Trump, fascism and the authoritarian turn

First published at Spectre.

When leading Democrats debate whether Trump is a fascist, they’re asking if he’ll change the voting system so that they can’t win an election again.1 When Marxists debate the same question, we do not isolate what will happen to the politicians from what will happen to society as a whole. Exploring the question of fascism means asking whether Trump will follow through with his threats and actually dismiss tens of thousands of civil service employees, abolish overtime pay law, outlaw public sector unions, and eliminate the federal minimum wage. What we’re debating is whether he will apply the open violence of the state to deport people in numbers never seen before. We’re asking whether he will start the wars he would need with Canada, Panama or Denmark, in order to fulfil his fantasies of territorial expansion. If we liken him to a fascist we aren’t necessarily saying he will succeed in carrying out all of these tasks. We’re asking whether he will do enough of them, unleashing such a wave of violence against his political and racial enemies, so that in four years’ time the United States, (and therefore the world) will be a crueler place than it is now.

I am not making comparisons with the past — that of historic fascism — because I am mesmerized by it or because I want anyone else to be. Rather, we should understand fascism as one of a series of broader techniques to deepen counterrevolutionary power that repeatedly suggest themselves to any authoritarian trying to deepen their rule under conditions of capitalism. We can use the history of authoritarian success against itself. We can draw on it to explore which supposed obstacles to authoritarianism are likely to fail and which will prove more robust in opposition to a regime that is still deepening its power over us. As I will argue, so far Trump has been governing with a degree of authoritarianism that is equivalent to fascism, certainly early Italian fascism. However, for the label to remain accurate, a regime must continuously radicalize, innovating in response to events, crossing thresholds including the use of mass violence against enemies in society and the state, and culminating in war and genocide. It is not yet obvious that there is such a degree of popular anger and enthusiasm for the regime to keep on radicalizing in that distinctive fascist way. In history, there are examples of regimes that begin with a burst of fury before stabilizing into ordinary capitalist authoritarianism (Spain, Portugal, most military dictatorships). By considering this evidence, I will show that, rather than concentrating on applying the (at times, misleading) label of fascist to Trump, the important thing is to learn the lessons from historical antifascist movements to formulate a robust counterpolitics to the Trumpian agenda.

Opportunities for the right: The unity between leader and movement

When the interwar antifascists explained their enemy, they settled on one factor that explained fascism’s destructive power. In contrast to all previous right-wing conservative or authoritarian politics, fascism was the first attempt to use the masses against democracy. Clara Zetkin, who in the 1900s was one of the leaders of the socialist women’s movement, and in the 1920s a spokeswoman for the Communist International, put it like this: “The fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wider elements of the population … in terms of the social composition of its troops, fascism encompasses forces that can be extremely uncomfortable and even dangerous for bourgeois society.”2

Trotsky warned from exile in 1931 that German fascism had become a real mass movement, that it organized the unemployed and significant numbers of workers alongside small owners. “The big bourgeoisie,” he wrote, “likes fascism as little as any man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled.”3

Both Hitler and Mussolini built a fascist party, then used it as a counterweight to the pressures on them to conform with mainstream politics. Each leader began as a minority, trying to recruit within a larger mass movement of counterrevolutionaries. In Italy, Mussolini’s first supporters, the fasci di Combattimento, were a mix of veterans and those too young to have served in the 1914–18 war. They were choosing between Mussolini and his rivals (the poet Marinetti, the adventurer D’Annunzio). They chose fascism, ultimately, because that party pioneered the use of violence against the left. Communists were beaten, kidnapped, menaced, or killed. Between March and May 1921, fascists destroyed 119 Chambers of Labour, 17 newspapers and printing workers, 59 People’s Houses, 83 Peasants’ Leagues, 131 Socialist Clubs, and 151 Cultural Clubs.4 The violence began outside of the state. Then, as it continued, police officers participated and both judges and conservative politicians expressed their support for it. The violence ended a whole period of successful workers’ struggles.

Fascism in Germany also began within the milieu of the Freikorps (the private armies that flourished in Germany in the aftermath of military defeat). There, too, the starting point was violence against the left: between January 1919 and June 1922, there were 376 political murders in Germany; 354 of them were carried out by supporters of the Freikorps or other far-right groups. The victims were Socialists or Communists.5

Both of the interwar fascist parties were militia parties. They used their private armies in a distinctive way — treating il doppiopetto e il manganello (the double-breasted suit and the bludgeon) as equal priorities. The parties were serious about standing in elections and taking power through them. They were no less committed to their own version of armed struggle. Once the streets were under fascist control, they would be able to take on the state and reshape it until the state delivered, at every moment and in every task, the fascist’s ideal of homes for their people, schools for their people, and jail (or worse) for their enemies.

Both Hitler and Mussolini employed their militia sparingly, most actively in the periods before they were in government, or before they had broken the previous Liberal Italian and German states. The militias were used to terrify liberal and center-right judges and politicians and prevent them from making any sort of protest. They were the loaded gun on the table — you couldn’t limit or restrict fascism, you could only defeat it in a bloody civil war.

The way in which Trump comes closest to the politics of the 1920s is through similar dynamics of building, emboldening, and adapting to a street movement. He has an independent base of supporters and even a militia that supports him. No one else on the US or European right has anything like Trump’s relationship to a violent street movement. The relationship differs in only superficial ways from the interwar years: Most people are recruited online rather than in person; They do not pay subscription fees to him. Rather, they buy the ties and earrings, wallets, wines, and mugs which Trump advertises.

In common with the street movements of the 1930s, today’s street-fighting far right has already employed forms of violence against the left and gender or sexual minorities. Some of Trump’s supporters intimidated election officials in 2020. Others participated in a state-sponsored manhunt that ended in a killing (Michael Reinoehl) or cheered on a murderer (Kyle Rittenhouse). Corporate-owned social media encourages hundreds of thousands of people, rewarding them with greater attention as they move up a scale of assertive acts: first taking sides against “libs,” then harassing people on the other side of politics, building up to doxxing. In order to cross the threshold of becoming participants in acts of violence, it is no longer necessary for a fascist party to mobilize its affiliated militia. Rather, individuals and groups who have congregated on 4Chan or even X can answer that call.

Trump entered his first term benefiting from the support of a movement he had not created — the tens of thousands who had participated in Gamergate and the millions who had given up Fox News in favor of Breitbart. Between joining Twitter in 2009 and 2017, Trump posted more than thirty thousand times on Twitter, acquiring thirty-six million followers. Trump seemed to be using his platform with inexplicable generosity. He used it to promote anyone on the right — living in the United States or abroad — including neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, and advocates of armed insurrection. On the surface, this tactic was irrational: Trump was dissipating his message to court extremists with audiences in the hundreds. It’s not what any other TV star would have done. That behavior was not intended to increase his platform, but it won him a base of supporters — intense Trump loyalists willing to risk anything, including jail time, for his sake.

The first test of Trump’s relationship to his movement came with the Unite the Right mobilization in Charlottesville. A crowd of three hundred people in a uniform of khaki pants and white polo shorts chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” They attacked antifascist counterprotesters, spraying them with mace. One fascist, James Fields Jr., drove his car at antifascists, killing trade union organizer Heather Heyer. Trump told journalists that there were “very fine people on both sides” and blamed the fighting on antifascists. Under pressure from the press and Republicans, Trump for the first time turned against his supporters, dismissing his chief strategist Steve Bannon. For the next two years, antifascists could be optimistic. It seemed that left-wing protests had broken the link between Trump and his street-level base.

Trump, however, rebuilt the relationship with his far-right supporters during 2020. He backed the QAnon conspiracy theory, which said that the Democrats were controlled by a small group of Satan-worshiping paedophiles. Supporters of QAnon were arrested after attacking restaurants rumored to have held captive children, assembling bombmaking materials, attacking Catholic churches, derailing trains, stalking politicians and attacking them in their homes.6 On one day in July 2020, Trump retweeted a dozen QAnon Twitter accounts. When Republican lawmakers criticized him, the White House communications team sided with Trump and QAnon against them.7 Again, Trump was giving up institutional backing to court his far-right followers. He hasn’t stopped rebuilding his bonds with them since.

On January 6, 2021, Trump instructed his supporters to “Fight, fight, fight!” urging them to march on Capitol Hill, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 election. His supporters took over hallways and offices, and forced the presidential confirmation proceedings into retreat. As sedition, the march was incompetent: there was no plan for how to hold the institutions of the state against democracy. It was an insurrection, Mike Davis wrote, “in the sense of dark comedy.”8 But to see the lack of plan is to miss the point. Like revolutions, counterrevolutions need their moments of theatre — their Ayodhya, their march on Rome (which, too, was derided at the time: how could it be a real insurrection if Mussolini rode in by train?). Trump’s involvement in the action deepened his relationship to the militias, to the likes of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Boogaloo movement. To an extraordinary extent, so did his fulfilled promise to pardon those who took part. Hitler and Mussolini were not born committed political warriors; they became ones. It was their participation in attempted uprisings, their decision to accept their radical supporters’ involvement rather than denounce them afterwards, and their doubling down on the extraelectoral dimension of struggle that made them into fascists.

When Trump pardoned those who had been sentenced for taking part in January 6, he went further than his allies expected. JD Vance told reporters that those who committed violence during the Capitol riot “shouldn’t be pardoned.” Trump ignored him, releasing even those serving lengthy jail terms or convicted of extreme violence. Vance then had to make an embarrassing climbdown.9 The reason Trump went further than other Republicans would have gone is that he sees the movement as a potential counterpower under his own control to a much greater extent than they do. There will be times when Trump encounters obstacles in his mission to purge universities, deport migrants, and attack the left — and his allies will offer themselves as a street force capable of solving his weaknesses. All we have seen in the last five years suggests that Trump will use them for this purpose.

You don’t need many ideologues

Later in this piece, I’ll address one possible limit to Trump’s power: that only a minority of people in Trump’s inner circle would support the use of violence against his enemies. As the example of Vance and the January 6 pardons show, even now many of Trump’s closest allies fail to understand how committed he is to a project of personal rule.

Yet, even in the classical interwar fascist states, most of the second-rank leaders had joined the fascist party from outside or were cautious about elements of its program. Think, for example, of Adolf Eichmann, the man charged by the SS with organizing the mass deportation of Jews in the Holocaust. As Hannah Arendt famously pointed out, at the time of Eichmann’s trial — he had joined the Nazi Party more than a decade after the party’s foundation, after stints in the YMCA, and a Christian walking association. He was a serial joiner, armed not by a deep ideological motivation but an overwhelming instinct to follow.10 This is not at all to excuse Eichmann, but rather to suggest that fascism’s firmly committed ideologues are often a relative minority. Why should it be different now?

The reason why more radical fascists were able to dominate the passive joiners was due, in part, to the vagueness of the fascists’ plans for government. They, in turn, encouraged a dynamic in which second- or even third-rank leaders were invited to guess what the leader wanted, imagine themselves in the leader’s mind, and come up with plans for government. These were then tested by dynamics of internal selection and competition, with the more radical proposals generally triumphing. The minor leaders in this description don’t need to be converted to the full program of fascism, they just need to be enthused by the idea of taking over the state, pushing it in new directions, acting out grudges against their enemies, or simply identifying with ascendant power without regard for what that power does.

Think, for example, of a relatively minor piece of legislation that originated outside of the Trump inner circle, the bill HR 9495, which was introduced into Congress in winter 2024 by New York Republican Claudia Tenney. The point of the bill was to enable the President to declare any nongovernmental organization a terrorist supporter, and to remove its tax exemption as an NGO — with the Palestine Solidarity movement, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch very obviously in Tenney’s sights. Tenney has been a Republican since the days of John McCain and Mitt Romney. She is a Republican who has pushed rightwards by arguing what is common sense to Israel’s supporters: that genocide is legitimate, that protest against it must be banned, and that even those people who stand adjacent to actual protesters (that is, the conformist leaders of human rights charities) are dangerous radicals whose voices need to be silenced.

What you need for a fascist outcome may not be a large group of committed fascists, but a moment of right-wing advance and innovation, and a willingness to use the state in new ways so that the previous limits on authoritarian power no longer apply.

The US state is not so far from fascism already

One of the problems with the discussion of whether a social order is or is not “fascist” is that it smuggles in an unacknowledged comparison with the interwar European societies in which fascism emerged. In Europe, a distinction had emerged between the metropolis and the colonial margin. At the centers of capital accumulation, a system of human rights flourished with the gradual removal of barriers to equality of citizens based on their national origin or religious beliefs. Workers won the vote, pensions, and access to state education, heralding the emergence of modern welfare states. Part of the shock of fascism lay in its sudden reversal of what many had assumed was a universal trend towards equality. Yet hundreds of miles away in the colonies of the global South, the colonized were treated as less than equal and deprived of rights under political regimes which made sharp distinctions between European citizens and non-European subjects.

Fascism’s attacks on Europeans who had moved closer to full citizenship rights — socialists, the left, gay men, and Jews — erased this geographical distance. It deployed similar violence in the European metropolis to that which the colonizers had used in Africa or Asia against the racial subjects of empire.

In both the 1930s and today, the United States lies outside of Europe‘s colonial paradigm because the structures of US society rested directly on colonial territorial expansion, the recent genocide of the indigenous population, and imported slavery. The worlds of full rights-bearing citizens and those without rights in the United States were not kept geographically distinct as they were in Europe (the South lost the Civil War). Nor did the rights of citizens ever become universal (Radical Reconstruction failed). The United States contained within one set of expanding borders both colonizer and colonized. In consequence of colonialism and slavery, as the Panthers observed a half century ago, if you were Black in the United States then violence was never kept at arms’ length.11 Even before Trump was in power, significant groups of oppressed people in the United States already experienced levels of state-sanctioned violence which would normally be associated with an authoritarian society.

Trump promised to “end the transgender lunacy.”12 Most states have already banned healthcare for trans youth. There are already hundreds of laws policing which bathrooms trans people may use, what jails they are sent to, and what sports they may compete in. At the federal level, the attacks continue unabated with trans and intersex passport holders, at best, stuck in legal limbo and, at worst, totally disenfranchised.

Under the Biden Presidency, university lecturers were subjected to laws prohibiting them from teaching classes that acknowledge the country’s history of racism. Over half of the country’s states passed laws limiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory.13 By spring 2024, ten thousand books were already banned from US libraries.14 The Democrats repeated the mistakes of European liberals in the 1920s and 1930s: they conciliated Trump’s base by continuing and deepening attacks on migrants, hoping to displace the impact of authoritarianism outside the borders of the United States. However, the continuation of such policies over the last four years has created the opportunity for him to take the violence further. Biden’s administration in 2023–4 deported three hundred thousand people, one sixth of whom were adults with children in the United States.15 The immigration police have been recruited, the flights have been chartered, the detention camps made ready.

The politics that grew worse in power

The greatest difference between fascist and other forms of right-wing rule was that fascist governments radicalized in office. Fascists came to power through promising significant change and by mobilizing people in their thousands, and yet fascism in power dropped its revolutionary rhetoric, instead taking decisions which had the effect of boosting the rich. Fascist regimes had to make good in some way the distance between promise and reality. In both classical cases, this meant offering ordinary people liberation through military victories overseas. The way to do this was through the pact under which Italian and German capitalists accepted fascism, judging that they’d gain from far-right promises to purge socialists from the workplace. That agreement changed — corrupted — the way workers were supposed to approach the state. A working-class Italian would not become richer under fascism — unless they were granted a villa in the empire in Abyssinia. An ordinary German could prosper, beyond a certain point, if the nation captured colonies and recruited citizens to settle the outposts. The vague yearning for change was displaced into using the nation for permanent war.

Although fascism produced similar regimes in both Italy and Germany, it is not the case that each society became fascist at the same speed. Nor is it the case that because the far right hasn’t yet taken over and purged a democratic state at any point since 2016, this generation of populists never will. In the case of Hitler, fascism began within days of his accession to power. Within one hundred days of Hitler being appointed Chancellor, he had issued decrees suspending the German Constitution’s protection of civil rights, free speech, and due process. The Enabling Act permitted Hitler to rule without needing parliament. Laws dissolved state governments including Prussia, Germany’s largest state, with its huge Socialist and Communist electorate. All Jews and antifascists were dismissed from government employment including in schools, universities and the judiciary. Trade unions were taken over by the state. People remember the German example and assume that fascism means dictatorship from day one.

But in Italy, by contrast, Mussolini was in power for three years before an opportunity presented itself to declare the country a dictatorship. The Socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated by fascists on June 10, 1924. In the aftermath of his death, the opposition parties met, determined to boycott parliament, but could not agree on what to do next. They feared confronting Mussolini directly. Unlike him, they had no militia. Nor did they dare call on the forces of the far left — the Communists too kept their own, sectarian, distance. Not daring to call on the people to resist, they asked the Italian King to intervene and he refused. In January, Mussolini made a speech to Parliament accepting responsibility for Matteoti’s death and promising to govern, from that moment on, as a dictator. As late as November 1926, four years after Mussolini had taken power, he faced opposition in the Italian Parliament from deputies including the Communist Antonio Gramsci. A further attempt on Mussolini’s life was used to justify the laws banning the left from office.

The far right is winning in many countries

On the right, as on the left, the breakthrough for radical politics takes place when several societies go through similar crises at the same time. Change needs to happen at the level of the international, so that participants in rival states can learn from each other’s advances, emulate them, and, ultimately, surpass them. An isolated revolution (or indeed counterrevolution) can face resistance from interest groups, sanctions, or even the threat of invasion from other states saying they are policing their breakthrough on behalf of the mainstream. It is much easier to transform one country’s politics if it is one of several radical states governing at once.

In the 1920s, Mussolini offered Hitler a model of how to come to power (his March on Rome inspired Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch), the idea of ruling by a one-party dictatorship, and a slogan as to how to run an economy. Later, Hitler was able to surpass Mussolini’s example — Germany was a richer country with a greater potential military power. But you could not have had fascism in Berlin without Mussolini having broken through first.

One of the reasons why Trump is able to govern as an authoritarian is that we are living in a world where a series of other right-wing states — Israel, Hungary, Russia, India — are already promoting themselves, funding allies abroad, recruiting friendly journalists, paying for automated social media influence, and finding propagandists willing to serve them.

At the time of writing, the most dynamic of Trump’s global allies is, of course, Israel. In a world which declares it a rational and legitimate exercise of state policy for Israel to murder the civilian population of Gaza, Trump’s fantasies of occupying Greenland and totally cleansing the Gaza strip of all remaining Palestinians become “rational” too.

Limits on authoritarian advance

So far, I have been listing some of the most obvious points of comparison between historic fascism and the present authoritarian turn. In the next section of this piece, I will address some of the factors which are often said to be likely to curtail his power and analyze how powerful each may be.

It is often said that Trump’s voting base is lifelong Republicans, rather than committed ideological fascists. If he goes further than they would tolerate, surely, they must turn against him. It is true that, seen purely in its own terms, the 2024 election result represented continuity rather than change. The two-party system has produced elections in a 49-49-2 split in almost every presidential contest since 2000. One candidate wins a higher share of the vote, neither obtains (or even seeks) a majority. In that context, of course, 2024 was going to produce more or less what it did. The Democrats might have won. They lost for many reasons, not least because the United States has been living through an oil boom for four years and the gains of that inflationary boom have been so swallowed by the rich that most voters had no good reason to back Harris. Look beyond the United States and 2024 was the first time since 1945 in which incumbent parties in every single affluent state that held elections that year (including Britain, France, Japan and India) saw their share of the vote fall. The four-point swing against the Democrats was in fact the least dramatic vote-loss of any governing party anywhere that year.16

Trump won because enough usual Republican supporters voted along party lines and enough previous Democrat voters stayed home. The problem with portraying the 2024 election as a constraint on Trump’s power is that there is no mechanism by which moderate Republicans (even assuming such a constituency exists) can influence him. Trump has won his second term. Whether he ignores or amends the constitution and tries to declare himself President for life — or whether he finds some less brazen device by which he and his allies can keep his system of government intact without him — he will not face an election like 2024 again.

Part of the problem faced by opponents of dictatorship is that the political call for voters to vote to stop fascism, which was made loudly in 2024, failed to find an audience. We can test this by segmenting the electorate according to the reasons they give for voting. In the 2020 election, pollsters asked voters whether they were voting positively (because they identified with the Democratic program or with Biden) or negatively (to stop Trump). Four years later, the fastest fall in turnout was among the people who had described themselves as negative, that is, anti-Trump voters.17 Millions of people who had turned out against Trump in 2020 decided four years later that even his threat could not compel them to back the Democrats given their record in relation to the economy and Palestine.

During the election, Kamala Harris told the New York Times that Trump was a fascist because elite gossip insisted that he was — that is, because John Kelly, his former White House Chief of Staff, had heard Trump quoting Hitler with approval.18 Robert Reich culled together lists of the parts of Trump’s ideology that he liked least, and said that he shared those ideas with fascists.19 In other words, Reich forgot the opportunistic way in which fascism had always traded in political language. In reality, neither Harris nor Reich were thinking about what fascism might actually mean. They were, rather, trying to win an argument and motivate voters by making the points that they thought would play best with their base.

The Democrats have pursued this strategy many times before. In 1964, Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for the presidency. He pledged to increase US military power. Pat Brown, an old school Democrat, who served for two terms as Governor of California, said that Goldwater’s speech to the Republican convention “had the stench of fascism. All we needed to hear was Heil Hitler.” Three years later, the Marxist Hal Draper wrote, “You can’t fight the victory of the rightmost forces, by sacrificing your own independent strength to support elements just the next step away from them.” Democrats consistently exaggerated the threat posed by Republicans, Draper argued, as a way of concealing how little their own party differed from them. Pat Brown (the man who had labeled Goldwater a fascist) had helped pass laws criminalizing Mexican farm workers during his time as Governor. When the Berkeley students had spoken out against the Vietnam war, Brown had unleashed the police on them. Draper observed that “the lib-labs would be yelling ‘Fascism’ all over the place” if the same appeal to the repressive state had been ordered by a Republican.20

During the election, several commentators sought to prove Trump’s malice by saying that he had a far-right program. This program was “Project 2025,” a manifesto for presidential transition drawn up by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.21 That document was drawn up not by Trump, but a group of his supporters. It plans tax cuts, reducing both Medicare and Medicaid, and removing protections against discrimination on grounds of gender identity or sexual orientation. If they get their way, the authors would dismiss tens of thousands of educators. Since November, Trump has nominated authors who contributed to Project 2025 to lead his Office for Management and Budget, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the CIA.22

In contrast to the visions of the interwar fascists who needed a strong centralized state in order to wage war, the Heritage Foundation envisages the weakening and privatization of the state. This raises the possibility, at least potentially, of a serious conflict, with one wing of the Trump movement promising a “state capitalist” future (state spending on the economy, the promotion of the 1950s-style family) and another wing promoting “neoliberalism” (raiding the state like a broken piggy bank, crashing spending on roads, air infrastructure and handing huge profits to the rich). But Project 2025 was never Trump’s blueprint and his relationship to it is more equivocal. In the first weeks of Trump’s administration, Project 2025 has informed a series of Executive Orders whose tenor has been solidly authoritarian — whether that has been through militarizing the Mexican border, removing healthcare for trans people, or unmaking civil rights-era laws. The use of presidential decree to make these “laws” is already creating a kind of personal postdemocratic rule that goes beyond any precedent, in any of the states of the capitalist core, at any time since the end of the Second World War. Beyond that, it’s not clear at all how much vision the two wings of Trumpism share.

Earlier in this piece, I acknowledged that Trump is short of allies who are committed to using violence against the left and destroying the existing state. His appointment to his Cabinet and other senior roles are mostly not fascists in any traditional sense. Since November, commentators have been transfixed by the billionaires who’ve gathered to sit at Trump’s top table — Ramaswamy, Linda McMahon from WWE. But they are the rich demanding gratification, rather than loyalists. The same is also true of the influencers who called on their supporters to vote for Trump: Joe Rogan, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard — all recent ex-Democrats.

Significantly, Trump doesn’t appear to have any obvious candidate in his immediate entourage who could play the role of a strategist. In 2016, Steve Bannon seemed capable of planning to take the regime in an ever more radical direction. Eight years later, Trump has no obvious counterpart to him. While there are people in his inner circle who would be comfortable with a transition to authoritarianism, there is no one beyond Trump to visualize that path.

Yet, one can find among Trump’s appointees several who were complicit in the attempt to overturn the 2020 elections — including White House counsel, Christina Bobb, who chose eleven Republicans in Arizona willing to vote for Trump in the electoral college despite his loss there.23 Bobb has called the left “evil” and “demonic,” and urged Trump to clean out “the filth” — meaning us leftists.24 Other appointees are clearly influenced by the far right. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, has a German-style Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest and the white supremacist slogan Deus Vult on his arm. Hesgeth has called for a civil war at the end of which the military and the police would jail leftists, even middle-of-the-road Democrats.25

I have made the point already that Trump may not need a large core of committed supporters — if there are enough people willing to experiment alongside him, that could be enough. Linked to this, it may be that figures of sufficient malice emerge — the likes of Stephen Miller, maybe, equipped as he now is by the experience of four years in government.

One good way to understand Trump is as the equivalent in the United States to Benjamin Netanyahu, Narendra Modi, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Javier Milei, and Jair Bolsonaro. This generation of right-wing leaders have not exactly cancelled elections. Rather, they have tried to suffocate the democratic system. Hungary’s Civic Alliance party (Fidesz) has dismissed nonparty journalists from the state-financed TV and radio channels. Faced with a constitutional court where Fidesz did not have a majority, it introduced different retirement ages for judges depending on whether they backed the ruling party (62 and 80).26 It has made new appointments until it secured its proregime majority. The party introduced a series of laws proscribing NGOs. Fidesz has banned gender studies, removed trans people’s legal status, and introduced pronatalist policies. It has campaigned through a series of lurid antisemitic lies, blaming all opposition on the supposed influence of a single Jew, George Soros. Hungary is often characterized as a “managed democracy”; Fidesz’s policies are reported in both the state and privately owned media, while their opponents’ messages are ignored. The Hungarian system of government is authoritarian without being classically fascist. Hungary has fought no wars, begun no genocide. Thinking about these allies may help us to understand a realistic sense of the future towards which Trump is aiming — not necessarily the ending of elections as such, or the jailing of AOC, but a managed democracy in which there are still formal contests between two rival parties but power never changes hands.

Not without challenge

The most compelling reason to feel some confidence about the future is that Trump’s first term saw him fail to deliver on his authoritarian promises. Deportations fell by around a third between Obama and Trump (before returning to 2010 levels under Biden).27 Trump’s expansion of the Mexican wall was modest.28 The total number of death row prisoners executed fell. In his first term, Trump’s authoritarian instincts often proved self-defeating. The fact that Trump was pushing for more executions caused journalists to investigate and gave death-penalty campaigners energy to resist him. Trump was unpopular and state governors didn’t want to be seen to be copying him.

The difficulty is that, in the intervening eight years, Trump’s inner circle has built up a certain degree of technical knowledge — his allies better understand how the system works. There was a visible illustration of the differences between the two inauguration days: In 2017, Trump announced no more than two executive orders on the day of his inauguration, and one of them was a policy he loathed (keeping the Affordable Care Act going). Eight years later, Trump used his speech to announce two hundred executive orders, which he has since carried out.

The social base of Trump’s regime is wider than it was, particularly in terms of the assent he has received from sections of the rich. It is true that in the November election, Harris had the backing of most US bosses and outspent Trump. However, since Trump’s election, a number of billionaires have made overtures to him, including Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The motives behind this shift are not hard to discern: Trump promises to close down so much traditional federal infrastructure and replace it with forms of outsourced government that there are fortunes to be made in the grabbing of data and contracts.

There is a large difference between governing a society dominated by your allies and one where the rich didn’t want you, didn’t choose you, regard you as an upstart, and would prefer that you had lost. But if we see the 1930s as a model, the wealthy were far from keen on either Hitler or Mussolini. They would have preferred democracy to continue, but they made peace with fascism. A common metaphor used by historians to explain their decision is the idea of a pact. There was never a single meeting at which the bosses, as a class, sat down with Hitler and agreed to give away a significant part of their social power under an authoritarian regime. And yet the outlines of their consent and its rationale were apparent. The ruling class feared Communists more than they feared Nazis. So long as the regime cleaved to familiar right-wing ways of ruling, expanding the army, subsidizing industry, the rich made peace with it.

Trump’s personality makes it harder for him to govern as an effective ruler. Like all dictators in history, he is constantly changing his mind, feuding with subordinates and getting rid of the people who were last week’s favorite. To a greater extent than any obvious comparator, his first term was chaotic, short-termist and weak at exploiting the opportunities available to it. During Trump’s first year in office, he dismissed a third of his staff. No other president in living memory has come close to that attrition rate.29 Trump’s picks for high office have the records for the shortest tenure by any chief of staff (Reince Priebus, 192 days), national security advisor in US history (Michael Flynn, 22 days), and any White House director of communications (Anthony Scaramucci, 10 days). In place of legislative triumphs, Trump’s first term was punctuated by dismissals. The churn made Trump weaker. With the exception of the Supreme Court, where Trump was able to benefit from Democratic arrogance and favorable circumstances, the turnover in senior roles prevented the administration from making the plans that could have altered the balance of politics.

Another argument that is sometimes deployed against the vision of Trump as a fascism-developing dictator is that second-term presidents generally disappoint their followers. All presidents are weak, at least in terms of domestic politics, dependent on making alliances in Congress. Yet Trump has significant advantages compared to most US presidents — Congress is servile and the Supreme Court has repeatedly signaled that it will not trouble him. If the pattern of the first few weeks is followed, and Trump is able to govern this time around by repeated executive decrees, then he has much less reason to care what the legislature does. The German Parliament did not cease to sit, after the Enabling Act, which had permitted the Chancellor to make laws without it. It became instead a part-time body, of no more than ceremonial function.

What kind of counterpolitics might restrain Trump?

Part of the crisis facing the left today is that it really does make a difference to the Left whether our opponent is pushing towards fascism or not. Different strategies of resistance follow from our analysis of how far Trump will go. We have to decide what kind of opponent we face. And yet, the opponent we have in front of us is one who seems poised, always, between two different approaches to politics. One of the reasons it is so hard to fight him is because we — and most voters — don’t yet know just how bad his second term will be.

Over the last two decades, in almost every country, the tactic of denouncing our enemies as fascist has failed to stir right-wing (or indeed liberal or center-left) voters. When Giorgia Meloni was invited to address the confederation of the CGIL trade union federation in March 2023, she had to delay her speech because of union delegates drowning out her words with the partisan anthem ‘Bella Ciao.’ And yet Meloni, whose party the Brothers of Italy has as its symbol the fascist tricolor flame, won 44 percent of the vote in the 2022 election. She had secured a higher proportion of the vote in a free election than Hitler or Mussolini ever managed.

One way to explain the failure of the fascist label is that this generation of far right leaders are not fascists, will never be, and voters can see the difference for themselves. Calling them fascist makes the accusers look like they are exaggerating and cannot be trusted. If that approach is correct then the left likely needs more precision. Facts have accumulated in such numbers that we can see with clarity that the old rhetorical approach is not working. To prove politically galvanizing, we need a new paradigm capable of explaining the world around us. We should take our cue from the likes of Karl Marx and the opening lines of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Leftists should refrain from, in our anxiety, conjuring up the spirits of the past to our service. We have become obsessed with the past when we should be grasping the specific circumstances around us.

It follows that we need new terms — Naomi Klein’s “mirror world,” Richard Seymour’s “disaster nationalism” — a whole new vocabulary which takes on board this new politics without forcing it into the patterns of the past.30

In this way of understanding Trumpism, the people to celebrate are the hundred thousand people in Michigan who, in February 2024, voted uncommitted to protest against Democratic complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Or the thousands of trans people demanding continued access to health care from one New York City hospital. Or the students who protested in vast numbers against US backing for the war, only to see a generation of Democratic university administrators sending cops in riot gear against them. Or the thousands of trans people demanding continued access to health care from one New York City hospital. They didn’t want to see Trump in power; and yet they were correct to reject the liberal arguments about keeping silent, standing down all criticism, accepting genocide as the price for democracy. If ever a generation of Trump voters are going to reject him and move left, there need to be some people who can talk to them, and insist that we are the rebels, the people on whose shoulders the police batons fell. We did not wait to see what Trump would become, we fought.

But what if Trump indeed makes the short journey from “not yet” fascism to the real thing?31 In the last hundred years, there have been very few moments like the one we are living through. The people winning elections on the right encourage a degree of sadism in their support, which has few precedents other than the 1930s.32 If we imagine, even for a second, that this wave of advancing right-wing politics will turn to violence, then the two likeliest candidates would be either Modi or Trump, since each has a relationship to a militia of armed supporters. Their peers in Hungary, Italy, Finland, Britain and France cannot draw on a similar (small but radical and committed) base. When one reads the newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, what is striking is the atmosphere of imminent violence. Fascist newspapers — before fascists started killing people — offered a drum-beat of killing. “Death,” they promised “to the adversary, outrage and persecution for the opponent.”33 Fascist novels from the period end with traitors hanged. They promise their readers a future filled with delight, its joy to be counted in the number of Communists awaiting execution.34

In Trump’s campaign speeches, and in Elon Musk’s rants on X, a similar mood is being created — a condition of tense preparation before acts of cruelty. On immigration, Trump’s language, which was once distinguishable from the politicians of the 1920s and 1930s, is now identical. When he speaks of “every city and town that has been invaded and conquered,” when he says that people crossing the border are “military invasions without the uniforms,” and calls every ordinary person fleeing war or persecution “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals,” what he is preparing is a society that will look upon acts of violence — even murder — and applaud.35 Trump isn’t a fascist yet, his party isn’t in its core politics, his voters are largely the Republicans of 2012 and 2008, rather than an army committed to certain outcomes in advance. But the distance between him and fascism has narrowed to such a fine point that it would take very little to cross it.

During the interwar years, antifascists formulated a series of distinct tactics that were intended to block the rise of fascism. They spoke of unity between socialist forces (the “united front”). They urged the separation of people willing to give fascism their militant support from the larger group of moderates, who have fallen behind that politics.

Joseph Fronczak’s recent work of comparative history, Everything is Possible, helps us to understand how powerful these tactics were, not just in resisting fascism, but in transforming how Communists and Socialists saw themselves. Historians of political ideas used to argue that the concepts of left and right emerged in 1789, in the debates of the French National Assembly, and that the terms have a continuous history from then on. Fronczak disagrees. He observes that in Britain, France and the United States, between about 1789 and 1934, the terms “left” and “right” were rarely spoken, and had little if any meaningful content. The left emerged after 1918. The threat of a vicious enemy caused different tribes of socialists to get organized. “Antifascism drove the left’s transformation.” Faced with the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, which threatened the destruction of both the Communists and their moderate left-wing rivals, the former began to argue that all forces on the left need to unite in their mutual self-defence.36 The Socialists, after some delays, agreed. “Only since then, since the middle years of the Great Depression, has it made sense for people to imagine the left as…a mass collectivity.”37 It was the threat of fascism, and people’s responses to it, which created the left.

When Trump tries to take the United States into a new and worse place, he will have opponents. We remember the 1930s as the devil’s decade, the period when fascism ruled. Yet, in the United States, the Communist Party grew from seven thousand to seventy thousand members — most of the new members had not been in any group when the decade began. They brought into being new kinds of left-wing organizations that would shape US politics until the Civil Rights years. Then, as now, new forces are waiting to come onto the field — they will be young, they will come from parts of the population that the left has not reached yet.

However Trump governs, we need to show that there are more people out there who reject the expansion of the carceral state than who support it. We need more protests like the 2023 United Auto Workers strike, and their emulation by other workers. We need the revival of Black Lives Matter. We have to cohere the millions of Americans who support trans liberation into a visible mass movement. When Trump called on his people to march on Washington, between two and three thousand people participated in that gathering. By contrast, more than twenty million people joined in protests following the murder of George Floyd. When both left and right go all out to mobilize, we are still so much more powerful than them.

DK Renton is a socialist living in Britain and the author of The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (Haymarket).