What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?

The New Yorker [no paywall] – “…Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs…Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning. That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to be asked, answers to be offered. Like communism, fascism is an answer to all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events, toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says. A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump. That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy…

What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. On social media, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our “most probable states.” The Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes our minds for them. This was already true before Elon Musk reshaped Twitter in Trump’s image…”