The entertainment industry, and the ways that young people chose to shock adults, took some mind-bending turns in the late-twentieth century. This has made the task of understanding fascism more complicated.
For a subsection of the male population, and seemingly a much smaller number of females, it was not enough to be fascinated with serial killers like Charles Manson, Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy. To seriously freak out their parents, teenage malcontents started messing around with the iconography and horrors of the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, in a manner that suggested more than just morbid fascination (which has been a rite of passage for many a male teenage history enthusiast).
In the 1970s and 1980s, this fascism fetish was most noticeable among musicians who were increasingly drawn to making fascism references or dressing up in Nazi drag in order to shock mainstream society and titillate their fans. The Sex Pistols decried their enemies as fascists — “God, save the queen / The fascist regime / They made you a moron” — while at the same time the band members could be fascists too. Sid Vicious was infamously photographed wearing a swastika t-shirt. Every second punk and post-punk band, it seems, had a “risqué” Nazi Germany fixation.
Fast-forward to the internet age and the situation became truly ridiculous, as the words “Nazi” and “fascist” get thrown around as common terms of abuse or used to signify one’s edginess, whiteness, manliness and even one’s sex appeal. How do we make sense of Mark Robinson, an African American man who stood as the 2024 Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, reportedly calling himself a “black Nazi” on the message board section of a porn website? Or what about the Young Republicans group chat leaked to Politico, which at several points valorises Nazis and expresses love for Hitler?
Rod Dreher, the conservative writer and close friend of Vice-President JD Vance, has recently estimated that supporters of neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes make up “something like 30 to 40 per cent” of Republican staffers under the age of 30 in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, earlier this year on X, Kanye West posted “I’m a Nazi … I love Hitler” in the wake of Elon Musk performing what looked for all the world like a Nazi salute at a rally celebrating Trump’s second inauguration.
Is this just cosplay or should we be on high alert about the rise of the “Nerd Reich” and this new generation of Hitler-loving youth?
In the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, key members of the first Trump administration — former chief of staff John Kelly, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and former defence secretary Mark Esper — warned that Trump was either a fascist or had fascist “inclinations”. In late October 2024, a poll found that half of registered American voters agreed that Trump was a fascist when given this definition: “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”. Some of these people undoubtedly went on to vote for him. (Though it is worth mentioning that, in the same survey, 22 per cent of participants also thought Kamala Harris was a fascist.)
Because fascism is often associated with a certain theatricality and exaggerated performances, it can be easy to dismiss it as unserious or even as mere political “entertainment”. The speeches of Hitler and Mussolini from the outset looked and sounded ridiculous. This left them acutely vulnerable to satire. The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin lampooned their theatrics in famous films from 1940, You Nazty Spy and The Great Dictator.
Needless to say, Donald Trump takes this theatricality a step further. As a reality television star and an occasional participant on the make-believe World Wrestling Federation — to say nothing of his camp Queens accent, his endless boasting and garish lifestyle — he is a figure who is ripe for satire. Indeed, ever since his time as a New York tabloid favourite in the 1980s, Trump has often satirised himself.
Accordingly, his rallies sometimes descend into stand-up routines, and his interminable, offensive, incoherent speeches give the distinct impression of Trump as crazy uncle around the Christmas table.
As America’s caricature-in-chief, is it any wonder that Trump himself buys into the whole caricature of Nazi ruthless efficiency and absolute loyalty. Take the following exchange with his one-time chief of staff, John Kelly:
“You f**king generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II”, Trump responded.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military.
In reality, many of the most reliable accounts present Hitler as being rather flaky and the Nazi generals were often far from efficient or rational, particularly on the eastern front in the war against the Soviets. Fascism in practice does not just have an apocalyptic streak to it; it also has a lunatic element — particularly in the way it fetishises revenge and violence.
In our topsy-turvy world, all of this makes fascism appealing to many of Trump’s influential online supporters insofar as it aligns usefully, in style and substance, with their trolling and meme-based approach to politics.
The modern abuses and overuses of the words “fascist”, “Nazi” and “Hitler” present complex challenges for scholars of fascism. One solution to this complexity has been to insist on a narrow definition that sees fascism solely as an Italian movement confined to the 1920s and 1930s. This is the approach adopted by the conservative historian Paul Gottfied in his 2016 book Fascism: The Career of a Concept and its 2021 sequel Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, where he condemns what he sees as the continued misapplication of the term “fascism” with respect to Trump. For Gottfied, the antifascist movement is the real threat to America — his book effectively laid the intellectual groundwork for the Trump administration’s decision to declare Antifa a “terrorist” organisation.
A much better starting point for understanding the long history of fascism is Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. In many ways, this is a model academic book: lucidly written by a genuine expert. While Paxton provides a detailed history of the fascism of both Mussolini and Hitler, he also confronts the important question, “Is fascism a transgenerational ideology with core attributes?” In response, he writes:
Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national-socialist and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized, and purified nation at whatever cost to free institutions and the rule of law.
Roger Griffin, on the other hand, boils the concept down to an “ideal type” wherein he regards fascism as “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism”. Palingenetic here means rebirth, a renewed nation rising like a phoenix from the ashes of decadence and corruption. Although Griffin’s definition has the advantage of being relatively short, I prefer Paxton’s longer definition:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Both definitions contain elements that are clearly visible in the conduct of the second Trump administration. For Paxton fascism has stages, which is why he contends all nations have elements of fascism. Even so, he presciently and wisely warns that the descent into deep fascism will “depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power”.
That is why the acquiescence and support Trump has obtained in recent times from the tech billionaires and corporate America is most concerning for the future.
This brings us to the specific question of whether Trump himself is a fascist. The easy way out is to describe Trump as an “authoritarian” but not a fascist, because fascism implies the violent destruction of free institutions and requires a “drop everything” mode of resistance. Seeing fascism as having levels helps avoid this kind of all-or-nothing thinking. As it moves through its various stages in its lust for power, fascism becomes, in Paxton’s view, more extreme than authoritarianism. He writes that fascists have the “urge to reduce the private sphere to nothing”, whereas authoritarians allow:
private space for traditional “intermediary bodies” like local notables, economic cartels and associations, officer corps, families, and churches. These, rather than an official single party, are the main agencies of social control in authoritarian regimes … Authoritarians would rather leave the population demobilized and passive, while fascists want to engage and excite the public.
The Trump administration is well short of creating a one-party state in which Republicans have the widespread political and social power that the Third Reich held in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
I do think, however, that the fascist label is an appropriate way to describe the second Trump administration’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. For me, the key element in the slide into fascism is the use of violence against one’s domestic enemies for populist, ultranationalist reasons, with little regard for due process and often for performative ends.
The arrest, deportation and disappearance of immigrants, refugees, students and even citizens by ICE too often fits this description. The manner of these removals and the treatment of these people strongly suggests that cruelty is the point, not a related outcome of the removals. Fascism extols violence, with even accidental arrests and irrational actions appealing to fascists insofar as their ideology applauds “action for action’s sake”, as Umberto Eco put it in his famous essay “Ur-Fascism”. Eco goes on to contend that fascists believe:
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation … Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
For many of us, Trump will continue to be viewed as a carnival barker who is hard to take too seriously. But for minorities and immigrants within the United States, his fascism is deadly serious and menacing. Just because his fascism is delivered with a voice, fake tan and coiffed hairstyle that are easily satirised, we should not treat Trump as less harmful than other figures in his administration who look and sound the part.
Given ICE’s current behaviour and the way the rule of law is being flouted by the Trump administration, I believe people and governments everywhere should be rethinking their relationships with the United States.