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The Pedantry of Wondering Whether Trump’s a Fascist
How words work and how liberals should oppose the far right
Is Trump a fascist? According to one philosopher’s article, “Why Trump is Not a Fascist,” Trump can’t be one, for linguistic and pragmatic reasons.
Semantically, the author says, the meaning of “fascism” is tied to the context of WWII, and strategically, it’s unwise to call Trump a fascist because that lets the American brand of right-wing authoritarianism off the hook.
Both of those reasons to avoid thinking of Trump as a fascist are dismally weak, as explained in many of the comments on that author’s article (linked below). In responding to those comments, the author says,
The points I am trying to hammer home are that there’s very little new in what Trump says or does when you are aware of American history, and Trump is a symptom of larger forces that are following that American history. That’s so important: what is going on right now is American, and saying Trump is a fascist is surrendering the fight to him by not engaging with what he is.
To be sure, the author says, Trump and his fellow travellers in the Republican Party are “American nationalists, with subdivisions of white supremacists and corporatists, often overlapping.” But ‘None of them are…
