Historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins edited Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a collection published in March 2024, which catalogs the debate up until 2023 and includes classics from figures such as Leon Trotsky, Angela Davis, and Hannah Arendt. In his introduction, Steinmetz-Jenkins writes that the “way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest,” but Trump’s victory all but ensures that the discussion is far from over.
What, then, has been the takeaway of the debate on fascism thus far, and will the years after January 2025 show that Trump was a fascist all along? For now, this much is clear: interpreting Trump through the lens of fascism was compelling but ultimately misleading.
The reason is straightforward, and the 2024 election hasn’t changed it. Fascism was born in the context of empire and herrenvolk democracies, and radical reactionaries have adapted to new environments, particularly multiracial democracies. Genocide, mass murder, and authoritarianism were never the exclusive purview of fascism, and remain possibilities. But the future likely contains new horrors, not ones recycled from the 1930s.
The 2024 election underscores the difference between Trumpism and fascism. Before the election, pundits in favor of the “fascism” label were predicting that Trump would use paramilitary forces to seize power. Maybe if he lost, those measures would have been in the mix. But he didn’t need them: Trump won a popular majority, backed by a growing number of black and Latino voters. He’s an authoritarian working through electoral politics, promising stability, not revolution.
Washington Versus Weimar
Eight years later, it’s hard to know who first raised the “fascism” label with Trump, though conservatives surprisingly launched some of the earliest accusations. There was a clear exculpatory character to these arguments: they wanted to show that Trump had “nothing to do with the Republican Party” but was instead the devotee of a foreign creed.
Did It Happen Here? includes a section of essays devoted to the politics of analogy: Did Trump match up to the 1930s? And why look to interwar Europe, rather than something closer to home?
The burden of the pro-fascist-analogy case is to show why Trump is a fascist, but without watering down the term and making it a synonym for something like racism in general. If we focus specifically on interwar fascism, some basic parallels do exist — Trumpism shares racism, nationalism, and antidemocratic tendencies. But Trumpism is missing the core elements of interwar fascism, especially the worship of violence as a means of transformation.