Trump: Not Fascist, but Dangerously Authoritarian

Ben Burgis

14 March 2025

This was delivered as a guest lecture for Global Labour University alumni on  “The Rise of Authoritarian Regimes in Uncertain Times” on February 15th.

The political situation I’m most intimately familiar with is obviously the American one, so that’s where I’ll focus, although I’ll do my best to weave in a few examples from other national contexts here and there, and I hope all that gets considerably supplemented by contributions in the discussion from those of who live and work and politically struggle in various other countries around the world, including some in countries that face far more heavy-handed repression than anything that seems likely in any of the examples that are mostly going to preoccupy me here.

At least starting with the United States, though, this year marks a full decade since Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his first candidacy in 2015. To be honest, some part of me still has a hard time believing or understanding the extent to which American politics has realigned itself around the personality of this strange, spiteful, child-like person, who was, it’s sometimes hard to remember, a reality television host before he was ever a politician, but here we are.

In that decade, a lot of the debate about Trump on the Left, and particularly on the intellectual Left, has been about whether he counts as a “fascist.” So, I want to start by saying a few things about the substance of that debate, and how I’d see its political stakes, before moving on to a broader set of issues.

Whenever you see someone claiming that Example X is an instance of Broader Phenomenon Y, a pretty obvious place to start the discussion is by asking what people mean by Y, so we can see whether X fits that definition. And when it comes to “fascism,” even very smart people often struggle when asked for a definition of this particular term. I often hear phrases like “ultra-nationalism,” for example, but I rarely see much clarity on what’s supposed to make some nationalisms and not others “ultra-.” In World War I, for example, when anti-German hysteria in the United States reached such a fever pitch that German books were systematically removed from libraries, was that an example of regular American nationalism or this special “ultra-“ nationalism? How about World War II, when we went so far as to round up American citizens of Japanese descent and put them in internment camps for the duration of the war? Are European soccer hooligans who go around randomly assaulting people on the streets for being suspected fans of the opposing national team “ultra-“ nationalists even if, when they go home, the hooligans vote for mainstream parties instead of the parties of the far right? These are all examples of nationalism making people cruel and stupid, certainly. But that’s what nationalism does.

Analysts who focus on rhetorical similarities between Trumpism and classical European fascism like to throw around phrases like “nostalgia for an imagined past” and “visions of national greatness.” And it’s true enough that these were central rhetorical tropes of the followers of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. But these have also been rhetorical staples of any number of conservative and reactionary movements both long before and long after classical European fascism. See, for example, Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for president in 1980 and 1984 which were, by the way, the source from which Donald Trump and Steve Bannon lifted the phrase “Make America Great Again” in 2016. It seems to me that all we can learn from the fact that various kinds of right-wingers including but not limited to fascists go to these same rhetorical wells is the uninterestingly obvious fact that fascism is a phenomenon of the Right.

Classical Marxist analyses of fascism focused not on how fascists talked but on what they did. In his brilliant writings on the rise of fascism in Germany, for example, Leon Trotsky emphasized that the unique feature of fascism, as opposed to various other kinds of right-wing authoritarianism, is that fascism starts as a grassroots mass movement that battles socialists and communists and busts up labor unions in bloody street-fighting. When fascist movements achieve state power, they overthrow parliamentary democracy, ban unions and opposition parties, and supplement or even partially replace the traditional repressive machinery of the state with their own forces.

Nothing like that, of course, has come remotely close to happening in the Trump era in the United States. Right-wing paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath-Keepers are microscopically tiny, they’re beset with federal informants, and they have no capacity whatsoever to physically terrorize their enemies. Compared to serious right-wing paramilitaries in a country like Brazil, groups that control territory like drug gangs and sometimes assassinate left-wing politicians like Marielle Franco, armed rightist groups in the United States feel more like Live Action Role-Players. I certainly agree that Trump deserves moral condemnation for his coddling of such elements, for example through his sweeping pardon of even violent Jan. 6th defendants, but honestly, they’re such minor players you could tell the story of Trumpism without them.

And going back to the Brazil analogy, even when Bolsonaro was president, it doesn’t seem to me that fascism had actually been imposed on Brazil, even if the raw materials for it were far more developed than they had been in the United States. Bolsonaro, after all, was deposed not by some equivalent of the Red Army marching on Berlin or Italian partisans hanging Mussolini but because a free press exposed his wrongdoing, he lost a democratic election, and once out of office he was held accountable by an independent judiciary.

On the other side of the divide between Trotskyists and Stalinists, the Comintern’s main theorist of fascism was Georgi Dimitrov, who defined fascism as “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” While Trotsky’s definition has been a bigger influence on my own thinking about fascism over the years, you may prefer Dimitrov’s definition if only because it casts a wider net by emphasizing what fascists do with state power rather than how they achieve it in the first place. Pinochet’s Chile, for example, wouldn’t count on the Trotskyist definition but it might well according to Dimitrov, and perhaps it should. Certainly, if what we were facing under Trump was anything like what happened under Pinochet, the academic debate about whether it counted as “fascism” would be utterly beside the point.

Whatever you make of that issue, though, Trump is certainly very far from fulfilling Dmitrov’s description (at least when you remember what sort of example he had in mind when he formulated it). Whatever Trump’s very real and disturbing authoritarian impulses, or his acts of extreme performative cruelty toward migrants and refugees, he’s just not going to ban the Democratic Party and start filling concentration camps with dissidents. Something Trotsky emphasizes, and I don’t think Dimitrov would disagree with this, is that capital only tends to throw its weight behind actual full-on fascism when its back is up against the wall. Honestly, empowering a Hitler or a Mussolini is destabilizing. There’s a reason parliamentary democracy is the state form which advanced and reasonably prosperous capitalist societies tend to gravitate toward over time. I’m not saying that capitalists have ever just given democratic rights without people at the bottom of society having to fight for them, but ultimately, once the system is in place, capitalists tend to know better than to rock the boat too much on the basics.

If you want to manage popular frustrations without too much instability while the underlying profit machine whirrs along extracting surplus-value from the working class, you’re better off with the degree of long-term popular legitimacy multi-party democracies can achieve. Capital only tends to sacrifice that stability when the capitalists have a real and credible fear that the alternative is that they’ll lose everything in a socialist revolution. In the United States, our rate of private-sector unionization is, what, 6%? We’ve never even had a mass, electorally viable independent social-democratic party, never mind a revolutionary communist cadre capable of making a bid for state power. We haven’t had any city-wide general strikes since the Great Depression, and we’ve never had even one single national general strike. Even the social democratic wing of the Democratic Party was handily crushed by the Democratic establishment in the 2020 primaries and hasn’t been able to stage a comeback since. The situation is simply not meaningfully comparable to any that’s ever led a multi-party democracy to lurch into fascism or military dictatorship or anything like that. We should try to be more analytically serious than that.

And at this point in the conversation, people will often say, oh, you’re assuming that 21st century American fascism will play out like 20th century European fascism, but no, it’s going to be its own thing with its own characteristics. But if you want to talk that way, the next step has to be for you to provide a clear and operationally useful definition of your own, and to be honest, at least in my experience, that next step never seems to happen. When you get right down to it, the reason people desperately want to claim the f-word is that World War II is the last great big moral touchstone that everyone, more or less, agrees on. Elon Musk is the kind of deeply grotesque human being who thinks that doing a Hitler salute and giving a jokey little explanation of why he did it (“oh, see, I was throwing the crowd my heart”) is a funny way of being edgy and triggering his liberal political enemies, but even Elon Musk made a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, since that kind of thing is one of the most unifying rituals of our political class. Vladimir Putin’s stated justification for invading Ukraine was that he wanted to “de-Nazify” that country given the presence of far-right forces like the Azov Battalion, and on the other side, we’ve had three years of anyone who criticized US policy in Ukraine and called for de-escalation and peace negotiations being compared to Chamberlain at Munich. Eighty years after the camps were liberated by the Red Army, Hitler’s regime remains our most potent symbol of evil, and when I say “our” I mean damn near everyone. After Bannon imitated Elon’s trollish Sieg Heil, even Marine Le Pen felt the need to distance herself, because those are the rules. The Nazis are still the most easily hate-able mainstream movie bad guys. That’s half of why leftists want the emotional satisfaction of calling our enemies fascists. The other half is that, just as World War II was the heroic period of the United States military, for example, the struggle against fascism that culminated in that war was the heroic period of the Left. We, or rather our much older comrades, were the ones who did things like fight in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and got labeled as “premature anti-fascists” in later FBI Files. It’s right and proper that we take pride in that history. And honestly, I have no objection to anyone who wants to just use “fascist” as an insult applying it to Trump and Musk and the rest. God knows, few people in the world more richly deserve to be insulted, and if it’s cathartic to you to throw it around, go for it.

But my reason for pushing back so hard against the attempts of some left intellectuals to say, no, it’s not just an expressive political swear word, we’re literally fighting fascism, is that I think it’s a misleading theory of what we’re up against. Like pretty much everyone to the left of the GOP, I’ve been horrified by much of what’s gone on in the last month. But trying to analytically force this into the mold of the enemies we faced in our heroic period risks making us miss what’s actually novel. The title the organizers suggested for this talk was “the rise of authoritarian regimes in uncertain times” and that strikes me as exactly right. I want to tarry on the fact that these are uncertain times. The fact that these are uncharted territories and genuinely no one has any idea where it’s going. I’m not going to insult anyone intelligence by claiming to have a complete and well-formed theory of the phenomenon, let alone what we can do about it, but I want to at least urge people to think about it in a more clear-eyed way. Let’s at least start there.

Something my friend and occasional co-author Danny Bessner emphasizes in his work on this, and I think it’s really worth emphasizing, is that these rising right-wing authoritarian movements around the world are a symptom of the deep failures of standard liberal governance. Consensus politics has been running on fumes for a long time, dining out on accomplishments like defeating fascism and instituting modern welfare states that happened before the vast majority of people alive now were even born, and in any case at least some of these accomplishments have been deeply hollowed out by half a century of neoliberal retreat. In the United States, the secondary domestic heroic period of liberalism was the civil rights movement, and there are at least rough equivalents in various other countries around the world, so a lot of mainstream liberalism’s attempts here and elsewhere to create the impression of a moral purpose to justify itself have involved things like increasing gender equality and acceptance of sexual minorities and increasing racial diversity, and of course I think that all of these things are welcome forms of social progress, I take it for granted that we all think that here. Why be a socialist or a labor activist or anything like that if you didn’t have a basic normative commitment to human equality? But progress in these domains, or sometimes pseudo-progress, or quite often a messy combination of genuine progress and performative nonsense, has played out in the shadow of economic neoliberalism. The original civil rights movement in the U.S. wanted to follow up the destruction of Jim Crow with egalitarian economic initiatives. Remember, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But even in the mid-1960s, American capital wasn’t going to accept massive jobs programs that would cripple its bargaining power against organized labor, and by the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter even the Democratic Party had started its neoliberal turn. And, in different ways and to different degrees and certainly on different timelines, broadly similar things have happened in many other nations throughout the world. The effect of all of these trends is to give us a kind of liberalism that focuses on diversifying the ruling class and shaking its finger at uncouth proles, maybe making them sit through a lot of diversity trainings even at the same time they worry that they’ll lose their jobs to cutbacks, and the entirely predictable effect of that is to create a lot of room for reactionary monsters who can portray themselves as a countercultural force, as a kind of collective middle finger to the oh-so-benevolent-and-enlightened liberal technocrats. It’s a petri dish in which new and more virulently authoritarian strains of right-wing politics can grow.

In countries with strong fascist traditions, there will of course be overlap, on the level of rhetoric and certainly on the level of personnel, between these new strains and the remaining dregs of those older traditions. Just as many communists in the U.S. became New Deal Democrats, many Frenchmen who may have been carrying a torch for the memory of the Vichy regime may settle for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far more mainstream daughter Marine Le Pen. She may not hate Jews or deny the Holocaust, in fact she may be fanatically pro-Israel, but at least she hates Muslims and she’s a middle finger to the Left. They’ll take it.

Victor Orban’s Hungary is probably the country, at least in Europe, where this kind of new Right project has been most successful. As such, it’s held up as an example to emulate by reactionary movements far and wide. Orban himself travels to the U.S. to speak at conservative conferences, where he’s greeted as a hero. And he might not be filling death camps with his political enemies, he might even bow down to Brussels on many issues when push comes to shove, but he’s certainly been far more authoritarian than the global right-wing average, in terms of doing things like purging the universities of centers of political dissent. Trump and his associates certainly at least dream of doing the same here, whether or not they’ll ultimately prove to be able to carry it out.

Netanyahu in Israel is another obvious point of comparison here. Of the bunch, he’s most closely approximated Hitler’s crimes through his outright genocidal campaign of terror against Israel’s internal population of non-citizen Palestinians in Gaza (and, to a lesser but still very real extent, the West Bank). And even within “Israel proper,” he’s vastly increased his personal power and hollowed out democratic institutions in ways that caused mass protests and strikes even from within the country’s Zionist mainstream, but he’s not about to cancel elections and declare himself president-for-life. In fact, much like Trump, who I now want to turn back to, Netanyahu is desperate to stay in power precisely because judicial institutions have been able to hold onto enough independence that he’s worried that his alternative to leading the country will be sitting in a jail cell.

When Hitler took the reins in Germany, and especially after the burning of the Reichstag, he acted rapidly to take total control over the German state. And, sure, in a certain sense Trump has been taking unprecedented actions to consolidate his power over the American state. At that level of abstraction, the two look similar. But where Hitler oversaw a massive expansion of German state capacity, what’s gone on the last month, as Elon Musk’s so-called “Department” of Government Efficiency has slashed and burned its way through America’s regulatory and welfare states and even aspects of its repressive apparatus, has almost felt more like a self-imposed version of post-Soviet shock therapy. Oh, did we fire all the guys who look after the nuclear stockpile? Oops. Is airline safety collapsing? Sorry, that happened when we were stripping the Federal Aviation Administration for the copper wiring.

One of the things I’ve found the most frustrating about the Left’s “fascism debate” in the last decade is that it’s often felt polarized between the position that Trump was literally Adolf Hitler and the position that he wasn’t even worse than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Those positions feel equally absurd to me. The single American left intellectual I most deeply admire, Adolph Reed Jr., wrote an essay in 2016 encouraging people in swing states to vote for Hillary Clinton. It was called “Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger, It’s Important.” I think he was correct, and I’ve been publicly advocating the same position during the last two election cycles. Maybe I’m just a simplistic person but given the choice between a lesser evil and a greater evil, my position is that diminishing the amount of evil is better for the workers’ movement, and for humanity in general. I’ve never believed we would be able to meaningfully influence corporate Democrats like Biden or Harris to move to the left, sadly I just don’t think we have the capacity for that, but I do think that we’re better off not having what little organizational capacity has been built up by the American working class subject to an all-out assault.

And, to circle and underline that last point, one of the points I most emphasized last year when I was encouraging leftists in swing states to hold their noses and vote for Harris was that Trump spent his first term appointing hardcore union-busters to the National Labor Relations Board. I expected him to do the same. But what’s happened has been a thousand times worse than what I expected. Last time, Trump did what any Republican president would have done with NRLB appointments. This time, Trump and his robber-baron friend Musk are waging a scorched-earth war against organized labor like nothing we’ve seen since before the New Deal. This time next year, depending on how various court cases shake out and whether the Trump administration even bows to the courts if things don’t go their way, we quite literally might not have a National Labor Relations Board, or if we do, it might be an empty shell, stripped of its most basic enforcement powers. That’s the kind of nightmare we’re facing right now.

And on core issues of constitutional governance and basic liberal rights, we might also be seeing the kinds of lurches in the wrong direction we haven’t witnessed in a very long time. The degree of assertion of executive power at the expense of the legislative branch we’re seeing right now, that kind of basic assault on small-r republican principles, has reached a point where we may need to relearn Marxist vocabulary from a lot longer ago than the 1930s, words like “Bonapartism.” And while I don’t expect Trump to declare himself president-for-life or anything like that, I certainly think there will be an election in 2028, I do think free speech rights might be in worse trouble than we’ve seen in a very long time. In the 2024 GOP platform, they had this numbered list of all-caps points that more than a few people commented read like a list of Trump’s shower thoughts, it was stuff like “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY - ALL MADE IN AMERICA”, and one of them was “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN.” Taken seriously, that’s a call for a third Red Scare. That’s a very real and grim possibility right now. Trump and his camp have been ranting and raving for a long time about “Marxists” in the universities and, man, I’ve got to say, as a Marxist who’s spent his life in universities, I’ve never actually felt like I had as much company as that, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that they’ll find ways to come from what few of us there are as part of a much more general purge.

Trump’s rhetoric since the election has also taken a hard turn in the direction of a genuinely deranged kind of territorial expansionism. He spent two paragraphs of his inauguration speech ranting about retaking the Panama Canal, which several decades after we signed a treaty giving it back and a couple decades after we actually did give it back, could only be accomplished at this point by actually reinvading that country. He’s refused to take military force off the table in pursuit of the annexation of Greenland for God’s sake, which taken literally would mean war with Denmark, and that raises some truly fascinating questions about Article V of the NATO charter. Oh, and he’s formally designated the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which sure feels like it could be the first step of a ramp-up of military tensions that could lead Trump to follow in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson by sending troops to Mexico. Now, I’m not saying any of these things will necessarily happen. Trump, frankly, talks all kinds of bullshit he has no intention of actually carrying out. The ever-so-fun guessing game is always trying to tell what portion of it he might actually decide some sunny day to take a shot at. But if any of these new wars do come to pass, then as with the Bush-era war in the Middle East, this too could coincide with an uptick of domestic authoritarianism. Historically, the two tend to go together.

But I think if we’re going to think seriously about the particular horrors we’re facing, it’s a good idea to expand our repertoire of historical analogies, not because whatever happens is going to be simply a re-enactment of anything that’s already happened—Trump is no more the reincarnation of Woodrow Wilson than he is the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler, he’s something new—but because remembering the sheer variety of horrible things that have happened at various points in our history can help us orient ourselves as we think about ways to fight the more recent grotesqueries emerging not only in my country but all around the world as the socially progressive strain of neoliberalism loses its grip on any kind of popular legitimacy.

So, let’s talk seriously about that.

The first Red Scare happened under Wilson, the same president, who as I just mentioned, did what Trump has threatened to do and militarily intervened in Mexico. Tons of socialist and communist immigrants were deported from the country. Eugene V. Debs went to jail under Wilson for giving a fiery speech condemning World War I and calling for working-class resistance. Wilson also gave encouragement to the Ku Klux Klan back when that was a far more deadly right-wing paramilitary force than anything we face now.

Another historical analogy I’ve suggested in some of what I’ve written about this is the beginning of the Cold War under Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both were very far from being Nazis. Truman was the president who oversaw the final defeat of the Nazis in his first month in office, and Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander who carried it out. But they instituted much worse forms of repression in many ways than anything that, at least as of now, it looks like we’ll be facing. Again: I really meant what I said about uncertain times. I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m not going to lie to you guys and say I know exactly how bad things could get. No one knows how bad it could get. But at least in terms of a snapshot of anything anyone is talking about now, it’s nothing like as bad as the Eisenhower era, the era of loyalty oaths and blacklists and something called the Communist Control Act of 1954 that formally banned the Communist Party USA.

And I don’t bring any of this up to say, oh, see, Trump isn’t so bad, or if Nigel Farage becomes Prime Minister of the UK, he won’t be so bad, or Marine Le Pen if she ends up in charge of France. It’s all honestly pretty horrifying, and where and when this makes sense tactically, I absolutely think the serious working-class left should be willing to make short-term alliances with liberals we hate to block it from happening, even as we recognize that this stuff is the symptom and the decomposition of liberalism is the disease and we need to create an alternative to the liberals to have any hope of solving the problem in the long run. Rather, I think pointing to forebearers for what we’re facing now less apocalyptic than classical European fascism can precisely help us to be better fighters against all of this stuff.

If real literal fascists on the 1930s model are about to take over your country, or they’ve already done so, you basically have a couple options. The first is that you flee the country. And don’t tell me you can’t afford to, because in situations like that huge numbers of people will flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs and walk hundreds of miles on foot like Syrians did when they were fleeing Assad. The second is that you stay but you go underground, carefully hiding your politics so you can carry on resistance activities even under a fascist regime. Those are both decisions that small groups, or even individuals, can make on their own. The third, which only works if a massive proportion of your society is willing to take this leap with you, is that you take up arms like the Spanish Republic, killing massive numbers of your fellow citizens and seeing a massive number of your own comrades killed. Then, if you lose, you can maybe go into hiding and do the second option, but probably you’re really looking at the first option. And if you return, it’s going to be after a revolution like Portugal in the 1970s or following the liberation of the country by invading armies like the end of World War II.

But that’s not how the Left responded to the Wilson or Eisenhower. I’m not saying no one left, or that there might not even now be people who make a rational decision that leaving is the best option for them. There could be. But by and large, that’s not what we did in response to those earlier bouts of authoritarian repression. We stayed, we marched and wrote and spoke and organized in defense of civil liberties, we challenged them in the courts, we stuck up for workers’ rights in the workplace. And we weathered the storm. We stayed and we lived to fight another day. And that’s exactly what we need to do now.

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Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.