Endless jeremiads from the mainstream media, academia and a large chunk of the political class warn that Americans are on the precipice of a fascist hell, presided over by our own orange-haired Il Duce. Some prominent progressive scholars, like Yale’s Timothy Snyder, a historian of fascism, claim to have read the Weimar-like tea leaves and have now relocated to Canada.
Trump’s vengeful actions against his well-entrenched enemies certainly invite parallels to the kind of behaviour exhibited by fascist leaders, as well as their Communist analogues like Stalin or Mao Zedong. But we are far from a Fourth Reich. Somewhere between 3.3million and 5.6million protesters attended the anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests last month and were met with no pushback from the authorities. This clearly would not happen in a truly fascist country. Nor would Trump’s political enemies still control most of the media, academia and the vast non-profit world. In Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, they would have been supplanted, jailed or even executed.
Critically, MAGA is hardly the Nazi Party or Mussolini’s Fascists or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks. It represents, rather, an ad hoc and fundamentally unstable alliance. It spans career GOP political hacks, rogue billionaire executives, rabid Evangelicals, radical populists and media screamers – including some who espouse racist themes, as well as the equally awful Tucker Carlson.
As the fallout over the so-called Epstein files suggests, MAGA’s prime chatterers are less focussed on coherent policy than on conspiratorial hysteria. It is hardly a mass movement across a broad spectrum of the population, but essentially a rebellion of the middle orders and mostly older voters – 60 per cent of the Trump base was aged over 50 in 2024. Trump himself is a blimpish 79-year-old who seems ready for serious decline, while Mussolini and Hitler were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively when they took power.
Furthermore, both Hitler and Mussolini expressed a horrific, but coherent worldview with broad appeal. Italian fascism ‘drew in all class levels, from workers to the aristocracy’, notes art historian Martina Caruso, who is writing a book about her grandfather, Pietro Caruso, who was executed for crimes committed as Rome’s chief of police under Mussolini.
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Author: Ruth King
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