For those doubtful about the fascism analogy for Trumpism—and I count myself as one of them—the point is to appreciate both continuity and novelty better than the comparison allows. Abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes. A response to what he represents hardly requires a restoration of “normalcy” but a questioning of the status quo ante Trump that produced him. Comparison to Nazism and fascism imminently threatening to topple democracy distracts us from how we made Trump over decades, and implies that the coexistence of our democracy with long histories of killing, subjugation, and terror—including its most recent, if somewhat sanitized, forms of mass incarceration and rising inequality at home, and its tenuous empire and regular war-making abroad—was somehow less worth the alarm and opprobrium. Selective outrage after 2016 says more about the outraged than the outrageous.
It is no contradiction to add to this qualm that comparing our current situation in America to fascism also spares ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it. For all its other virtues, comparison in general does not do well with the novelty that Trump certainly represents, for all of his preconditions and sources. It is true that in the face of novelty, analogy with possible historical avatars is indispensable, to abate confusion and to seek orientation. But there is no doubt that it often compounds the confusion as the ghosts of the past are allowed to walk again in a landscape that has changed profoundly. Comparison is always a risky tool; it leads to blindness, not just insight.
But keeping us honest is not the only reason that contrasts are essential at every turn. The politics of comparison are routinely bad. The best defense of analogy is that it could help improve our situation, by attracting crucial allies, and plotting next steps. Arguably, comparison served some of those functions in the early Trump years. I confess I found the reductio ad Hitlerum annoying even then, not least because it already seemed to me the definition of irresponsibility: if you say the world is about to end, either it will grimly confirm your prophecies or you will say your warning saved it. Heads, you win; tails, I lose. But if it was reasonable not to demand an ethics of comparison in those early days, three years on our situation is radically different. For what we have learned is that our politics of comparison doesn’t do the work we hoped it would.