American Fascism: Reed Faculty on Where We Are,Where We’ve Been, and What We Can Do
The second inauguration of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States–and the series of executive orders that followed–have been the centerpiece of discussion for the past month. Major media sources such as The New York Times and The Guardian have focused on historical parallels between the ideology of MAGA and Trumpism with far-right political movements such as the Nazi Party in 1920s-30s Germany. These parallels are especially apparent considering billionaire and recently appointed head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration (and his support for the far-right AfD party in Germany), and the repeated echoing of language associated with Nazi ideology, such as Trump saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
To dissect parallels between the rise of fascism in early-to-mid 20th century Europe and the MAGA movement today, the Quest spoke with three Reed faculty members: Professor of Political Science and Humanities Peter J. Steinberger, Associate Professor of Anthropology Anand Vaidya, and Visiting Associate Professor of History and Humanities Padraig Riley.
As the professors argued, there is a major distinction between what is characteristic of the infamous fascist movements of 20th century Europe, and what is distinctively American. In Steinberger’s words, “we have uncovered the deep racism that is characteristic of America, has been characteristic of America since the founding, and continues to be a deep and profound feature of American life, and now we have authorized it, and it has become official.”
Riley explained that “there's a danger in thinking of MAGA as a totally aberrant political form.” While the idea that MAGA is unprecedented has truth “in terms of the current constitutional crisis and the rampant quest for executive power,” Riley cautioned that “in terms of the objects of Trumpism, the obsession with undocumented migrants, xenophobia, the hyper nationalism, and in the first iteration, the white Christian nationalism... [there have] been variants of that all throughout American history that predate European fascism in the 20th century.”
Vaidya argued against trying to strictly define what is and what is not fascism: “it's kind of useful to think about fascism or fascist movements [not to] ‘check the boxes’... but to think about family resemblances between different moments, and to think about what's also radically new.” As an anthropologist, Vaidya considers how political movements have “direct genealogical ties with movements in other parts of the world, and [how] they situate themselves in relation to older political movements.”
Vaidya brought up political activist and philosopher Angela Davis to argue that American fascism is nothing new. As Vaidya explained, Davis argued that fascism in America had always existed, but the effects of it were mostly felt by African-Americans: “The relationship with the police in the United States, the long history of racial violence, meant that there was fascism in terms of a suspension of liberal universal rights for the African American population of the United States.
The method of silencing the general public is one unique part of American fascism. As Vaidya pointed out, “it hasn't actually been as necessary to use the state typically to silence people, that you can censor people very easily, using the employment relationship in the United States. The threat of unemployment, and with that, the threat of losing health care and housing and food, is often enough to do the work of shutting people up.”
Steinberger argued that one key dimension of MAGA is the ideology which centers around the distrust of the other. “I believe that MAGA is rooted in, ultimately, white nativism,” Steinberger explains, “it is a fear and distrust of the other, whatever the other happens to be. The other could be a matter of gender, could be a matter of sexual orientation, and equally important a matter of race, or perceived race, skin color, nationality, and so on.”
Vaidya also mentioned that the racialization and transphobia in MAGA are new compared to political movements of the past. Vaidya asserted that “the border creates new forms of in and out groups that don't necessarily map onto what we think of as racial categories” and that there is “something new going on in the US and around the world these days, around gender politics, [and] the family form” to produce “an organized transphobia, playing on patriarchal men's anxieties about their children and their relationship with their role as patriarch.”
Steinberger introduced another dimension to MAGA’s ideology: a rejection of a republican form of government. “Republicanism with a small ‘r’,” clarified Steinberger, “as in the discourse, deliberation, dispersed power, and through a process of mutual engagement, you come up with some kind of decision. There's a rejection of that. And that claim leads into, substantively, a rejection of regulations.” Steinberger added, “That republican form of government has always been challenged, but has always been resilient. It's not pretty, it's problematic, but nonetheless, republican government with a small ‘r’ has endured, and now it's being threatened.” Steinberger explained that a lot of the driving force behind MAGA ideology is “‘to minimize government and maximize perceived freedom.’” He continued, “The literature on political science of the 1960s and 70s demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt... that maximizing individual rationality does not conduce to collective rationality,” and how “it's almost impossible to achieve public goods without some kind of coercive regulation, without top-down government.”
The dismantling of the bureaucracy by the Trump administration “seems kind of radically new to me,” said Vaidya. “This is not what you'd expect, that this is kind of an authoritarian directly consolidating their power.” The relation may be to make room for tech capitalists like Elon Musk. “It looks like Elon Musk is being empowered, in a certain sense, to control... payments,” stated Steinberger, citing grants and payments to administrative agencies. He explained how if Musk “doesn't like something, he puts a stop to it... This is not American government. This is not republican government. This is the emergence of fascism.”
On the rise of tech capitalists, Vaidya explained that “the social safety net’s been broken... and the alternative is to get rich quick using crypto.” Vaidya cited cryptocurrency as “part of the appeal” of the Republican Party with “this new force of the tech capitalists signing on board with Trump. That's the piece that's really kind of baffling to me.” However, obsession with tech and cryptocurrency is not too far from fascist ideology. Fascism has “a kind of orientation, not just to the past, in the sense of this betrayed national community, this Volk, but also to the future,” Riley said in reference to the mention of flying to Mars in Trump’s inauguration. “[MAGA] does seem like it's just this hodgepodge, assembly of things,” remarked Riley, “but it is united in a cult of the leader that seems quite consistent with fascism.”
Riley believes that comparative politics works mainly to understand the context of a political phenomenon. “I do think we are in a crisis of... liberal democracy and a liberal capitalist order,” said Riley, “that is quite similar in some ways to the crisis that afflicted the interwar period, but it's clearly driven by really different phenomena. And the actors also seem like they have, again, analogous, but quite different motives.”
Steinberger spoke about comparisons with Nazi Germany: “I sometimes wonder if I haven't felt the last few years the way that my father felt in Hungary in the 1930s. My father's Hungarian, they get out in 1939–think about that date–Hungarian Jew. I wonder if my feeling is along those lines.” However, there are ways in which these comparisons can fall short. “I think there are disanalogies,” he argued. “I don't think we're going to have concentration camps, but I think there are analogies that are good analogies and they show how democracies die.” Understanding history, according to Riley, is less about comparison with the past, and more about “looking for those deep continuities and trying to figure out what those mean and how they constantly recur and reinvent themselves.” On the classic example of understanding history to not repeat the mistakes of the past, Riley said, “I'm not sure that’s quite possible, but at least it's better dissecting the weight of the past on the present while at the same time trying to figure out what is the field of struggle like at the moment, and in some sense, what should we do given that field?”
Steinberger notes a continuity across history of an “unholy alliance” between the people, or “demos,” and an absolute ruler, or “autocrat.” “Historically,” says Steinberger, “the demos has often undone itself in infatuation with the autocrat... What makes this even more bizarre is that, by any objective standards, the autocrat that they're in love with is a know-nothing clown.” The result, he explains, is “to aid and empower the fabulously wealthy at the expense of the people who are wildly supportive of this.”
What has a particular “family resemblance to the mid century fascist movements in Germany and Italy,” says Vaidya, is the large mass movement led by the demos and its relation to extralegal violence. Vaidya mentions the Proud Boys as an example of this, “these street groups that could carry out the violence that the state couldn't directly carry out, but they enjoyed a certain kind of impunity from having aligned state actors in power,” culminating in the January 6 insurrection for which the insurrectionists were pardoned by Trump.
However, the professors each had a message of hope to go along with their concerns about the new administration. Despite expressing that he was “very pessimistic,” Steinberger found two sources of hope in the use of lawsuits and the chance of political disaster. “We're going to have lots of lawsuits, and we're going to be dependent a great deal on judges and courts, and we'll see,” he explained. “Another forlorn possibility... is if all of this blows up in [Trump’s] face, if unemployment skyrockets, if inflation skyrockets, if the stock markets tank.” Even then, because, as Steinberger mentions, “there's a strong media operation out there which can show what's not really blowing up in our face," the dismantling of ideology due to disaster is difficult.
While, in the case of Kamala Harris, “running on protecting the current quasi-democratic order seems to fail,” said Riley, there’s “a way in which, potentially, we could see a resurgence of democratic opposition and other forms of resistance that could lead to real blowback.”
In Trump’s first administration, Riley talked about how there was “resistance focused on the figure of Trump. And now I think we really need to think about resistance focused on building political institutions that are going to last and turn the tide, and that will also be there for us when things are going to get worse.”
“It's really tricky,” explained Riley, “because, on the one hand, it's like there's a way in which not paying attention to Trump is in some ways right, if what he's trying to take is our attention. At the same time, you ignore it a little bit at your peril if it ends up meaning that he seizes power of the entire federal state and basically becomes a tyrant... We have to find a way out of exhaustion.”
Vaidya and Riley both believe that the best course of action for the individual is to focus on the change one can make in their local community. Riley urged people to “focus on the state level, and try to do what you can to check the malign influence of Trumpism in your local government, where you actually do have a lot of power, and in some sense, what you do will have a lot more impact on everyday life.”
“There's one very straightforward thing to do,” said Vaidya, “which is to look out for your undocumented and trans friends. I think that's an immediate thing everyone can do and should be doing.” “Whether or not you can directly change what happens in Washington, DC,” he argued, “you can help protect people you know, at Reed, in Portland, in Oregon, or in whatever kind of community you belong to.”