Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

By Peter Beinart, The New York Times

19 September 18

he list of Trump-era jeremiads keeps growing: “The Road to Unfreedom,” “Can It Happen Here?,” “Fascism: A Warning” and now “How Fascism Works,” a slim volume by the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley that breezes across decades and continents to argue that Donald Trump resembles other purveyors of authoritarian ultranationalism.

More than 30 years ago, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis divided his colleagues into “lumpers” and “splitters.” Lumpers, he said, “deliver themselves of sweeping generalizations.” They “seek to systematize complexity, to reduce the chaos, disorder and sheer untidiness of history to neat patterns.” Stanley’s a lumper. And that leaves him vulnerable to “splitters,” who would object to cramming together Trump, Victor Orban, Hitler, the Confederacy, the Rwandan genocidaires and the current government of Myanmar, among others, into a one-sentence definition of fascism: “ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural) with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.”

Stanley’s approach has its costs. He emphasizes the similarities between myriad “fascist” parties and regimes without adequately acknowledging their differences. Nor does he adequately distinguish between conservative or right-wing politics and fascism. Early in the book, for instance, while arguing that fascist politicians promote traditional gender roles, Stanley notes that Mitt Romney said Trump’s comments in the “Access Hollywood” tape “demean our wives and daughters.” By describing “women exclusively in terms of traditionally subordinate roles in families,” Stanley claims, Romney employs “language evocative of that used in the Hutu Ten Commandments.” Maybe so, but if Romney’s rhetoric qualifies as fascist, so does that of virtually every other cultural conservative.

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