Is Donald Trump a fascist? Judging by some of the speeches at last week’s Democratic Convention, key figures of American liberalism seem to think so. The election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in the sixty seconds allowed to her, was about ‘stopping fascism in the United States. That is what Donald Trump represents.’
Barack Obama was more coded, using the word democracy 18 times in his twenty-minute speech; he told listeners, ‘This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,’ and urged them to resist authoritarianism: ‘Don’t let them take away your democracy.’
Trump’s critics are right to see him as something new and different, a more nationalist and authoritarian form of Republican politics than that which dominated from the start of the Reagan era until 2016. But we need to distinguish between the parts of Trump’s politics which are like fascism – principally, the encouragement of a far-right street movement, for example by actively promoting and retweeting its activists – and the parts which aren’t.
Between 1920 and 1922, fascism emerged in Italy through a campaign of violence against the left and its organisations. Michael Ebner, the historian of these attacks, writes that ‘Blackshirted squadristi beat, shot, ritually humiliated and destroyed the property of peasants, workers, politicians, journalists and labour organisers … Socialists and the working classes were the primary victims.’
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