‘fascists’ is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason.”
Snyder specifically identifies Russia’s friends, Putin’s international allies, as leaning towards fascism, including Marine Le Pen of France, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News, because they are enemies of democracy.
Others have defined the fascist threat more broadly.
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered a succinct definition of fascism in a message he delivered to Congress (New York Times, April 30, 1938, 2). According to Roosevelt, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
British historian Eric Hobsbawm, writing in The Age of Extremes (New York: Pantheon, 1994, 125-128), argued that fascism emerges when governments no longer function effectively and there emerges “a mass of disenchanted, disoriented and discontented citizens who no longer knew where their loyalties lay.” They often attack domestic opposition groups who they consider a threat to their dominant position, groups that actually have no ability to threaten them.
Roosevelt and Hobsbawm’s insights when added to Snyder’s analysis of the situation in Russia make me fear for the future of the United States. The United States now has a significant bitter ethno-nationalist white Christian movement that considers itself aggrieved by Jews, Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants who they claim want to replace them as the dominant group. It has a political party and cult-like figures who manipulate this group to hold onto power and block any attempts to address major social and economic issues. It has corporate interests that support the cult figures and their efforts to stir up mass support because it is in the interests of these wealthy capitalists to cut taxes and eliminate government regulations. So far the United States ethno-nationalism has not turned to militarism, but it includes armed groups that threaten military action in the name of 2nd Amendment rights. Increased pressure on the southern border as climate refugees try to enter the United States could well trigger the kind of military action against southern neighbors that Putin and Russia launched against Ukraine.
Isn’t Donald Trump and MAGA’s claim that they will make America great again a reference to a mystical past golden age, an age dominated by white Christian men, that they hope to restore? Aren’t these similar to the claims made by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the 1930s and Vladimir Putin today? Yes fascism is afoot in Putin’s Russia. But it is also a threat in Trump’s America. As we saw on January 6, 2021, crazy can be very dangerous.
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