In Fascism's Shadow
The Trump Effect
By John Foster
The United States has always sought to remake Europe in its own image.
Thus, it should have come as no surprise that at last week’s Munich Security Conference, instead of chiding European leaders for not spending enough on defence, America’s new vice president attacked them for not being right-wing enough.
That this took place in Munich, the site of the notorious sellout of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938, made the historical resonances even more alarming.
The fact that JD Vance, a proponent of Great Replacement theory, then took the opportunity to meet up with Alternative für Deutschland leader Alice Weidel, a champion of remigration, was further indication of the Europe Washington wants today.
Vance’s Dachau visit the day before did little to dampen outrage over his meeting with Weidel, whose party leaders have repeatedly called for Germans to move on from the Holocaust.
The United States has now spent a month in the grips of Trumpism, which some are anxious to describe as fascism (or Nazism) which seems more like a simulacrum.
One of the more peculiar aspects of the Trump-Musk regime is that, in its most essential elements, it is a caricature of fascism rather than its legitimate offspring.
Trumpism is based on a narrative of crisis. While the president’s utterances often descend into mere word salad, his central themes emerge by their frequent repetition. America is beset by foreigners who, although they lack the right documentation, are hoovering up welfare benefits.
The US economy, as Donald Trump would have it, was at the point of collapse under President Biden. Its productivity and profitability have been sapped by China’s dumping industrial products on American markets and unfavourable trade deals with the European Union.
The US military was in a similarly parlous state. Its combat readiness had been fundamentally compromised by diversity initiatives and the influx of trans people joining the military with the intention of transitioning on the government’s dime.
In short, America is in a fraught condition. What is needed is a government ready to struggle with enemies both external (China, Mexico) and internal (government employees, racial minorities, liberals, and up to 60% of the population of the country).
Many of these contentions echo Trump’s predecessors in the twentieth century right. Ironically, the claims of the latter seem to be better grounded than those of the former. This is not to say that the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini weren’t based on lies. Of course, they were.
But the Germany in which the Führer came to power was in immense distress. The country was two decades removed from a war which cost more than two million German lives and for which Germany had been forced to accept responsibility and pay massive reparations.
The early 1920s had seen the country spiral into a bout of hyperinflation in which the annual inflation rate reached more than 1700%. After a period of stabilisation in the mid-1920s, the German government became increasingly dysfunctional.
As the worldwide depression caused increasing economic crisis, the political centre evacuated. Street violence between the private military forces of the extreme left and right was commonplace between 1918 and 1933.
Hitler was fond of pointing to these facts, although his appropriation of these conditions was fundamentally dishonest. His attribution of Germany’s defeat in World War I to a stab in the back delivered by Jews and socialists was pure, malevolent fantasy.
If political violence had become epidemic, it was the result of a dynamic initiated by Hitler’s use of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) to disrupt the events and speeches of his political rivals.
Mendacity was a crucial element of Hitler’s political practice. But he was referring (however dishonestly) to conditions that existed. Germans were hurting, and thus, it is unsurprising that they were ready to hear a narrative in which they were the wronged parties.
Trump and his fellows on the far right don’t have such benefits to leverage in the United States. Inflation in the US and Europe has been higher than in the last couple of decades but still relatively low.
There is no modern cognate for the Great Depression, although the financial trauma of 2008 and after might be thought of as having had effects on public consciousness similar to those of the German currency collapse of the early 1920s.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the centre of political fantasy is migrants and their undermining of the welfare state and white, Christian civilisation.
In the US, several important sectors of the economy (agriculture, construction, etc.) would function much less well (i.e. more expensively) without the addition of hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers fleeing crisis-ridden southern countries.
This system is cynical in the extreme. It involves the creation of an underclass working for wages and under conditions that no American citizen would accept. Donald Trump’s demonisation of illegal aliens further heightens the heartlessness.
There is a measure of similarity in the European situation. If refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and North Africa are less imbricated in the productive circuits of European economies, there is a remarkable similarity in their place in the far-right imaginary.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, for example, will decry the tragic situation of South Asian labourers getting killed on Italian farms but at the same time spearhead initiatives to subsidise Maghrebi militias imprisoning migrants to stop them from reaching Europe.
As far as violence in America’s streets goes, it is pretty much a one-sided affair. By and large, the demonstrations surrounding Black Lives Matter were peaceful. To the extent they weren’t, it was because of Proud Boys and other lumpen extremists doing their best to stir up trouble.
The central feature of Trumpism, and the point at which it differs most starkly from European fascism, has been the dismantling of the administrative capacities of the US government.
Both Hitler and Mussolini dramatically increased the size of their respective governments. Mussolini’s Italy was increasingly bureaucratised. Hitler’s Germany saw the shadow state of the SS added to the already existing structures of government.
President Trump, by contrast, has been on a cutting spree. Ostensibly, this is supposed to be a cost-cutting measure. However, it is clear that the real purpose is the systematic punishment of federal bureaucrats he views as having thwarted him during his first term.
Finally, and not least importantly, there is the question of communism. One of the things that drove the formation of fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was the threat of communism.
Whether communism was a threat is a matter of debate. But it was clear that it was something that existed. For Trump, as for other paragons of the far right, contemporary communism is a sublime object A, a nullity, the non-existence of which means that it can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Hardly any aspect of liberalism has not been labelled as communistic either by the president or one of his imitators, in a typically Red Scare way. To paraphrase Voltaire, if communism hadn’t existed, it would have had to be invented.
There is a lot of discussion about whether Trumpism or any of its cognates constitute fascism. Certainly, they are fascistic. However, the question that needs addressing is whether the underlying forces that gave rise to these phenomenon are the same.
This may seem academic in the worst sense of the word. There is a lot to be done that is not dependent on a deep understanding of the roots of this phenomenon. Solidarities must be forged, and marginalised communities defended first.
But in the long run, how we oppose the shift to the right will depend on what we ultimately think it is. In the meantime, it’s safe to say that a new kind of fascism is coalescing and that it’s what comes after Hitler and Mussolini. Without a doubt, many of their victims are the same.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.