The Infernal Triangle: American Fascism

When Timothy Snyder’s slim volume On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century was rocketing up the best-seller charts in 2017, I noticed an interesting fact: The most illuminating analysts of America’s frightening recent political turn were turning out to be scholars specializing in Europe. When Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, or Richard Steigmann-Gall noticed phenomena in America’s past or present that resembled something in the right-wing movements they studied in Germany, Italy, or elsewhere, they just said so—blithely indifferent to what every graduate student in American history learns, and what New York Times reporters shout from the rooftops, that America is supposed to be “exceptional.”

The most interesting voice thinking about the connections between interwar Europe and the present-day U.S. happens to be a scholar of both. John Ganz’s forthcoming book When the Clock Broke illuminates the exceedingly odd politics of the U.S. in 1992—including some haunting harbingers of America’s Trumpian turn. The most fascinating posts on his Substack Unpopular Front are deeply learned perambulations through the 20th-century European right. Their most important lesson: Fascism is always less simple than we think it is.

“We have this image in our heads—and this is really hard to get out of people’s heads—of the fascist rise to power that comes from fascist propaganda,” Ganz explains. The stereotype is thugs marching into the seat of government with truncheons, then marching out having seized state power. “It is much more political than that. It has much more to do with negotiations between established political factions and elites … None of these movements were destined to succeed. There was a lot of luck, and there were a lot of contingencies.”

Most fascist parties and movements—Ganz knows their names, and repeats them often, as a reminder of that contingency—never seized any power. They were footnotes. That’s an important insight to address to observers who cite the sheer ridiculousness, abundant incompetence, and outright insanity within Donald Trump’s movement, and have a hard time placing it in the same universe with the movement that almost conquered Europe. After all, if Hitler’s little gang of beer hall brawlers had failed to achieve power, they surely would have looked precisely as ridiculous as all that. As Ganz puts it, “Everything kind of looks farcical until it doesn’t.”

The brawlers are never really the engine of the thing anyway. Ganz explained how Hitler and Mussolini used their more violent elements to destabilize and intimidate, while they took power through the more normal political channels of forming coalitions in parliament and ascending into leadership roles.

“The constitutional system in Italy always remained intact,” even when Mussolini became dictator, Ganz notes. “There was still the king, there was still a constitutional monarchy; he was prime minister. The fascist state kind of superimposed itself on that.” There was, for a time, even a robust parliamentary opposition: “Antonio Gramsci, head of the Italian Communist Party, famously was elected to parliament after Mussolini rose to power.”

At least as important to the story are the “responsible conservatives” who made their peace with the strongman, believing he could be controlled. Like Germany’s Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, architect of the 1933 coalition that made Hitler chancellor, who said: “In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.” Or the guy who said in 2015, “You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” That would be one Lindsey Graham, who later decided he liked Trump just fine, once he started winning.

The conceit is similar to what Bill Clinton felt about allowing China into the World Trade Organization: If you bring a radical outlier within the political system, they will act rationally and moderate their worst impulses. Mainstream conservatives in Italy and Germany repeatedly claimed Mussolini and Hitler would turn out to be responsible actors, once they occupied positions of responsibility. American elites followed suit with the absurd refrain, on occasions when Trump managed to act normal for 15 seconds: “He became president of the United States in that moment, period.”

That was CNN’s Van Jones, when Trump paid tribute to a military widow in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Venerable pundit Karen Tumulty still thinks this a reasonable thing to believe. As she wrote in The Washington Post a few weeks back, “In 2016, it was still possible to believe that Trump would grow and change under the weightiness of the office.”

The 1991 documentary Trump: What’s the Deal?—released for free online by its producers when Trump announced his presidential campaign—had already revealed him to be exactly as he would be in 2016. The best line—I quoted it in what I believe was the first piece to evaluate whether Trump was a fascist (not yet, I concluded then)—came from architect Der Scutt. He said that if you want to calculate the truth of one of Donald Trump’s claims: “Divide by two, then divide by four, and you’re closer to the answer.” It also documents his feral racism and consequence-free consorting with criminals in pursuit of his aims.

There were Karen Tumultys back in the day, too. A 2015 book by historian Despina Stratigakos, Hitler at Home, demonstrates publications around the world dutifully passing on der Führer’s carefully cultivated image as an amiable country squire of whom we could expect reasonable things, in features like this one that ran in The New York Times 11 days before the 1939 blitzkrieg of Poland: “High up on his favorite mountain he finds time for politics, solitude and frequent official parties …”

It sounds crazy that sophisticated people could be that naïve, that late in the game. But listen now to the reports from the World Economic Forum in Davos: “U.S. industry leaders seem overwhelmingly nonplussed with a second Trump term, while foreign chief executives are terrified.” Replied one of the nonplussed: “I’m not sure Europeans understand how weak executive orders are. We have a justice system … it won’t be the end of the world.” Another pronounced Trump “all bark and no bite,” with his tossing aside the 2020 election returns mere bloviation. And besides, “many of his policies were right.”

Call it #vonPapenism. #vonPapenism über alles.

One surprise I took away from my conversation with Ganz is that, in a certain respect, Trump is plus fasciste que les fascistes: that is, more incautiously thugocratic than his European antecedents, at least in the beginning of their rises.

“The heads of these movements had to be very careful about how they would use the fascist paramilitaries, and make this implicit promise to the elite that they could be contained,” Ganz says. “It was always something they needed in their back pocket, right? But sometimes it felt like those people were giving [Hitler and Mussolini] more problems than they were worth.”

But Trump always thought differently. After Charlottesville, he called the thugs “fine people.” Asked about the Proud Boys in a 2020 presidential debate, he said: “Stand back and stand by.” I’d always worried that utterances like these were harbingers of things to come. I suspected that Trump never criticized supporters willing to commit violence on his behalf because that willingness might eventually become useful to him. I saw him as playing politics with something far more than votes: that thugs were valuable currency to keep in his back pocket, to send forth whenever that was what it took to keep power.

Then, on January 6th, he did.

For the briefest moment, the von Papens of the Republican congressional caucus considered cutting him loose. Then they thought better of it. Now that Trump calls his thugs “hostages,” few Republicans seem even to consider expressing alarm. Some have even turned it into a MAGA term of art. “This movement between goons and conservative allies,” Ganz notes, is “something I saw a lot with Trump.”

OUR CONVERSATION SHIFTED TO THE GROUND of political theory. Ganz points out that a book that won a lot of respect for its explanatory power in the European context, Dylan Riley’s The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, has been deployed in the American context by critics of the idea that “fascism” is a relevant category here and now. “[Riley’s] theory,” Ganz explains, “is that, in a society where the political establishment is weak and cannot get consensus behind it, but there is a highly developed civil society—where there are a lot of pressure groups—you can expect something like fascism, as those groups make demands on the political system that it cannot satisfy. And these idiot fucks …”

One of the things I love about Ganz is that he gives it with the bark off.

“… look at that and say, ‘Well, there’s no civil society left in the United States, so that doesn’t work anymore.’”

They mean that nobody shows up to Kiwanis Club meetings these days; that they bowl alone. They are wrong, because they neglect the civil society spaces right-wingers do abundantly show up for. Like services at churches where Trump is venerated like an earthly manifestation of the godhead; like gun groups; like Moms for Liberty chapters; like militias and quasi-militias.

And boy, do they make demands.

There are two ways to think about the failed, weak political establishment, abetted by the sclerosis-inducing nature of our constitutional system. One might think about the state’s failure to deliver the things it used to: adequate physical infrastructure, an economy that provides meaningful work with the kind of protections against firing that powerful unions provide, a safety net to smooth out its rough edges, and increasing moves (Medicare, Medicaid) toward affordable health care. The right sometimes claims they don’t want the government to accomplish these things, but they grew quite excited when Trump promised that he alone could restore, provide, or preserve them.

The other way to think of it involves things people in groups like these demand that no government can deliver: a Christian theocracy many Americans wrongly believe to be their birthright; protection from demographic change; return to a prelapsarian time when America was supposed to have been “great.”

Any way you slice it, the perceived absence of responsive government, the presence of groups positioned to clamor for response, and then government’s failure to respond, does things out in the world.

“This cluster of demands coming from civil society being put on a very weak political establishment is a basic sociological formula for fascism,” as Ganz summarizes Riley’s paradigm.

“And I think that’s what, basically, we have in the United States: a very weak political establishment, but a civil society underneath it that’s looking for a kind of expression. And the expression that it’s taking is pathological … It’s demanding a dictator. Because the party system is unable to answer the demands they have.”

In describing how that longing has historically been expressed, he introduced to me an idea that blew my mind a little. It was articulated during a political crisis in France in the late Third Republic that culminated in a failed march on the Chambre des Députés on the night of February 6, 1934, leaving 16 dead. In correspondence between Ganz and the great historian of fascism Robert Paxton the day after the riots at the U.S. Capitol, both agreed that day bore “a spookily close parallel” to January 6th.

What the right-wing populist marchers were demanding in 1934 Paris was “republic by plebiscite.” Meaning: a true sounding of the French people’s desires, to get around a corrupt parliamentary system “dominated by Jews, and special interests, and the Masons.” That’s the part that blew my mind—because I immediately recognized something like it as a constant during the 70 years or so of right-wing politics in the U.S. that I’ve studied, since the days of Joe McCarthy: conservatives’ faith that a true sounding of the will of the American people would put paid to the foreign intrusion of liberalism for good.

Like the kind of letters George Gallup received in the early 1950s: “If you took a true poll of the American people … you would find them over 95 percent for Senator McCarthy.”

Or Phyllis Schlafly’s tract A Choice Not an Echo, which argued that if the Republicans would only nominate a true conservative he would win in a landslide, but the only reason that didn’t happen was that a few “New York kingmakers” (Mr. Gallup pre-eminent among them, as it happened) manipulated things behind the scenes to make that impossible.

Or the 84 percent of Tea Party adherents who said their views “generally reflect the views of most Americans.”

Or when Mike Lindell, in his campaign for RNC chairman in 2023, said, “This country is 70 percent red. If you remove all the garbage and all the corruption and everything. It’s 70 percent red, and it’s getting redder all the way.”

And, of course, on January 6th.

Various aspects of fascism have been always present on the American right. (In 1981, the virulently and explicitly racist and antisemitic magazine The Spotlight had many times the circulation of any other publication on the right.) They remained contained or undeveloped. With Trump, they burst forth in full flower. The fantasy of the Republican plebiscite—the notion that the true nation is already with them were it not for the deep state’s depredations—was at the essence of the demand at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “If the government is no longer for the people, it is your duty to overthrow that government and reinstate a new government, for the people,” as a 1/6 terrorist named Christopher Alberts, convicted of bringing a handgun to the Capitol, roused the mob that day.

It is a point I’ll keep repeating: The most important thing for journalists to cover in this presidential election is not how many votes Donald Trump gets, either in the popular total or the Electoral College. To those subsumed inside his cult of personality, the conclusion is already foregone: If you took a true poll of the American people, swept aside the garbage and the corruption of the kingmakers in the media and the deep state (not to mention all those Democratic officials desperate to do anything to cover up their pedophilic cult)—obviously Donald Trump represents the views of most Americans, and is the only legitimate representative of “the people.” The question is how many will be willing to take up arms for this belief, should the people whose job it is to count the votes come up with the “wrong” answer.

Will that be fascism? I’ll quote Jeff Sharlet from our previous interview. “One of the mistakes people make is they say, ‘Well, this doesn’t look like European fascism in 1936.’ Well, because it’s American fascism in 2024.”