Donald Trump is a Fascist, and It’s Time We Stop Pretending Otherwise
The U.S. military has begun appearing on U.S. streets in response to protests against police brutality and murder. The president has threatened more aggressive action, and fears abound about whether Trump can use the Insurrection Act to override the Posse Comitatus Act (an 1878 law that limits the president’s ability to deploy the military on U.S. soil). Meanwhile, in his latest tantrum, Trump has issued an executive order to attack the lawsuit protections granted to social media companies under his false belief that a notification of a fact check on a publicly available tweet constituted censorship. Lawsuits challenging the order have already been filed, and we wait now to see what will be the next step in the increasingly unhinged rants and flails of a president who too often seems to live in an alternate reality. In all of this, I’ve pondered a question I asked my students in a college writing class in 2017: is Donald J. Trump a fascist? Throughout the semester, they read non-fiction and literature ranging from Umberto Eco’s “Ur-fascism” to Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here to better understand what fascism is and the influence it had on U.S. culture. Back in 2017, the answer was a definitive “no, but.” No, he’s not a fascist, but he is an authoritarian. No, he’s not a fascist, but his behavior is unsettling. No, he’s not a fascist, but we should still be concerned. The question is one that the nation has struggled with since Trump’s election. There’s a good reason for that: fascism is, for most U.S.-Americans, an ill-defined concept. Much like the phrase “science fiction,” most of us are only equipped to identify it when we see it, and even then, not very effectively. I sought to combat that in my fascism course, and I’ll turn to some of that knowledge here to once more consider that infamous question.
“Protest. But Not Like That. Or Like That.”: U.S.-America’s Self-Imposed Riots
To suggest that protest in the United States is in its blood would be an understatement. Even a flippant view of the creation of this nation would require a recognition that the very founding of the United States was predicated on a string of protests. The casual references to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and other events in the decades leading up to the American Revolution would have to recognize the train of events as inevitable stepping stones to violence. The founding American story is an easily discernible hill that one must climb, fall down, and climb again: peaceful protest, destruction of property, looting and rioting, rebellion, and revolution. Yet, in the grand scheme of U.S.-American culture, we have often segregated our favorite variations of the pattern from the less comfortable ones. U.S.-Americans can joke about the Boston Tea Party or raise their fists over the Revolutionary War, but the same fervor and pride is noticeably absent when it comes to the same patterns concerning racial injustice, as in the case of the Slave Insurrection of 1741 or Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. U.S.-Americans during the era of slavery responded to possibility of slave revolts not by recognizing the immorality of the slavery system but by stifling dissent, increasing their control on slaves, and preserving white society. Later, U.S.-Americans would split their views on the institution of slavery while preserving a segregated society — by law in the South and by design in the north. Later still, U.S.-Americans were split again on the Civil Rights movement, with far too many supporting the use of police violence to stop dissent (with the help of the FBI). And today, that familiar response is here again.
“Finding Hope”: The History Reading List
Not too long ago, I announced a little project called “Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States.” I set as a goal to begin with a series of general histories of the United States to see if understanding the full line of this country’s history can change how I understand the concept of “hope.” And now that project can finally begin! For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting on the books I selected for the project to arrive. More particularly, the first two books in the chronology (listed below and shown at the top of the image). All the others got here in record time, but for some reason, the books I needed to even begin took a little extra time. But now the wait is over. Here’s the magic reading list for the first phase of “Finding Hope”: