Trump’s populism isn’t fascism. So what is it?
if fascism was going to spread to the United States, it would have done so in the 1920s and 1930s, when fascism and related ideologies were gaining the support of enlightened, forward-thinking people all over Europe. Authoritarian and antidemocratic movements were taking hold nearly everywhere from Portugal and Spain in the west to Greece and Russia in the east. For European intellectuals and politicos, democracy wasn’t the future; fascism and communism were. Yet neither ideology attracted more than a few adherents in the United States.
.. Fascism, in order to thrive, needed conformity and deference to the wisdom of planners. It was the doctrine of elites, not mavericks or crackpots. The Nazis purged many accomplished people from high positions, but most of the elites either tolerated or supported them. They captured the government first, but the universities, the established churches and the cultural institutions soon fell into line.
.. As for Trump’s chances of effecting a fascist putsch, does anyone seriously imagine that his populist creed stands a chance of winning over the elites who populate our universities, news media, cultural institutions and entertainment industry?
.. The Trump phenomenon is a distinctly American upheaval: ugly in its overtones, philistine in its aesthetics, incoherent in its tenets, occasionally disruptive of valuable traditions and institutions, but basically a necessary remedy to the centralizing dynamic of consensus liberalism.
.. The populist movement that’s turning our politics upside down won’t win them over, but it will weaken their influence and rattle their pieties. And when the dust settles and the United States is still the free and vibrant place it was before — when the nation hasn’t metamorphosed into some fascist dystopia — they just might engage in a little self-criticism.