Is Donald Trump a fascist? Historians cannot reach a consensus

American scholars and journalists have long debated their country’s national identity. Twenty years ago, the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published his book, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate, a title typical of this soul-searching.

Huntington made much in this book, written in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, of the legacy of the American founding fathers, and the “American Creed” initially formulated by Thomas Jefferson, the product of a distinct Anglo-Protestant culture. Huntington identified key elements of that culture: “the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, the rights of individuals, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try and create a heaven on earth”.

As Huntington characterised it, liberal political beliefs undermined such unifying aspirations due to “feelings of guilt towards those who they saw as victims of exclusion, discrimination and aggression”. Traditional pillars of identity came to be seen as symbols of supremacy, but what was best for America, he averred, was a shared belief in the pre-eminence of the foundational culture.

Many liberal American scholars excoriated Huntington’s assertions, suggesting he was stoking fear, identifying ominous threats and pushing nativist sentiments against immigrants; Mexican-Americans could only share the American dream, Huntington insisted, if they “dream in English”.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? Historians cannot reach a consensus

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Huntington predicted various possible futures for America, including one where, due to challenges to the “core of American culture”, native white Americans would seek to “revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity to create an America that would exclude, expel or suppress people of other racial, ethnic or cultural groups”. Trumpism has embraced that future and academics have thus devoted much time recently to debating whether they are dealing with a new fascism, pointing to the refusal to accept democratic election results, the willingness of right-wing groups to use violence and misinformation, and the building of alliances with white supremacist forces.

But various books, including last year’s collection, Fascism in America, edited by US historians Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, have also showcased the historians who argue Trumpism lacks many of fascism’s defining features, such as a “uniform galvanising ideology”, and, unlike the fascism of the 1930s, has appealed more to the elderly than the young, and that Donald Trump has espoused free market deregulation instead of corporatism, and has not advocated an expansionist foreign policy.

[ Fintan O’Toole writes in 2018: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow ]

Writing in 2021, leading historian of fascism, Richard J Evans, rejected the claim that Trump was a fascist; he acknowledged the “strong echoes of fascism”, but wrote: “What drove fascism and nazism was the desire to refight the first World War, but this time to win it. Preparing for war, arming for war, educating for war and fighting a war defined fascist theory.”

Trump, in contrast, has not been “consumed by a desire for foreign conquest and the creation of an American empire. He is an isolationist.” His encouragement of unrest and racism “bears no comparison to the hundreds of thousands of armed and uniformed stormtroopers and Squadristi that the Nazi and fascist leaders deployed on to the streets daily in the 1920s and early 1930s to intimidate, beat up, arrest, imprison and often kill political opponents”.

Nor, suggested Evans, could Trump create the superimposing fascist state apparatus: “Congress has prevailed over Trump’s attempts to sideline or undermine it, and judges, including his own supreme court appointees, have adhered to and interpreted the law in ways that have sometimes thwarted Trump’s ambitions, notably rejecting his legal challenges to the presidential election… the past four years of mayhem have demonstrated the resilience of American institutions, the law and the constitution.”

[ Are we over-using terms like ‘far-right’, ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’? ]

Evans also saw Trump at that point as too old and chaotic to endure. He might want to revisit some of his conclusions, given recent developments, Biden’s obvious frailties, the promised future of Trumpian revenge and Trump’s assertion that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”. Evans was rightly emphasising the need for historical context, but his view has been contested. In 2017, his fellow historian of fascism, Robert O Paxton, suggested that being authoritarian, devoid of any commitment to rule of law or ideology did not necessarily make Trump a fascist, but Paxton changed his mind after the 2021 Capitol riots; the fascist label was now “not just acceptable, but necessary”.

Paxton’s conclusions came on the back of decades of researching fascism; his book The Anatomy of Fascism, also published 20 years ago, defined fascism as “a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline in which a mass based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites abandons democratic liberties and pursues internal cleansing and external expansion”. There are enough boxes ticked there to ensure the debate about American fascism, or a version of it, will continue.