Are We in Fascism Yet?
Why calling everything fascism weakens our fight—and how sharper analysis can strengthen resistance
Note from the Author
The current threat of a federal military invasion into Chicago makes particularly urgent the issue of what is fascism, and what that definition means for how we can fight back. Are we in fascism? Are we facing a fascist takeover this month?
The dismal history of Italian and German fascism is that once they had achieved state power, even the most modest attempts at resistance were snuffed well before they had a chance of seriously challenging and overthrowing the fascist state.
This article, written but not published before Trump’s promised invasion, argues that fortunately we can fight back, we can defeat Trump’s goons, and fortunately the situation, while dangerous, is nothing like that faced by fascism.
Even if the invasion does not materialize, the questions of fascism—and how we resist authoritarianism—remain urgent. This is not just about Trump. It is about how we recognize danger and build the movements capable of resisting it.
—The exceptions being as the allies were pummeling the Nazis on the Italian peninsula, and the Warsaw uprising on the eve of the Russian army advance.
I invite you to read this not just as history, but as strategy for the present.
The word “fascism” has become a cliché in most sections of the U.S. Left. Every right-wing politician, bureaucrat, and policy has had the label attached to them to the point that the term has become virtually meaningless. Every few years, Democrats and their hangers-on warn us not only that it’s “the most important election of our lifetime,” but also that fascism will result if the Republicans sweep into power.
By that count, during my lifetime, we’ve been overrun by fascism at least a half dozen times.
Why is Defining Fascism Important?
To organize, activists need to have a clear understanding of our circumstances so that we can act most effectively.
Under-estimating the power arrayed against us means we will organize in ways that expose ourselves to dangers that can be avoided. Over-estimating the power arrayed against us means that we squander opportunities to resist the right more effectively.
In modern history dictatorships that rule against the wishes of their peoples have been a dime a dozen. All of them are brutal and dangerous, both to their subjects and their neighbors. In comparison to formal “democracies,” the opportunities for open organizing under them are more limited, so it is important to use and defend what democratic rights we still have.
But applying the term “fascism” to all or most dictatorships was and is meaningless. It collapses together a particularly dangerous form of dictatorship – as seen in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – with far more common garden-variety dictatorships. Successful organizing against these more common dictatorships, while complex and dangerous, has been done many times.
Even the most cursory knowledge of the history of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and the movements that brought them to power, shows that fascism (with a lower-case “f”) poses a far more imposing threat than “dictatorships-on-the-make” like Recep Erdogan’s in Turkey, Viktor Orban’s in Hungary, or Trump’s USA. Correctly gauging our current challenges – whether we’re facing historic fascism of the 1930s, or facing a new “McCarthy Era” of increased autocracy as I have argued elsewhere – is something that the Left in the U.S. has to come to terms with if we’re to defeat the attacks from the right.
Some Definitions
Liberal and Marxist historians have sought to define “fascism” with very different results.
Is fascism defined by ideology? Anti-Semitism was at the core of Nazi thought as a movement and then in government, but played almost no role in the Italian fascist movement and then minimal role in government except at the very end of that regime when it was a clear puppet of the Nazis.
More commonly, leftists of all stripes have used the presence of various reactionary policies to define what is “fascist”:
Concentration camps make a regime “fascist.” If so, did that make liberal Democratic Party hero President Franklin D. Roosevelt a fascist? After all, in 1942, he signed the bill setting up the Japanese-American “internment” camps. Did the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. become fascists in 1942? After all, the overwhelming majority of Americans supported concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, including the U.S. Communist Party!
Mass deportations of “disloyal” immigrants and mass closure of dissident publications make a regime “fascist.” On this score, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson was a “fascist.”
Ditto U.S. invasions of other countries. On that score, practically every U.S. president in the modern era, of both political parties, was a fascist.
Ditto government suppression of leftist First Amendment-protected protests. On that score, the entire U.S. was “fascist” up through the early 1930s, and the First Amendment right to assemble is still frequently challenged by local governments throughout the US.
When the U.S. left bandies about the term “fascist” in these ways, it is not only using it as a superfluous and misleading synonym for “reactionary.” It also shows an appalling ignorance of US history.
A Marxist Definition
Marx famously described all history as “the history of class conflict.” In the current world, the central conflict is between workers vs. capitalists. The middle classes (small business people, supervisors, managers, petty government functionaries, “professionals,” etc.) side with one or another main class rather than play an independent role.
A common myth promoted by liberal and conservative historians is that most Germans supported the Nazi Party, but this is belied by a wealth of empirical evidence. In his excellent book, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class, Donny Gluckstein cites many primary source materials demonstrating the mainly middle class basis of the Nazi Party (though it did draw members from all classes, especially once it became the governing party).
While the Nazis made faux-“socialist” appeals to these middle classes, such as breaking up big retail establishments that were driving small businessmen to the wall, it ignored these promises once in power. Its usefulness to German capitalists who largely funded it was its mass basis in the streets, allowing it to physically destroy demonstrations and meetings of Germany’s leading working class organizations – the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and their associated unions and other institutions. By the early 1930s, the street-fighting arm of the Nazi Party, the storm-troopers, sometimes outnumbered the rest of the party.
It was the mass basis in the streets of the growing Fascist and Nazi parties that made them so dangerous to the Left and civil liberties in general. After the violent suppression of the 1918 revolutionary movement which had forced German rulers to sue for peace at the end of World War I, the nascent fascist movement fueled a level of political violence during the next decade and a half that makes our current political climate look tame by comparison:
“In the mid-1920s, the left-wing statistician Emil Julius Gumbel published figures showing that the 22 political murders committed by left-wing offenders from late 1919 to mid-1922 led to 38 convictions, including 10 executions and prison sentences averaging 15 years apiece. By contrast, the 354 political murders which Gumbel reckoned to have been committed by right-wing offers in the same period led to 24 convictions, no executions at all, and prison sentences averaging a mere 4 months apiece; the courts actually acquitted 23 right-wing murderers who confessed to their crimes.” — Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich
As Gluckstein notes, “On the international scale, there have been many examples of dictatorships attacking and destroying labour movements. In the strict sense of the term, many such dictatorships are not fascist, though they may use violent methods popularly identified with fascism. The manner in Germany revealed the unique nature of fascism – it was carried out with a thoroughness in both breadth and depth which set it apart from almost any other counter-revolutionary process. This was due to the Nazi Party’s mass roots, its millions of supporters, and its huge activist core.”
To the extent that people today know of any German-based opposition movements to the Nazi regime, it’s typically the “White Rose,” a small group of upper-middle-class students, or the “Generals’ Plot,” ruling class military figures who supported Hitler until the war was clearly lost. Gluckstein helpfully unburies the history of the far more numerous, but still small, working-class groups that organized against Hitler. What all these opposition movements had in common was how easily they were destroyed due to the Nazi movement’s mass basis.
Most Dictatorships Aren’t Fascist
Under dictatorships whose origins were not from mass fascist movements, underground and sometimes open organizing by opposition forces is much more possible, though fraught with danger. Think of “Mothers of the Disappeared” during the Argentine military dictatorship, Solidarnosc in Poland during the Wojciech Jaruzelski dictatorship, and the People Power movement in the Philippines during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. There are many other examples besides.
When people today loosely talk about international fascism, they typically point to Trump’s close ally, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who is notorious for destroying the independence of the country’s judiciary and its press. Yet just last month, over half a million people in Budapest openly protested for queer rights in a massive show of defiance of the regime. Could that have happened in Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy?
Individual fascists infest these regimes, as they do the Trump administration, but the repression overwhelmingly is carried out by forces employed by the state. Trump would love to have a mass, private force of jack-booted thugs at his disposal to break up protests, beat up enemies and riot against institutions, government or private, that refuse to do his bidding. But despite pardoning the January 6th rioters, he lacks such a force. This was starkly revealed, for example, by the pathetic attendance at his June 14th military parade compared to the mass “No Kings” protests of millions on the same day. Could those protests have been organized in Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy?
Bandying about the term “fascist” today underestimates our opportunities to oppose the far right. It trivializes the epic repression suffered by Jews, gays, women, religious dissenters, liberals, writers, scientists, leftists and millions of others under actual fascist movements and regimes. Once the regime was in office, Nazism physically obliterated almost every independent institution, no matter how apolitical or rightwing – choir groups, sports clubs, the most trifling social organizations. The utter atomization of German society gave Nazism a unique power.
Today the US doesn’t even have a garden-variety dictatorship (yet), let alone a fascist one. We fortunately do not have a mass body of non-government thugs breaking up our protests and meetings, and breaking down the doors of our private residences. We still have many opportunities to utilize our diminishing rights to publicize our issues – through gatherings, media, strikes, civil disobedience, etc. – to gain more adherents, to get more people involved in direct actions, and thus to grow and become more powerful in the face of the right wing’s attempts to get their way.
In this context, scaring people today with the prospect of current or imminent “fascism” is political malpractice, blunting our attempts to create larger movements. It also lets powerful law firms, universities, and media empires off the hook for their cowardice in caving to Trump. For if fascism is truly here right now, who could we blame them for caving to the jack-booted thugs?
At its worst, crying “Fascism!” is yet another cynical attempt to herd people into the Democratic Party—the same party of enablers who paved the way for Trump by giving little more than lip service to most people’s needs, thus laying the groundwork for so much of what today is labeled “Trumpism.”
Properly applied, sharp political analysis leads to more impactful organizing. Sloppy political analysis is a recipe for political failure.
As I’ve written elsewhere, our current situation is far more analogous to the mis-named “McCarthy Era” of the 1950s and early 1960s. Rather than alarmist cries of “fascism,” we would do better to study that era to learn what did and did not work against the right. And things are not yet as dire as back then. We have two crucial advantages over that earlier McCarthy Era: 1) our political positions are far more popular than were those of the 1950s US Communist Party, and 2) we have the rich legacies of the Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-war, feminist, and other movements to draw upon.
Identifying “real” fascism, in contrast to the more typical far right and neo-liberal forces that enable it, is just a first step. With all the present-day discussion of fascism, it’s amazing how little probing there has been about the abject failure of the Left to stop the Nazi rise to state power in Germany, despite that country having the largest Communist and Social Democratic parties of that era. It’s beyond the scope of this article, but the main question beyond identifying fascism is how to defeat it.
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Andy Thayer is a decades-long organizer and media activist in Chicago, and has been active in a wide variety of issues ranging from queer liberation, defense of homeless people, opposing US wars, to solidarity with Palestine.
Some further reading besides those sources already cited:
David Renton, Fascism: History and Theory. While outside the scope of this article, Renton’s discussion of the reasons why Europe’s most powerful left parties and unions abjectly failed the test of successfully defeating Nazism before it took state power is especially illuminating.
Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
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