You know the joke about the three guys who encounter dog shit? They smell it, touch it, taste it, confirm that it’s dog shit and walk away glad that they didn’t step in it. America’s gradual acceptance of fascism reminds me of that joke, only it differs in this respect: after we saw, touched, tasted and confirmed it, we willingly stepped in it.
As far back as the 2016 presidential debates, historians, pundits and journalists were drawing attention to Trump’s likeness to the fascists of yore. Just after the debates, when a colleague asked me who I thought would win, Clinton or Trump, I said, “The fascist dictator we so richly deserve.” Why deserve? Because the lower-middle class (petty bourgeoisie) in this country were making demands of the government that the government couldn’t meet. Because conservative radio commentators and Fox News had been feeding the country “red meat” politics for years in the form of conspiracy theories, untruths, false accusations and blame reversals and demonizing the left. Because establishment democrats persisted in being polite, modest and reasonable; refused to tout their accomplishments; and presumed that their record and the facts would suffice to appease the American lower-middle class, who suffer the insolvency of the working poor and envy the financial security of the rich. Because democrats had no message to counter the republican politics of power at the cost of competency and victory at the cost of truth. Because, in their ethical superiority, democrats refused to take Trump seriously, just as the establishment politicians of Germany and Italy had refused to take Hitler and Mussolini seriously; they regarded Trump as a showbiz bozo with no experience in government who would surely fail to stay in power should he win.
Nominating someone so obviously unfit to be president was a good way for republicans to punish liberal democrats for being so well-meaning, modest, reasonable and effective. The democrats had saved the automotive companies and financial institutions from collapse, successfully legislated for affordable healthcare and pulled the country out of the Great Recession, and they did it in the face of fervid republican opposition. The republicans welcomed a strongman who could make use of straw men and promise to fight his own fabricated threats. They saw that if they couldn’t beat the democrats on their record, they could at least beat them over the head with a bombastic thug. Trump, a reality-TV plutocrat, was the only chance republicans had to re-inflict their economically eviscerating melange of corporate subsidies, tax cuts for the rich, industry deregulation, wasteful wars, government expansion (e.g., DHS) and endless borrowing to pay for it all. Only a big, loud, pretentious personality would be able to obscure the legislative incompetence and fiscal negligence they had cloaked in patriotism.
Allowing Trump to figurehead the party was easy, because republicans had long since integrated the irrational into their policymaking. For years they had kowtowed to the religious right, white nationalists, militia groups, gun advocates and agrarian populists. They had already agitated their base with madness and lies through their media outlet, Fox News, and the Tea Party. Pitting a narcissist, chauvinist, fraud, racist and chronic liar against an eminently qualified but entitled woman wasn’t a strategy so foreign to the alternative reality in which their support base lived. Even if their plutocrat candidate lost, as they expected him to, it would popularize their brand with one hell of an entertaining show.
After the 2016 election, Americans got down on their hands and knees and sniffed fascism. Immediately after Trump took office, the journalists, pundits and experts buried their noses in the scandals, blunders and bullshit issuing from the Oval Office. Trump’s incessant abuse of power, for which he was impeached, never gave them time to step back, draw the historical parallels and classify him as a fascist. Though he blatantly demonstrated all the general characteristics of a fascist—the ethnic nationalism; fear mongering; repetitive lying; conspiracy trafficking; self-aggrandizement; narcissism; chauvinism; pretentiousness; militarization of supporters; disregard for truth, facts and reality; contempt for the institutions of government; persecution of intellectuals and experts; demand for unconditional loyalty; domination of the media; politicization of everything, including the weather; nostalgia for past greatness; and, of course, outspoken reverence for fascist dictators present and past—experts on the history of fascism, such as Robert Paxton, were hesitant to apply the term fascist to Trump. They argued that he was bound by the legislative apparatus of a strong federal republic and unable to exert the sort of power that fascists had wielded the past. But they failed to recognize that fascist leaders have always piggy-backed on existing government institutions. They have always seized control from within the political establishment. As John Ganz notes, the rise of fascism “has much more to do with negotiations between established political factions and elites.” Because Trump advocated free speech (either solely on his partisan platform or unchecked on social media) and supported neoliberal economics, the republican establishment was able to reassure themselves that, though fascistic, he was not quite a fascist. As for the predatory scowl, maniacal ramping, ritual hand signs, clownish posturing and covert signaling to his goon squad, which were emblematic of the fascists of yore, they dismissed it as showbiz. There was also a general denial of his fascism in the form of that exceptionalism which Sinclair Lewis mocked in the title of his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. For example, just after the election, Obama said, “It’s not the end of the Republic.”
On January 6, 2021, America got down on its hands and knees, tasted fascism and confirmed that, yes, Trump must be a fascist. It took our very own Beer Hall Putsch, March on Rome, Veteran’s Riot—whatever historical parallel you want to cite—for experts to unhesitatingly use the F-word. In keeping with the fascist tradition of projection and reversal, Trump blamed radical liberals for the violent insurrection, while continuing to promulgate the cause of it, the Big Lie that the election was stolen. None of this should have come as a surprise, however. All along he had been rallying his white nationalist supporters—“Stand back and stand by Proud Boys”—and letting his opponents know that his “very fine” paramilitary goons were armed and ready. All along he had threatened to remain in office at any cost, to not concede defeat and to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. All along he denied his obligation to respect the laws, traditions and conventions of the Republic.
Though the experts were ready to call Trump a fascist after his “day of love,” democrats were still hesitant to besmirch Trump and his republican allies with the F-word. They persisted in their political politeness all through Biden’s term, until the day of undeniability faded into the day of unaccountability (November 5, 2024). Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should have disqualified Trump from holding office. He’d incited an insurrection, conspired to overturn a legitimate election and conspired to obstruct a congressional proceeding. The prosecution, indictment and sentencing for these crimes should have been swift and unforgiving. But for all four years of Biden’s term Trump was allowed him to influence congressional and state elections, consolidate financial support, covet classified documents, purge Congress of non-loyalists and distract the nation with more antics and legal impediments. He even skated on the civilian charges for which Mitch McConnel, Master of the Obvious, reassured Americans that he would be held to account.
When John Kelly, retired Marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, came out two weeks before the 2024 election with the understatement that Trump fit “into the general definition of fascist,” we were too close to step back. It was clear that Trump was going to crush his opponent, a practically invisible vice president with no brand and no runway to build one. Biden had chosen Harris as his running mate in 2020 not only because she was professionally qualified and a woman but because she was, unlike Gretchen Whitmer and Elizabeth Warren, a mixed-race woman of immigrant parents. Harris was the embodiment of everything that Trump hated and had been railing against for over a decade. She was a living example of the “birther,” “white replacement” and “anchor baby” conspiracies, not to mention an ideal target for the false claim that her sex, race and immigrant parents were the only reasons she became vice president. She was the embodiment and architect of everything that Trump openly opposed. She ran a polite, competent, mildly negative, last-minute campaign in a country weary of identity politics, afraid of foreigners, bogged down with inflation and captivated by a cult figure. The campaign took place in an alternative reality that the autocrat and his supporters had cultivated for years, a reality in which Harris served as the perfect straw woman. And that was how in November of 2024 Americans did one better than the guys in the dog shit joke and stepped into fascism.