Thread by @tzimmer_history

The best argument for applying “American fascism” as an analytical framework to Trump / Trumpism is the fact that it emphasized - rather than dismissed or sanitized - these fascistic elements from the start and rightfully diagnosed an acute threat to democracy.

🧵1/

Meanwhile, the people who have proudly taken on the mantle of “Guardians Against Liberal Alarmism and Hysteria” have offered a lot of sneering condescension - while being wrong about Trumpism and what’s happening on the American Right almost every step of the way. 2/

It goes far beyond just Trump, of course: “Thought leaders” on the Right keep calling for a radical counterrevolution of the rightfully aggrieved against the sinister forces of leftism that are supposedly threatening the nation’s survival… 3/

All strands of the Right – GOP officials, the media machine, reactionary intellectuals, the conservative base – are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence against “the Left”… 4/

Significant portions of the Right are clamoring for a revolutionary leader who promises that he alone can return the nation to glory by violently purging it from globalist, leftist enemies and restore the rule of the *real* people.

Fascism is an adequate term for that. 5/

The fake-indignation over people applying the term “fascism” to factions on the Right is just silly – as is denying the fact that making common cause with extremism has fully moved to the center of conservative politics, which constitutes an acute threat to American democracy. 6/

Yes, it’s important to emphasize the specific historical circumstances that led to the rise of fascism in Europe’s interwar period, and it’s crucial to keep those in mind when using the term in any political context. 7/

But it does not follow that whoever speaks of fascism in America must be ignorant of fascism’s history. All too often, those who vehemently oppose the use of the term in a U.S. context betray an inadequate understanding of the actual state of conservative / rightwing politics. 8/

It’s certainly worth reflecting on the exact nature of Trumpian fascism in comparison to both the phenomena that arose in Europe’s interwar period as well as previous iterations of the more specifically American fascistic tradition. 9/

It’s also important to debate the place of Trumpian fascism in relation to other factions on the American Right, its specific role in the context of the broader rightwing counter-mobilization against egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy. 10/

Applying the fascism concept is not the same as using facile historical analogies to Hitler. Rather than just referencing the rise of the Nazis and fascism in Europe’s interwar period all the time, we should investigate domestic traditions of fascism and rightwing extremism. 11/

The latest research on the history of modern U.S. conservatism and the American Right very much emphasizes those importance of domestic far-right extremist and fascistic traditions, and most serious historians agree that Trumpism needs to be situated in that context. 12/

At some point during the Trump presidency, most good-faith observers crossed the line from “Not sure, maybe go easy on the fascism claims” to “Trumpism clearly qualifies as a specifically American, specifically 21st-century version of fascism.”

It’s gotten way worse since. 13/

We are certainly past the point where I would still consider it a reasonable, good-faith position to reject the use of the fascism concept outright and to deride anyone who does, who emphasizes fascistic tendencies on the Right, as ridiculously “alarmist.” It’s not serious. /end