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.
Fascism and infrastructure
Much like the presumed-dry domain of logistics, infrastructure has long been tied to what the Cold War era called “command and control” systems — and that emphasis on defining political and social order remains latent in its civilianization. As Jo Guldi observed in her excellent Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State, for the state the act of infrastructure-making is also an act of defining markets, social relations, and the formation of a body politic.
.. Authoritarians tend to have really comprehensive infrastructure plans, which usually contributes to their appeal. From British roads in the nineteenth century to Hitler’s Autobahn to power grid repairs by ISIS to, uh, Immortan Joe’s Citadel, anyone seeking the legitimacy afforded a state understands that maintaining infrastructure not only builds goodwill (or at least subservience), it’s also a tremendous display of power.
.. it turns the owner or architect of that that infrastructure (not, let’s be clear, the actual labor force maintaining it) into a humblebragging servant of the greater good. Whether or not that system genuinely serves more than a power elite or a fascist agenda is more or less handwaved away.
Donald Trump is actually a fascist
All this seemingly erratic behavior can be explained — if not justified — by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world.
.. The game has several names: “Corporate statism” is one.
.. It means, roughly, combining the power of the state with the power of corporations.
.. Just to be clear: If I’m correct that Trump actually has a governing philosophy, that’s a bad thing, not a good thing. If he actually has principles to guide him through those famous swamps he plans to drain, that’s alarming, not reassuring. Bad principles are not a good substitute for no principles. Four or eight years of bad principles may make no principles look pretty good.
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming
In 1950, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno helped to assemble a volume titled “The Authoritarian Personality,” which constructed a psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic individual.”
.. The combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity is precisely the scenario Adorno and others had in mind: mass distraction masking élite domination.
.. A defining moment was the turn-of-the-century wave of music piracy, which did lasting damage to the idea of intellectual property. Fake news is an extension of the same phenomenon, and, as in the Napster era, no one is taking responsibility. Traffic trumps ethics.
.. At some point over the summer, it struck me that the greater part of the media wanted Trump to be elected, consciously or unconsciously. He would be more “interesting” than Hillary Clinton; he would “pop.” That suspicion was confirmed the other day when a CNN executive, boasting of his network’s billion-dollar profit in 2016, spoke of “a general fascination that wouldn’t be the same as under a Clinton Administration.”
.. America has, for the time being, abdicated the role of the world’s moral leader
.. “Make America Great Again” is one of Trump’s many linguistic contortions: in fact, one of his core messages is that America should no longer bother with being great, that it should retreat from international commitments, that it should make itself small and mean.
.. On the day after the American election, which happened to be the seventy-eighth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a neo-Nazi group posted a map of Jewish businesses in Berlin, titled “Jews Among Us.” Facebook initially refused to take down the post, but an outcry in the media and among lawmakers prompted its deletion.
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No, the fear is that the present antidemocratic wave may prove too strong even for Germany—the only country in the history of the world that ever learned from its mistakes.