Is the US on the edge of a new fascist epoch? To listen to much of the media, progressive politicians and many academics, Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday will usher in a politics we have not seen since the days of Mussolini, Franco and, worst of all, Hitler. In her presidential campaign, vice-president Kamala Harris openly called Trump ‘a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist’.
The Democrats and their media allies believed these accusations would be the key to electoral success, hoping to scare Americans into voting for Harris. Some even suggested Trump would throw Democrat politicians and commentators in jail once in office. Liz Cheney, the one-time rightist turned anti-Trumper, warned Americans this might be ‘the last real vote you ever get to cast’.
Yet these accusations did not ring true for most Americans. Similar nonsense charges have been hurled at far less worthy targets, like George W Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Perhaps this has desensitised Americans to Democrats crying ‘fascism’. In any case, a recent Gallup poll showed that only three per cent of voters described ‘elections / election reform / democracy’ as a key issue in 2024, well behind economic problems or immigration. Notably, voters in swing states said that Harris, not Trump, was a bigger threat to democracy.
MAGA and similar movements, such as the National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK, have grown in stature by leading a rebellion against unrestrained immigration, rising crime and the post-nationalist ethos of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, they display some worrying, right-wing tendencies.
Yet in economic terms, at least, Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other progressives are closer to embracing corporatist ideas, which any fascist might recognise, than Trump or his doppelgangers. Critical here is the central notion of fascism. ‘At its fullest development’, writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism ‘redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had been untouchably private’.
Under Mussolini, for example, private property remained and powerful corporations thrived. But only, as Il Duce himself suggested, if they pledged, ‘formal adherence to the regime’. Mussolini relied heavily on large landowners and companies to help finance the March on Rome. Once in power, Mussolini, who viewed himself as a ‘revolutionary’ transforming society, saw the state as ‘the moving centre of economic life’. He successfully co-opted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure, as well as the military, which he used to fight off Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions.
In contemporary times, the most powerful corporatist economy can be found in nominally Communist China. Here, concentrated wealth, governmental power and control of information, even about the past, has echoes of fascism. In China, as one scholar observes, corporatism is ‘a socio-political process’ where monopolies flourish with the assistance and connivance of state agencies. They follow state strictures by embracing the party ideology, celebrating the CCP’s vision and enforcing ideological conformity among employees and even foreign business partners.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: White House Archive via Flickr in Public Domain.
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