Ultimately, Trumpism must be called fascism for this simple reason:
As Ellul posits in "The Victory of Hitler," the military-industrial complex will always pose the threat of holocaust. Mass industrial processing of human beings is no different than the mass processing of cattle.
So long as there exists a genocidal impulse in human nature, that impulse will present itself in politics. When it does, it will follow certain known pathways.
- A strongman
- Lugenpresse, in our time "fake news"
- Xenophobic rhetoric
- Dehumanizing rhetoric
- Glorification of violence
- Expansionism
- A contempt for the rule of law and democratic norms and processes
There is no reason to believe that Trump or the movement behind Trump will not turn on the ovens.
Why has this instance of fascism been especially difficult to pin down? There are a variety of reasons
- An aging electorate slowly boiled in a pot of its own rancid partisanship
- Aging politicians unable to hold Trump accountable in a series of poor judgment calls
- A press which attempts to cater to middle points of view which are incoherent
These are on top of the already known propensity of moderates to look away from the things they find frightening. This can no longer be an option for those moderates. You know who they are.
But the particulars of this movement's intellectual flow yield an unusual confluence: the temporary alignment of three categories of the electorate:
- the "tech right," a bunch of easily duped moderates
- Old guard Republicans who are set in their distrust of Democrats
- New populist Republicans
Not every person who voted Trump is a fascist and I think it's safe to say that most are not fascists.
Many of the easily duped moderates on Twitter are quasi-fascist, for instance: they fall into the expansionist spell in a fit of young naive imperialism, but imagine a peaceful conquest in which the colonized simply vote to join the US. This is the height of their delusion.
But delusion is the stuff by which fascism is fabricated. The strongman is made into a god who can do no wrong.
When that strongman becomes detached completely from reality, arguably due to his age and temperament, so too do his followers. This fascist death spiral is documented elsewhere; suffice it to say that there is inherent dysfunction and incompetence to authoritarianism and the masses who believe in supermen are morons.
In any case, to understand contemporary American fascism, it's necessary to understand its philosophy in this descriptive sense.
Postmodern
Infused with a cynicism of media, betrayed by the old Republican guard in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this generation of political discourse lived in the shadow of the 9/11 conspiracies. Distrust in government was already high. Distrust in journalism was already high.
The narrative of the War On Terror was of the government misleading the people of the United States into war, with the help of the media.
This narrative was so strong that Trump's withdrawal from Afghanistan led many to proudly boast that Trump was the anti-war candidate. Trump's many warmongering aggressive actions could do nothing to defuse this argument. Nor could the straightforward observation that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was not Biden's choice.
Now Trump threatens to put soldiers in Panama. And there aren't enough thinkers left in the "tech right", the old guard Republicans, or the populist Republicans to notice this contradiction. (And if you're about to be on me about taking Trump at his word, shut the fuck up ya moderate scum.)
Broadly speaking, Trump's supporters were introduced to postmodernism through Jordan Peterson's promulgation of the term. Whether or not they intended to, they became more postmodern in their outlook as a result of familiarity with Peterson's fearmongering about "international postmodern marxism."
It's worth noting that Peterson, too, is not a fascist. Though he shares the habit of targeting young men for indoctrination in his preferred school of thought with Steve Bannon, Peterson is not a xenophobe nor a violent expansionist, just an unwitting agent of the fascist demiurge.
The height of postmodern thinking about Trumpism came from a cartoonist named Scott Adams, who made the accurate observation, the postmodern observation, that what would happen in Trump's first term would look like "two movies on one screen."
Scott Adams is too broken a mind to be a fascist. He couldn't even notice that if there are two contradictory stories, one of them must necessarily be false; that if there's a strongman boomer advocating for violence everywhere and spreading delusions, then the people who live in those delusions will live in a separate delusional reality.
My point, though, is that postmodernist dissection of narrative helped fuel denialism to greater heights of dizzying moderate stupidity.
Ur-Marxist
I hope to be recognized as one of the first to point out that Rush Limbaugh made an entire generation of Republican thinkers into Marxists. The ur-Marxism of the present populist Right is anti-Elite in precisely the way Marx describes. Arguably the assassination by Luigi Mangione, a denizen of Musk's twitter, is the class warfare Trump brought to bear.
Rush Limbaugh helped seed the fascism, but for him poking leftists just seemed fun and the 90s leftists arguably deserved the criticism, if not the end of the Fairness Doctrine.
But what Limbaugh did as the Cold War ended was read the doctrine of the Cold War's enemies: Marx. And he read Marx on air and performed this rhetorical incision: what if the elites weren't rich people, but were, in fact, Hollywood, Universities, and Journalism?
This became the rhetorical fashion of Fox News.
It becomes comical, then, that certain "tech right" thinkers believe they independently reinvented this observation.
The populism of the Right is marxist. Right down to "Rich Men North of Richmond."
It's just that they can't call it that because that would offend boomer ideological sensibilities.
Neo-Fascism
The actual fascists, who are, it's true, few in number comparatively (though their numbers did grow in this time period) operated in a hostile environment skillfully and without hesitation. Their ability to reflect on prior eras of fascism made them neo-fascists: informed by some of the previous failures of their white supremacist ideology to take hold.
They know their views are unpopular. When they're attempting to infiltrate a space, they test the water with letting their mask slip. When preying on communities with postmodernism, they plant a seed of doubt. They equivocate.
Boomer inaction with regard to the fascism of the present day has become a very great threat.
I think you can do better than this empty posturing.