Yes, Trump is fascist

I can’t see where Dan Katz (Solidarity 676) is coming from with his pedantic insistence that Trump is not, as in truth he is, a fascist. Or where Katz is going with it.

Sure, we want accuracy and as far as possible, precision. We want to avoid demagogy and using words in such a way that feeling is substituted for reason.

In office, Trump did his best to be a rules-free dictator. He broke every rule and precedent he felt he needed to. He has discredited the FBI and the CIA (the main trouble with that is that he wanted to make them his wholly pliant weapons and tools). Before 2016, and in office, he campaigned relentlessly against the institutions of the bourgeois republic.

Against real elections, for instance, that he might lose. Trump campaignedagainst the election: if he lost, that would prove it was rigged. He spoke, lied, and acted against the transfer of power peacefully, without which real elections would not be possible.

Everything is “fake”. The journalists and judges who disagree with him are all “fake”. The “deep state” controls everything he doesn’t like — what he can’t yet control to his satisfaction and at whim.

He has a mass party. The party is a personality cult. Trump is its self-worshipping Führer and seen as that by its members. It fought the last presidential election not on a party manifesto, but left it to Trump to decide what its policies were.

They organised conspiracies and made an insurrection in Washington to stop the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden, in which police on duty died.

In office the electorate saw Trump ignorantly and dangerously pontificate on Covid while hundreds of thousands died. Incompetence, stupidity, indifference and foolish short-term self-regard ruled.

That was Trump’s response to the worst pandemic since Spanish flu in 1918 — and after all that 74 million US citizens voted for Trump in 2020, more than in 2016, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and won only in the electoral college. A sizable part at least of that number will vote Trump in November 2024. I don’t think he will, but it is possible that Trump will win.

Trotsky identified the fundamentals of fascism as the ability to mobilise masses of people on any mix of nonsense, including severe criticism of elements of the status quo, in defence of the status quo and especially against a self-controlling labour movement. They use as much violence as they need; they destroy, falsify, abandon what they think necessary to abandon or repudiate. The erection of some personality above the movement as supreme ruler is normal.

After the fascist victory the norm is for the extra-parliamentary forces to be taken into the state machine or otherwise subordinated to it (or unassimilable, perhaps subjectively revolutionary, elements are purged: the Night of Long Knives in Germany in 1934). If they have time, the fascist movement becomes part of the strengthened state machine under an autocratic leader.

If that is a generally true picture then Trump already has a powerful fascist or fascistic movement.

If you say that Trump, in what he has done, said, tried to do, and urged others to do, is not a fascist, then you have to provide some other description. Maybe he believed himself a monarch with absolute power? That isn’t a true or useful definition.

Trumpism is inchoate, but the elements swirling are fascist elements. There are a number of armed militias, such as those to whom Trump gave the order to “stand back and stand by”. They took part on 6 January 2021.

The Trumpites have taken control of one of the main parties. They have control of many state legislatures and governorships. They are on the offensive. If he loses the presidential election in 2024, and if events let him do so, Trump will continue to say he won.

Meanwhile there is a Trumpite republican offensive against black rights and women’s rights, against things thought settled half a century ago.

All these are elements of American fascism on the march and on the offensive. They are far more developed than Italian fascism was a year before it formed a government and five years before it turned that into absolute power.

Will US fascism develop something like that? I don’t know. Maybe Trump will go to jail. But there will be other Trumps. Trump threatens American bourgeois democracy now; but the point is also that Trumpism isn’t Trump alone. The crisis of American democracy was made very sharp by Trump as president, but it didn’t start with Trump, or with Trump losing the popular vote in 2016 and still becoming president.

Far more of a danger than to prematurely call Trump and the Trumpites fascist is to pretend that not a lot has changed. That isn’t true.

The Trump Republican party has a majority in the House of Representatives and in many states. Trump has succeeded in creating a world free of fact, logic, consistency, medicine, science, a world of “alternative facts” and free-wheeling lies. It doesn’t matter to his followers.

You can group fascisms into broad categories, like, say, clerical fascists, and that is useful. But no two fascisms are exactly alike. With many there are people to argue that they weren’t fascists at all, like Maurice Manning on the Irish Blueshirts. The Italian fascists were not, on their own or early on, antisemitic: hundreds of Jews took part in their totemistic “March on Rome” in 1922. If the demonic Nazis were the model fascists, then what were Mussolini’s people? Or what were they before absolute power, or as near as they came to it, in 1926?

Claureen Ryan, London