Misplaced Priorities: On the relative unimportance of what we call Trump.

Listening to political diagnoses can sometimes feel like the doctor trip from hell. Your back is killing you and you are experiencing random bolts of pain through your legs and your hair is falling out but, all the doctor can tell you is it isn’t this or that deadly condition. Get more rest, reduce your stress load, take some warm baths and you’ll likely feel better tomorrow. Some of this might be in your head, really; at the least, all your test results came back negative.

For those who bring up fascism when discussing the constellation of terrors that produced the Trump regime, being told that they really should stop using that term can produce a similar experience of confusion. Yet there are several public commentators who not only insist upon the irrelevance of fascism to understanding Trumpian populism but seem to think that to draw parallels between the two is in fact dangerous and counterproductive. The New Left Review recently published one of the most extensive of these essays by historian Dylan Riley, and it is specific and substantial enough to deserve a thorough response. While Riley undoubtedly masters the history of midcentury fascism and makes an argument for why such diagnoses are risky, his analysis is nonetheless shaped by historicist assumptions and leaves us, much like a frustrated patient, without any compelling political strategy for addressing the ills of the political moment.

It is important to recognize all that Riley gets right. Several dynamics that played a crucial role in the rise of midcentury fascism are either absent from contemporary geopolitics or so transformed as to be fundamentally different cases. The major Western powers are not continuously plotting aggressive territorial expansion, and communist movements and left-socialist parties are not threatening to take over the state apparatus, whether through electoral or revolutionary means. Our current economic climate, while bearing some similarities, also differs significantly. (Perhaps most importantly in this regard, the major powers are not seeking to solve their economic problems of overproduction via territorial and colonial expansion.) Probably the most compelling point Riley makes is the unwillingness of the citizenry of Westerners and Americans to die for their country – an oft-noted irony in political analyses of the hyper-nationalistic dimensions of American political culture.

However, many of the key factors highlighted by Riley may look different in the specifics, but still contain significant similarities in their effects. Take, for example, Riley’s point that unemployment rates, which played a key role in creating the insecurity and panic that made the nationalist projects of fascist parties compelling, rest today at healthy and even impressive levels. This is significant, but not absolutely; unemployment rates may look very different than they did generations ago, but the jobs represented by low unemployment numbers contain more and more low-wage, insecure positions with no benefits and no real promise for promotion or improvement. As unions were decimated and the service industry replaced secure industrial jobs, economic anxiety became one of the most essential characteristics of American life. Similarly, while the crisis within the Democratic Party about how to respond to the rise of left-liberal candidates like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pales in comparison to the potential of mass socialist parties to wrestle control from economic elites, this difference may be lost on conservative opinion leaders, Trump foremost among them. There is a difference between a real threat and an imagined one, but in the minds of Trump voters, the vortex of paranoia can produce some of the same results.

Yet Riley’s narrow historicism keeps him from recognizing these similarities. If the problem isn’t a specific kind of overproduction, with a specific form of alliance between fascist parties and economic elites, and if there isn’t a real threat of revolutionary insurgence, then it is not, as he calls it, “classical fascism.” Of course it isn’t; but Riley’s myopic focus on these details would lead one to conclude that “classical” fascism is the only kind of fascism worthy of the name. Yet since when did we decide to be so restrictive with political labels? American postwar liberalism was a very different creature than eighteenth century “classical” liberalism, yet most scholars acknowledge that they belong on the same evolutionary bush.

Most importantly, Riley leaves out of his dissection of midcentury fascism any analysis of racism. This seems odd, considering that fascist white supremacy resulted in one of the worst crimes in human history. Historians can and have argued that anti-Semitism itself didn’t play a central role in launching the Nazis to power – hatred of Jews, while certainly widespread, was an obsession brought to a new level by Hitler and some of the other top brass of the party, and, well, {enter banality of evil argument here.} But by ignoring racism, Riley and other sticklers for historicism miss how important preserving white supremacy is to our present moment, and how its centrality has set into motion dynamics which, in their effects, do in fact have a lot in common in midcentury conditions.

They key point here is this: while there may not be any imminent threat of socialist or communist takeover, there certainly is a threat to white supremacy. As countless commentators have pointed out, it is no coincidence that Trump’s victory followed on the heels of eight years of a black president. The presidency of Barack Obama sent America’s subterranean racist id into overdrive, dredging even the most old-fashioned and socially unacceptable forms of white supremacy up to the surface. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter pushed an antiracist radicalism far to Obama’s left into the public eye for the first time since the 1960s, a parallel made painfully clear by a million conservative and liberal pundits distorting the legacy of Martin Luther King to lecture BLM activists.

It is true that a threat to racial status is not identical to a threat to class status – yet to assume that the fear of the ruling classes cannot be put to fascist ends unless what they fear are commies is to arbitrarily privilege the role played by class and invest it with qualities which, for no particular reason, can supposedly only be put into play by a threat along class lines. But in America, race plays at least as central a role, if not more, in politics at every level and in every register. There remains portions of the Left – sometimes from an orthodox Marxist position, sometimes not – that refuse to recognize or accept this, ever-acknowledging the importance of antiracist work but nonetheless always viewing the dynamics of racism as a byproduct of the class struggle. Therefore, the deep need of Trump voters to Make America White Again cannot be invested with the same world-changing power to shape history.

To the everyday American concerned about Trump, however, the racism of his base is usually their primary concern behind the fascist analogy. There is good reason for this; when you visit the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem) the exhibits begin by documenting how Nazis demonized and otherized the Jews long before the killing began. In the popular imagination, violent white supremacy stands out as the most important characteristic of the Nazis. Granted, there are some unfortunate consequences to this – a belief, for example, that the Nazis themselves were socialists, a mistake that erases the fact that they built their momentum on the fear of socialist revolution and that radical leftists were among their first victims of deadly oppression. Nonetheless, in the context of American history, this concern makes sense.

It is also important to ask if historians and academics are the only ones with any right to weigh the relative importance of the consequences of fascism. If you type “fascism” into google, the definition that pops up highlights authoritarian ultranationalism and social and economic control. Some of these qualities can be seen fairly clearly in Trumpian politics, others not so much, but they are at least categories that are capacious enough to provide a meaningful compare and contrast. In the hands of historians like Riley, however, whatever echoes of the Reich worried contemporaries may hear in Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the press, conduct trade wars, demonize immigrants and encourage violence against opponents are merely the hallucinations of political novices that don’t know their history. When we wag our finger at people for hearing these echoes, we risk undermining any argument for the public importance of history; why bother investigating the past if historicists will quickly explain to you why it is not relevant to the present?

Of course, the scholars engaged in pushing back against the fascist comparison must think there is a very good reason for doing so – something is at stake and confronting it requires dismantling the Trump-as-fascist meme.  In this regard Riley does much better than some, making a clear and compelling case for how regarding Trump as a fascist could backfire. “The political logic of pinning the ‘fascist’ label on Trump is plain enough,” he writes. “It means uniting behind the programme of the present Democratic leadership—Pelosi, Schumer, the Clintons, the Obamas and other superintendents of the oligarchic order; the very project that gave Trump the White House in 2016.” This argument definitely holds some water. More than a few Democratic voters argued during the primaries that while Bernie appealed to them, they believed Clinton more likely to win and wouldn’t risk putting Trump in the White House to pursue a more ideal candidate. This is not, however, the only way a critique of Trump as fascist can cut, a fact borne out by the common association, on the Left, of Trump with fascism. (Most Antifa activists, for example, would not flinch at the comparison.)

Focusing solely on Trump also prevents Riley from considering the broader implications of his rise. While he appears to be responding to liberals fixated on Trump himself, there is no need to repeat their analytical mistake and, in the process, dismiss the disturbing resurgence of fascist politics and organizations. From frequent appearances of white supremacist flyers on campuses across the country, to the echoes of “blood and soil” in Charlottesville, Trump’s victory has clearly encouraged and emboldened what used to be an almost entirely underground community of neofascists to re-emerge on the public stage. It is here where the objections of Riley and other political commentators to the fears of fascist revival seem particularly tone deaf; while in a historical sense, today’s American neo-Nazis may not be proper fascists, their embrace of Trump as their leader absolutely cannot be minimized as the enthusiasm of historical amateurs.

Riley also makes the considerable mistake of refusing to provide any framework for which to understand what, exactly, kind of threat Trump represents. Going through several models of leadership, he ultimately concludes that he doesn’t fit any mold, and there’s no real defining him. This is particularly unhelpful, on both the conceptual and political level. For all the flaws of understanding Trump as fascist, at least it provides citizens with a working idea of the dangers of his politics. To leave people without any word or concept with which to summarize what is at stake – to shrug and say, “well, it’s really complicated” – is to prefer academic precision to politically effective communication. That, I would argue, is something we cannot afford to indulge.

But it is particularly hard to get scholars to tolerate the idea that conceptual precision does not always lead to an effective politics. While the guiding gut instinct might be denied, at the root of much hand-wringing over “knowing your history” is the assumption that if a phenomenon is imprecisely labeled by the opposition, that movement is doomed. While it is absolutely crucial for any leftist politics to be rooted in a truthful account of oppression, inequality, and resistance, myopically debating the details of how this translates to rhetoric reflects a misplaced faith in the importance of exact analysis. Riley’s article does not participate as much in this policing, identifying as it does particular liberals making fleshed-out claims in formal essays. Nonetheless, the concern with the “inaccuracy” of the fascist label bleeds out into the liberal and left-liberal community in a manner that repeatedly misses the larger point. While Trump’s base may not look like Hitler’s base or Mussolini’s base in every regard, a few things are clear: they are racist, they are nationalist, and they are desperately afraid of losing their privileges. This is why the fascist label resonates with so many Americans, and this is also why it makes for an effective rallying cry against Trumpism.

It certainly is the case that there are many historical differences, some of them important, some of them insignificant, between the European world of the 1930s and the contemporary American scene. To distinguish between the important and insignificant differences is a more helpful approach than scoffing at any and all comparisons drawn. Enzo Traverso shows the virtues of this approach with his concept of “post-fascism,” a phrase and an analysis which simultaneously acknowledges that the contemporary far right is not identical to the old yet recognizing, as he puts it, that “saying that a historical break took place with past models does not mean that a global left would not need memory and a historical consciousness.” This rings particularly true when we remember that any left that hopes to change our political horizons cannot be made up solely of professional historians and academics and therefore cannot be overly burdened with self-absorbed debates about which analytical framework most precisely captures our current moment. After all, if history teaches us anything it is that even the most educated among us do not always see the storm clearly in the midst of it; humbly refraining from expending too much energy on tearing down opposing interpretations therefore seems called for.

Ever since the horrors of WWII, the word fascism has been how Westerners have referred to a particular version of state power that seeks to crush opponents and uses a racialized scape goat to legitimize their efforts in doing so. Insofar as Trump is incompetent and impotent, he is most definitely a Very Bad Fascist. But historical memes appear not out of any studied or deliberate process of definition, but from a collective cultural experience and consciousness. I would be happy to embrace and promote any new conceptual scheme with which to understand Trump’s rise if it can be shown to resonate with the public at large and help us understand the present moment. But to chastise others who are trying to create a sense of urgency for being bad analysts while refraining from providing a different term or fleshed out label with which to organize others is to sacrifice mobilization at the altar of historicism. Instead, we must work with what we have inherited from our cultural and political past – recognizing differences when due but also realizing that political language is more than a concrete claim; it is also a cry for solidarity that must resonate deeply, and echo widely, in the public imagination.