It is a time honored quadrennial. In the weeks leading up to the vote for the US Presidency, there is the traditional rending of garments over the mere possibility that a Republican will win the race. At which point Democratic bien pensants begin to claim that the Republican candidate is a racist; has displayed a shocking tendency toward fascism, and that there is a whiff of fascism in the air etc.etc.
Current VP and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has managed to hit a new low in this respect. She actually accused Donald Trump of being a real live fascist.
The expected cast of characters, this time including Hillary Clinton, John Kelly and Mark Milley, accordingly jumped in and denounced Trump’s supposed fascism. What they actually denounced (perhaps unknowingly because they don’t understand what fascism actually entails) is authoritarianism.
Let’s face it. Donald Trump, without a doubt, has displayed authoritarian tendencies. He obviously enjoys, or at least makes a good show of getting along with dictators. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, China’s Xi Jinping and a host of others easily come to mind. It’s pretty hard to imagine Ronald Reagan palling around with this crowd.
There are actually two questions here. (1) Is it all an act on Trump’s part? And (2) more importantly, philosophically speaking what is fascism as opposed to authoritarianism.
First question first. Is it all an act? Damned if I know. I doubt that even Trump knows. After all, he is not known—to put it mildly— for making subtle distinctions. Not to put too fine a point on it, quoting Trump as saying he wants Generals like Hitler’s is not exactly dispositive. Anybody who is even vaguely familiar with modern history knows that a number of Hitler’s Generals plotted to assassinate him. Which, assuming Trump actually said what he is accused of saying, speaks to his ignorance (no surprise there) and that of his accusers.
Having said that, there is precious little actual evidence that Trump really has fascist leanings. Being a jerk does not equate to fascism. And hysterical assertions do not count as evidence.
It is the second question that is most interesting. Leaving aside the obligatory rhetorical nonsense, that question asks what fascism actually is. For that we can consult one of fascism’s chief practitioners and theorists. That would be Benito Mussolini.
Three quotations of his sum it up.
Here is the first. “Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the stateand accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the state, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.”
Here is the second. “The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the state, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the state is absolute; individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible insofar as they come within the state.”
And the third. “The Fascist state organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the state only.”
Now, who does that sound like? It sounds a lot like progressive activists. For example the fascist state accepts individuals only insofar as their interests coincide with the interests of the state. The interests of individuals are subordinate to the whims of the state. “Harmful” liberties should be curtailed.
Curtailing allegedly harmful liberties sounds an awful lot like punishing the publication of what the state labels “misinformation”. That is a practice enthusiastically endorsed by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. And the Biden Administration for that matter.
Let’s not forget that it was the Biden Administration that pressured media companies to suppress stories contrary to their preferred Covid 19 narrative. And it was the 2020 Biden Campaign that got 51 members of the “intelligence community” to assert that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. That particular effort in news suppression was spearheaded by Anthony Blinken who is now Secretary of State. How does that grab you for freedom of the press?
It should not go unmentioned that Donald Trump, no friend of individual liberties, has called for loosening the restrictions for suing reporters. We do have a first amendment the Supreme Court has steadfastly upheld (see Times v Sullivan) to prevent just this sort of thing. Unlike Harris and progressives, he has not called for packing the court.
And then there is the way that the Administrative state functions. Congress passes aspirations they call laws and sends them off to the executive bureaucracy to write the rules for implementation. That is where real policy making is done. In that process the interests of the politically well-connected, not the interests of the individual, largely determine outcomes.
Even consider an area where progressives pretend to protect individual rights, which is to say abortion policy. For abortion policy-making, individuals are the last thing that most progressives care about. Instead, people are subdivided into interest groups: Women vs Men vs unborn children.
The reason is simple. Unborn children don’t vote. They don’t get a say, any more than slaves did in the antebellum South. And men, who are increasingly Republican, are defined as cretins. Or as Hilary Clinton put it, “deplorables”.
Let’s present a hypothetical. Suppose the Democrats (by which I mean Party officials and office holders) really believed that Trump is a proto fascist. Then why did they spend so much time and effort trying to propel Trump toward the Republican nomination? The answer is they thought (possibly correctly) that he would be the easiest Republican to beat.
Another question: why are endangered Democratic Senators who are up for re-election running ads claiming that they have worked constructively with Trump?
These Senators include Sherrod Brown, (D—OH), Bob Casey (D—PA), and Tammy Baldwin (D—WI) all of whom are locked in tight races.
Are they fascist sympathizers themselves? Of course not. They simply want to win and they are afraid Harris will drag them down to defeat. So they (partially) align themselves with Trump, whom they know is not a fascist.
It is possible that both Trump and Harris are well aware of all this and are simply employing different campaign tactics in a desperate lunge for power. But those tactics are destructive. Words have meanings. Continuing to dilute or obfuscate those meanings makes discussion about politics and public policy even more threadbare than it already is. We should not be headed in that direction.
JFB
