All-American Authoritarianism
The reality is that everything Trump is doing has antecedents in the history of the United States, and that the best way to apprehend Trump’s radicalism, and organize to stop it, is to place his behavior in the context of this longer history. Trumpism, in other words, is an intensification of long-standing, antidemocratic, and profoundly American trends. There is hardly a need to use the term fascism to understand it. This is America, and Trump is nothing if not deeply American.
Let’s begin with Trump’s attempted dismantling of the administrative state. To appreciate what’s going on, one doesn’t have to point to any foreign Führerprinzip; one only has to investigate the actual history of the US presidency.
Since the founding of the American republic in 1776, the presidency has grown in power while Congress, the supposed representative of the people’s will, has abdicated its responsibilities. This is most evident in the realm of foreign policy. The US Congress is constitutionally responsible for declaring war, but it has only done so eleven times, the last being in 1942.
Since that moment, though, the United States has been in a state of near-constant war. In addition to the well-known Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars, in the decades after World War II, the United States has intervened against foreign societies, according to the political scientists Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, with “the threat, display, or direct usage of force” over two hundred times. And what is true in foreign policy is true in other issue areas — the president has increasingly become the equivalent of an elected monarch. Put another way, there has been an ongoing, if usually ignored, constitutional crisis since at least the 1940s.
Most dramatically, in the last several decades, a radical and antidemocratic theory of presidential power, dubbed “the theory of the unitary executive,” has gained increasing sway in right-wing legal circles. As the political scientist Richard W. Waterman notes, this theory “posits that the president has sole responsibility for the control and maintenance of the executive branch” and concomitantly claims “that Congress does not have the right to enact laws that limit the president’s powers as chief executive or commander in chief” and “that the president has the same authority as the courts to interpret laws that relate to the executive branch.”