Thread by @tzimmer_history

I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the use of the term “fascism” to describe the American Right. It’s complicated.

But this - the racist demagoguery, the idea of the racialized Other as a diseased threat, the desire to keep the nation “pure” - is pretty fascist.

I reflected a little bit on the “Is it fascism?” question here, with links to a great piece by @lionel_trolling and an excellent episode of the @KnowYrEnemyPod podcast, both providing insightful, nuanced explorations of the fascism debate:

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1393243602093056004

I’ll also link to this thread in which I reflected on – and rejected – an argument advanced by some scholars of Nazism that today’s American Far Right can’t be “fascist” because fascism was a phenomenon exclusive to Europe’s interwar period:

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1380577836109602818

I’m getting a lot of “How can you not see they’re all fascists??” reactions to my initial tweet on Ted Cruz in which I confessed to feeling somewhat ambivalent about the #fascism debate. Let me elaborate a little bit.

As the threads to which I linked above should make clear, I am certainly not in the camp of those who categorically reject the use of the term “fascism” in the current American context.

I do believe there are many good reasons to see Trumpism as a specifically American, twenty-first-century version of fascism. And it is crucial to emphasize fascist traditions on the American Right. But calling something “fascist” should be an analytical, not a moral statement.

I’m getting a lot of “Do you not see how bad this is?”-type reactions. And it’s absolutely bad, which is why I keep writing very, very long threads about the longstanding authoritarian, anti-democratic tendencies on the American Right and the acute danger to democracy.

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1397187240619610120

But the fact that something is really, really bad (read: authoritarian, racist, anti-democratic, etc) does not automatically make it “fascist,” and saying something is not fascist does not mean it’s not bad. It might be equally bad, or even worse – just different.

We shouldn’t reduce the question to “Is Trump / Trumpism / the American Right *bad enough* to be called fascist?” The term “fascism” is not just a slur. Saying “Be careful how you use the term fascism” is not at all the same as “I’m not convinced it’s bad enough.”

Which brings me to the specific reason why I’m somewhat skeptical about the way the term “fascism” is currently used to describe Trumpism. It often comes with certain apologist implications, separating Trump from the continuum of American history.

The comparison to Europe’s interwar period is sometimes invoked to mark Donald Trump as an aberration in American history, something Un-American, something so foreign that you have to use terms and concepts from Europe’s past to describe it.

But using these comparisons and these terms in this way is highly misleading. Trumpism is not an aberration. It is deeply rooted in longstanding American traditions and continuities of racism, white nationalism, white nationalist Christianism, and nativism.

It is fueled by the same energies and anxieties that have shaped the American project from the beginning. His support from conservatives is based on long-standing anti-democratic impulses on the American Right.

A white reactionary backlash against the first black president is, in a way, much closer to the historical norm in this country than it is an aberration. We should make sure that comparisons to Europe’s past don’t obscure that fundamental fact.