On the night of the election, after it became clear that Donald Trump had beaten Kamala Harris, neoconservative pundit David Frum took to Twitter to announce his intentions. A longstanding “Never Trumper,” Frum said he would “walk to the bar, strike up the band, and sing ‘The Marseillaise’.”

Some commentators many thousands of miles to Frum’s left seem to be thinking along similar lines. Independent presidential candidate Cornel West, for example, said that the lesson of the election was that “multicultural militarism” of the Harris campaign had been unable to defeat the “raw fascism” embodied by Trump. When a reporter asked Harris herself whether she thought Trump was a fascist, her answer was unambiguous.”Yes, I do.” 

All in all, this is a remarkable cross-partisan consensus. The Democratic nominee, one of her most prominent radical socialist critics, and the neocon who wrote George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech all agree that in the next four years, we’re faced with a literal struggle against fascism. Perhaps the constraints imposed by American institutions will stop Trump from declaring himself Führer on January 20^th and filling death camps with his political opponents, but anti-Trumpists still feel like they’re in the position of Rick and his friends at the bar in Casablanca. Nazis will have the run of the place, and the rest of us simply need to decide how much courage we can summon up in response.It’s hard not to suspect that these analogies are driven less by a sober assessment of the possibilities and dangers of American politics in the 2020s than by the desire of everyone involved to relive the heroic period of their respective factions. Never Trump conservatives can see themselves as little Churchills, liberals as little FDRs. Contemporary socialists don’t tend to be fans of Joseph Stalin, but we’re not immune from our own version of the fantasy of reenacting WWII-era anti-fascism. If we can’t defeat the corporate-friendly centrists in charge of the Democratic Party, rebuild the workers’ movement, and deliver Medicare for All, we can at least fill out the left flank of a glorious new People’s Front Against Fascism.

Some Annoying Follow-Up Questions

What exactly does it mean to say that Trump is a fascist? First, what does it mean in practical terms? Second, what does it mean in a literal sense? In other words, what definition of “fascism” is being assumed?

It’s not hard to find examples of liberals and leftists suggesting before November 5^th that it would be the last real election if Trump won. Rachel Maddow went as far as to suggest that she might end up in a “camp” if Trump won. It didn’t take many hours after Frum’s “strike up the band” tweet, however, before progressive America had switched gears to discussions about how bad Trump’s cabinet appointments were and what could be learned from the election so that Democrats could do better next time. Hardly anyone seems to be denying that there will be a next time.

Perhaps everyone is wrong, and one day soon we’ll all be reminding each other of our complacency as we live out our final days in the camps. (“Remember when you said in Damage that no one seriously thought this would happen?”) History has a way of surprising people. Just now, though, even those who insist most fervently that Trumpism is literally a form of fascism rarely seem to be willing to make this prediction. Indeed, one of the most familiar refrains of the Trumpism-is-fascism crowd is that twenty-first century American fascism can’t be expected to play out quite like twentieth-century European fascism. It’s going to have its own characteristics.Fair enough. But surely “fascist” means more than just “right-wing and very bad.” What is it exactly that makes both the German and Italian originals and the alleged American remake specifically fascist?

In his writings on the subject in the 1930s, the Russian revolutionary and Marxist theoretician Leon Trotsky analyzed what had happened in Italy (and what he saw happening again in Germany) primarily in terms of the street-fighting mass movements on the ground. These movements started by waging pitched battles against socialists and communists, busting up union halls and the like. They then took power, smashing all labor unions, opposition parties, and other sources of countervailing power, and supplemented or even partially replaced the traditional repressive apparatus of the state with their own forces. To the extent that this is a plausible read on what Mussolini and Hitler’s movements had in common, such that both could be reasonably counted as forms of “fascism,” Trumpism manifestly fails to fit the bill.

The Trump camp includes microscopically tiny groups like the Proud Boys, who have, as I’ve put it elsewhere, “no power, no capacity to smite their enemies, and a multitude of federal indictments.” But the story of Trumpism could be told entirely without these grouplets, and very little would be lost by the omission.

Of course, rather than trying to make the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers stand in for the brownshirts and the blackshirts in this round of the history of fascism, you can argue that Trotsky misread the essence of fascism. The Comintern’s chief theoretician of fascism, Georgi Dimitrov, defined the phenomenon as “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” This might look more promising as a definition, if we’re hoping for Trumpism to fit the bill. Here, the question of how fascism comes to power—whether through a March on Rome or by beating Nikki Haley in Iowa—is put to one side. Instead, the focus is on what fascists do once power has been achieved. But Dimitrov’s “open, terrorist dictatorship” seems to be exactly what no one expects to happen between now and Trump’s successor taking office on January 20^th, 2029.Most attempts to define fascism broadly enough to include Trumpism focus instead on analogies between the numerous ugly and unhinged things Trump and his supporters have said and the psychology or rhetoric of classical fascism. Or left intellectuals groping for a definition throw around terms like “ultra-nationalism.” But this too doesn’t quite convince. Nationalisms exist on a spectrum from pure ethnonationalism (where the nation simply is the ancestral racial volk) to pure civic nationalism (where the nation is everyone who lives here, or perhaps everyone willing to accept the “American creed” or whatever). Any given nationalist ideology at any given time might be expected to partake of some degree of both, often in a fairly incoherent way. But surely, if “ultra-nationalism” means anything more than “enthusiastic nationalism,” we should expect ultra-nationalists to lean hard toward race and ancestry, or at least culture and religion, rather than embracing a more inclusive notion of nationhood.Inconveniently for this narrative, Donald Trump won the Arab-American vote in Michigan in part by doing a lot of rallies where he was introduced by imams. Indeed, he’s often indulged in micro-targeted pandering to groups of prospective voters much smaller than the American Muslim community. (“To the Coptic Christian community living throughout the United States,” one of his tweets shortly before the election read, “I deeply admire your Steadfast Faith in God, Perseverance through Centuries of Persecution and Love for this Great Country.”) Even his genuinely vile rhetoric about unauthorized immigrants was mixed with heavy doses of purported concern for racial minority groups who were already here. New arrivals from Mexico, he often claimed, would take jobs from black people and well-established Mexican-American citizens.

Much as liberals and the liberal-adjacent portions of the socialist Left might wish to believe that Trump’s triumph can be understood in terms of the power of “whiteness” or “white supremacy,” the plain fact is that his multiracial pitch worked. He didn’t become the first non-incumbent Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988 by increasing his share of the white vote. In fact, preliminary data shows that Trump won a slightly smaller share of white voters running against Kamala Harris than he had running against Joe Biden four years earlier. Meanwhile, whether as a result of his ostentatiously multi-racial campaign appeals or as a byproduct of general class realignment or a bit of each, Trump made significant gains among black and especially Latino voters. One of the main functions of “fascism” discourse is to present Trump as a departure from past Republicans, but right this second, one of the most tangible differences between him and his predecessors is that he’s done a far better job of making inroads into these key Democratic constituencies.

Perhaps the Left Could Learn a Second Analogy

None of this is to deny that there are genuine points of contact between the liberal fantasy of impending fascism and the reality we’re likely to face. There are serious reasons to worry that Trump will be more competently authoritarian this time around, and his explicit promises have been disturbing. The central plank of his campaign was a promise of “mass deportations,” and he’s talked about declaring a state of emergency and using the military to round up deportees. He’s also talked about officially declaring the drug cartels to be “terrorist organizations” and bombing them. Trump hasn’t bothered to explain how he’ll wage a war in Mexico without it escalating to a war with Mexico, and as ever it’s hard to know how serious he is about either of these ideas. (Bluntly: He has a strong tendency to spout whatever bullshit crosses his mind.) But it’s reasonable to worry about both possibilities.

Nor are his authoritarian tendencies confined to mass deportation or drone strikes against drug dealers. The official 2024 platform he imposed on the GOP includes an all-caps promise to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN.” As Branko Marcetic has written, this and many other pronouncements by Trump and his allies pretty clearly add up to a proposal for a “third Red Scare.” Again, it could all be swagger and bullshit, but as someone who (i) still teaches a few university classes as an adjunct, and (ii) has written and spoken quite a bit about Palestine, it’s hard for me not to see grounds for concern in all this.

In fact, once you put all this together, you might conclude that the Casablanca analogy is on-point after all. Trump wants to terrorize a disfavored minority group, embark on a military adventure in a neighboring country, and use heavy-handed tactics against the domestic Left. He might not exactly be a fascist, but there’s no need to be pedantic about this. (As a joke I heard the first time in 2016 puts it, it’s only real fascism if it comes from the fascism region of Germany—everything else is just sparkling authoritarianism.)

There are, however, far more reasonable historical analogies for the ugly, reactionary, militaristic, and authoritarian elements of what we might be facing in the next four years than interwar Germany and Italy. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was like Trump (the first time) and very unlike Hitler or Mussolini in that he came to power through a democratic election and didn’t then end bourgeois democracy and declare himself President-for-Life. But Wilson acted out some of Trump’s most disturbing promises—sending troops to Mexico, for example, and starting the first Red Scare. The second Red Scare started under Harry Truman and escalated under Dwight D. Eisenhower—who, by the way, used the military in a mass deportation operation. It was called, and I swear I’m not making this up, “Operation Wetback.”

These analogies are not only closer to home than Hitler and Mussolini in a geographical sense but far more realistic in the expectations they set. In many ways, American society was far worse than it is now when these presidents held power. By any sane measure, for example, the United States is culturally a vastly less racist and sexist place now than it was then, and many positive precedents on civil liberties had yet to be set. The oft-quoted phrase about how you don’t have a right to “yell fire in a crowded theater,” for example, comes from a Wilson-era Supreme Court ruling upholding the arrest of a group of socialists for passing out Yiddish-language leaflets opposing World War I and calling for draft resistance. (As bad as we can all agree it would be to literally yell fire in a crowded theater that’s not about to go up in flames, I’d argue that the arrested socialists were, in that analogy, appropriately warning theater-goers about an actual fire. The key question when it comes to all such justifications for limiting free speech is, “Who gets to decide?”) Happily, the Court has long since reversed itself.

None of this is to say that there’s any kind of metaphysical guarantee that the worst things Wilson, Truman, and Eisenhower did will never be surpassed by anything Trump does. There’s simply no way to know that in advance. He conspired to steal the 2020 election, for example—something none of those three did (though George W. Bush did in 2000). Perhaps Trump and his friends will steal the 2028 election for J.D. Vance, or even try somehow to get around the 22^nd Amendment’s prohibition of Trump himself seeking a third term. I don’t think that will happen, but after the last decade of bizarre and chaotic occurrences in American politics, it would be foolish to rule anything out too confidently.

Even so, as we look ahead to four more years of Trump, analogies to the authoritarianism of presidents like Woodrow Wilson aren’t just more analytically convincing than analogies to Il Duce’s Italy and the Third Reich. They’re also just much more politically helpful.

First, hysteria serves no one. And it certainly doesn’t serve a long-term project like patiently rebuilding the workers’ movement and constituting the kind of Left that could actually contest for power in as deeply anti-socialist a country as the United States.

Second, the implicit logic of fascism analogies in intra-left discourse is nearly always to encourage leftists to put aside our battles with the neoliberal center over economic questions in favor of a procedural defense of democracy against what’s postulated as an urgent common threat. This amounts to telling socialists to endorse pretty much the same “build the broadest possible front around the most minimal possible basis of agreement” strategy that Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have been doggedly pursuing since Trump first came down the escalator in 2015. The abject failure of the Harris campaign to lean into an economically populist message is precisely what led to an unprecedented level of working-class support for the “fascist” Trump. Endlessly relitigating January 6^th and constantly reminding voters of how sensible people across the political spectrum were supporting Harris (everyone, as she and her surrogates often said, “from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney”) simply didn’t move ordinary Americans. 

We’re in our tenth straight year of dire warnings about the imminent demise of democracy, and that message loses force with every repetition. Defeating Trumpism requires offering Americans a program that serves their material interests.

And this brings us to the third and most important point. Besides whitewashing past generations of conservatives and encouraging leftists to bury the hatchet with contemporary liberals, the main function of “fascism” discourse is to stigmatize grassroots “fascists.” If we’re all in Rick’s bar in Casablanca, singing our hearts out in defiance of the Germans, then it’s hard to see what the 49.9% of American voters who pulled the lever for Trump are in this analogy if not Nazi collaborators.

That’s pretty much what’s suggested by a great deal of liberal rhetoric. Even as liberals (never mind the socialist Left) are losing ground in the war for public opinion to Trumpism, we’ve got Amanda Marcotte ranting in Slate about how progressive women should “never date a Trumper” and talking heads on MSNBC telling their viewers they’re right to refuse to see Trump-supporting family members at Thanksgiving. On any kind of rational tactical or strategic level, telling people to personally cut off 49.9% of American voters is bizarre. But the emotional logic of stigmatizing Trump voters is easier to understand if we start from the premise that they’re literally Nazis.

Maintaining Perspective

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander who led the struggle to defeat Hitler before he came home, became president, and persecuted communists and “wetbacks.” Woodrow Wilson was Commander-in-Chief for the dress rehearsal for that war a couple decades earlier. Socialists like Eugene V. Debs in the Wilson era and Norman Thomas in the Eisenhower years rightly and properly saw those presidents as political enemies who needed to be defeated. But they didn’t see them in the apocalyptic terms suggested by analogies to Hitler and Mussolini.

Pollsters ask voters about their education and income levels, not their relationship to the means of production, but from what can be gleaned from the data so far it looks like Trump won an outright majority of the working-class vote. I don’t pretend to have all the answers about how to realign American politics in the direction we need in order to win over a majority of the working class to a socialist program that pins the blame for their problems on the capitalist class instead of pointy-headed radical professors or desperate immigrants. But one thing about which I feel absolutely certain is that our opening rhetorical gambit can’t be an analogy to Europe in the 1940s.

You don’t try to convince Nazi collaborators to join your labor union and then hope that, little by little, you’ll win them over to your electoral program by means of normal political persuasion. Thinking we’re in Casablanca is a good way to do the exact opposite of what’s needed at this historical moment. It’s simply the wrong frame of reference when the greater evil has just won a popular election and we need to figure out how to beat our enemies not in some reenactment of World War II but in the war for hearts and minds.

If you need to understand contemporary politics through the prism of a story about dramatic historical events, you’re better off with the 1987 James Earl Jones flick Matewan. It tells the story of a group of workers coming together to fight the coal mining bosses in West Virginia in the 1920s. Many of them start the movie with deeply reactionary attitudes. In a time and place almost unfathomably more racist than any part of the country is in 2024, white workers are convinced to make common cause with black ones not by any antecedent moral epiphany but by the urgency of shared material interests. The moral growth comes later, as a result of the bonds of solidarity.

If you want to revel in being a “good person,” gather around the piano and sing La Marseillaise. But you’re better off in the frame of Matawan if you actually want to win.

Ben Burgis is an adjunct philosophy professor, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, and the host of the podcast and YouTube show Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books and pamphlets, most recently Four Essays on Palestine.