Most fascist parties and movements—Ganz knows their names, and repeats them often, as a reminder of that contingency—never seized any power. They were footnotes. That’s an important insight to address to observers who cite the sheer ridiculousness, abundant incompetence, and outright insanity within Donald Trump’s movement, and have a hard time placing it in the same universe with the movement that almost conquered Europe. After all, if Hitler’s little gang of beer hall brawlers had failed to achieve power, they surely would have looked precisely as ridiculous as all that. As Ganz puts it, “Everything kind of looks farcical until it doesn’t.”
The brawlers are never really the engine of the thing anyway. Ganz explained how Hitler and Mussolini used their more violent elements to destabilize and intimidate, while they took power through the more normal political channels of forming coalitions in parliament and ascending into leadership roles.
“The constitutional system in Italy always remained intact,” even when Mussolini became dictator, Ganz notes. “There was still the king, there was still a constitutional monarchy; he was prime minister. The fascist state kind of superimposed itself on that.” There was, for a time, even a robust parliamentary opposition: “Antonio Gramsci, head of the Italian Communist Party, famously was elected to parliament after Mussolini rose to power.”
At least as important to the story are the “responsible conservatives” who made their peace with the strongman, believing he could be controlled. Like Germany’s Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, architect of the 1933 coalition that made Hitler chancellor, who said: “In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.” Or the guy who said in 2015, “You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” That would be one Lindsey Graham, who later decided he liked Trump just fine, once he started winning.
The conceit is similar to what Bill Clinton felt about allowing China into the World Trade Organization: If you bring a radical outlier within the political system, they will act rationally and moderate their worst impulses. Mainstream conservatives in Italy and Germany repeatedly claimed Mussolini and Hitler would turn out to be responsible actors, once they occupied positions of responsibility. American elites followed suit with the absurd refrain, on occasions when Trump managed to act normal for 15 seconds: “He became president of the United States in that moment, period.”