David Bell – The F Word

With election day almost here, the polls all continue to show an agonizingly close race, but the polling data itself remains frustratingly hard to interpret. According to the New York Times, white Republicans are responding to pollsters more reluctantly than white Democrats: sign of a hidden Trump advantage? But women have so far outpaced men at the voting booths, and they support Harris by a large margin. A usually-reliable Iowa state poll just put Harris ahead in this supposedly safe red state. The Republicans have been making noises about flipping blue New Hampshire. Are either of these things possible? We are about to find out.

But if you are waiting for the sound and fury in American politics to abate: don’t hold your breath. It is not going to happen tomorrow. In fact, whatever the results, the United States is most likely entering a period of prolonged and possibly dangerous instability. If Harris wins, or if the election results remain genuinely uncertain, even for just a few days, Donald Trump and his allies will make false, incendiary accusations that the Democrats have cheated (they have already started). There will be protests, possibly riots, and many attempts, both within the legal system and without, to overturn the results. It is not impossible that we will see violence on the scale of January 6 or worse, despite the facts that the Democrats now control the federal government, and that a new electoral count act has made it harder to interfere with the process.

If Trump wins, there will be no challenge. Harris will concede. But whether or not Trump immediately attempts to wreak retribution on his enemies, as he has promised, he will almost certainly announce deeply disruptive plans for his second presidency. Will he name Robert Kennedy Jr. the czar over American healthcare? Will Kennedy then promise to ban all the childhood vaccines he considers unsafe, including for polio, measles, diphtheria, hepatitis, and chickenpox? Will Trump threaten Vladimir Zelensky with the withdrawal of American aid unless Ukraine bends the knee to Russia? Will he reiterate his promises to deport tens of millions of migrants, and to impose massive, economy-killing tariffs on American trade? All of these things are possible, and all may have deeply destabilizing consequences, well before the January 20 inauguration.

Of course, many liberals believe that something even worse could follow a Trump victory: the end of American democracy. Ever since the election of 2016, prominent academics have claimed that Trump wants to establish a fascist dictatorship. Yale’s Timothy Snyder, for instance, rushed into print in 2017 with a book called On Tyranny, and in an interview declared it “pretty much inevitable” that Trump would follow Adolf Hitler’s example by declaring a state of emergency and staging a coup. Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University published an article entitled “Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s Coup in the Making,” and followed it up with a book that placed Trump in the company of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, Qaddafi, and Idi Amin. Both have been sounding the alarm bells ever since, and they are not alone. But many other academics have disagreed, triggering a so-called “fascism debate” that has dragged on ever since. At a conference at Princeton University last spring, the disagreement grew so heated that a well-known philosopher compared a political theorist to a concentration camp “kapo” for daring to criticize the “fascism analogy.” In the last stages of the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris herself has used the “f-word” about Trump, as have many others, including his own former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

As a historian of Europe, I’ve always considered the “fascist” label inappropriate for the twenty-first century United States. Yes, Trump often uses what could be called fascist language. He refers to the “enemy within,” “enemies of the state,” calls his opponents “vermin” and “animals” and “garbage,” threatens the press, and has even promised, in his trademark “is he joking or is he not?” manner, to be a “dictator on day one.” But rhetoric alone doesn’t make someone a fascist. Nor does an event like January 6, horrifying and criminal as it was. Despite the terrible spectacle of violent protestors invading and defiling the Capitol, the riot did not rise to the level of an organized coup attempt and it was brought to an end within hours. It wasn’t the March on Rome or the Beer Hall Putsch.

The actual fascist movements that thrived in Europe between the world wars were built around highly regimented mass movements. These movements aimed to bring about revolutionary transformations of society, worshipped all-powerful leaders, had a mystical belief in the power of violence, despised the rule of law, and were committed to a racialized cult of the nation grounded in fantasies about a mythical past. They also depended upon powerful paramilitary auxiliaries such as the Nazi SA and Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The Republican Party, despite its transformation into a personal vehicle for Donald Trump, and despite, yes, some similarities with these actual fascist parties, does not fit the model (at least, not yet). It is nowhere near as regimented, nowhere near as unanimously committed to the cults of violence and racialism, nowhere near as ready to break with fundamental American law, and it possesses nothing like a paramilitary auxiliary. Furthermore, American institutions and democratic traditions are far stronger than those in interwar continental Europe.

There is a case to be made that the warnings against “fascism” have actually hurt Harris and the Democrats. The seventy-four million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 understandably take umbrage at the notion that they supported an American Hitler, and that they might deserve the label “fascist” themselves. Despite January 6, 2021, Trump’s first term obviously did not bring fascism to America, leading many to see the warnings of Snyder et al. as hysterical overreaction. Commentators on the progressive left, who view Trumpist populism as a misguided but understandable protest movement against neoliberal inequality and America’s involvement in “forever wars” abroad, dismiss the “fascism analogy” as an attempt to distract attention from the country’s more serious problems.

More immediately, in my view, calling Trump fascist distracts attention from the genuine danger he poses. It is not that he is a fascist bent on imposing a Nazi order on American society. It is that he combines stratospheric levels of narcissistic self-confidence with equally stratospheric levels of immaturity, incompetence, capriciousness, and sheer ignorance. Whether or not he meets the clinical standard for lunacy, he often seems to be trying as hard as possible to do so. These qualities led to a genuine catastrophe during his first presidency: the disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 epidemic, which needlessly cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. If no other catastrophes on this scale took place during his first term, it was due to a fortunate combination of sheer good luck, the “guardrails” maintained by a set of relatively competent appointees, and the fact that a younger Trump retained at least a slight level of realism and inhibition. In a second Trump term – or in a period in which an unhinged Trump challenges Kamala Harris’s election – we can count on none of these factors being present.

So tomorrow will either give us Trump in all his inglorious ugliness, or another dangerous attempt to deny a Democrat the presidency. In other words, don’t even think that in two days you will be able to relax.