This post is part of a broader project to organize my thoughts about contemporary politics. Some of this has been sparked by some recent comments and some offline conversations, but a lot of it has been rolling around in my head for quite a while. It is all linked to trying to figure out how best to categorize the Trump administration. It is an ancillary note to a series I started last year:
- Defining and Discussing Fascism, Part I.
- Defining and Discussing Fascism, Part II: Hitler Comparisons.
At the time, I promised a third part on white nationalism. While I had semi-forgotten that promise, that topic is definitely on my mind and far more well-developed (unfortunately) than it was a year ago when I promised that post. I think, too, a better iteration of Part I is needed.
But let me opine for a bit about WWII and how it still influences our thinking, and also to make one historic observation of significance.
All of these, past, present, and future posts of this type are aimed at three audiences. First is myself, because working through this all in writing is helpful to establish, to me, if this line of thinking is valid (which, I will say, writing these posts has deepened my ongoing view that fascism is the correct term to apply, although I remain open to being convinced otherwise). Second, I am trying to address various pushbacks I have received in the comment section here at the site. Third, I have hopes (perhaps in vain) of sparking pro-Trump voters to reassess their understanding of what is happening right in front of us.
First: WWII as the Model War
There are three conflicts that loom the largest in the American mind, in my view. These are the War for Independence, which is essential to our founding myth, the Civil War, which is still shaping our politics, and which contains a lot of American mythology, and World War II, which established us as a superpower and is seen as the epitome of what just war looks like.
I could unpack these observations, and perhaps some will quibble (or even vehemently disagree) with my characterizations. But these conflicts suffuse our political culture and our self-image. You can’t, for example, argue about the Framers and “original intent” without the War for Independence. The way in which we argue over statues and names is the direct continuation of the Civil War (as is, really, racial politics in the US).
And no war defines American Greatness and the justice of war like World War II.
To put my point as succinctly as possible, and recognizing I could more fully develop my point, I think that WWII is seen, especially as it pertained to Nazi Germany, as a contest of Good v. Evil in a way that most wars really aren’t (despite whatever contemporary rhetoric surrounds such conflicts at the time). I mean, the SS had skulls on their caps, and some of their uniforms were all black.
Aesthetics aside, there was the horror of the Final Solution and the massive crimes of the Holocaust.
If there is a storyline for the justification of war, Nazi Germany was it.
Let’s add in a few other elements that speak to the basic mythology.
- The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor meant the US was drawn into the war. See? We had to fight. (We aren’t warmongers, we only fight if we have to!).
- We had to help our friends in Europe. (Friendship and solidarity against evil! And it shows our magnanimity towards Europe, which is later affirmed by the Marshall Plan.)
- After the war, our enemies became democratic allies (proving the efficacy of war as a policy tool).
- Plus, we emerged from WWII as the most powerful country in the world. Not only did we have the bomb, but our economy was intact, while the rest of the industrial world was literally in shambles. (War not only can be worth the cost, but victory can empower.)
I am gliding over it all, but this view of war made it easier for subsequent politicians (and the public) to see war in a positive light and to see things like the Vietnam War as an aberration (you know, morally questionable, politically problematic, and ultimately a defeat). Or Korea. Or Iraq (the second time). Or Afghanistan. Or any number of other conflicts that did not lead to enemies becoming stable democracies and proving that if we only applied force the right way, it could be used to achieve whatever we wanted to achieve.
But, to my point, the Vietnam War isn’t the outlier; WWII is.
This notion was reflected in Trump’s recent statement when he renamed the Department of Defense, the Department of War (at least for stationary, signage, and social media purposes):
“We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense,” Trump said. “So we’re going Department of War.”
To my general point, Trump was there tapping into our collective mythology about WWII as the big one we won. He is also tapping into a shared, but incorrect notion, that we played the same role in WWI as we did in WWII. It is a vision of American Greatest that Trump constantly taps into.
As a general observation, I have long thought that the willingness of the American public to go to war, and to see war as a good thing, is at least in part a result of the way we look at WWII.
This is relevant to contemporary politics because of how we perceive the enemy in that war, specifically Nazi Germany and the Hitlerian take on fascism. We pay lip service to Mussolini’s fascism, but as a country, we focus almost exclusively on Hitler and the Nazis.
We also ignore the fact that Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal had significant fascist elements, but since they remained neutral in WWII (and Portugal joined NATO in 1949), and they were both anti-Communist, well, they don’t loom so large.
I point out Spain and Portugal to suggest here that maybe the best understanding of fascism is not to be solely found in the most extreme case in one of the most brutally evil regimes in human history.
Second: WWII Era Nazism as a Model
So this leads to a more direct issue for me. Because the way in which the Good v. Evil narrative about WWII is so deeply ingrained in us, both in terms of our general national story, but really in our pop culture. Think of all the movies about Nazis we have seen over the years. Not only in the flood of WWII films in the decades after the war itself, but even for years after. The main villains in two of the first three Indiana Jones films are Nazis (old films, yes, but also persistent ones). Saving Private Ryan was from 1998, and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was from 2009. The very popular video game, Call of Duty, had a WWII version in 2017. I am sure that if I did more research, it would not be hard to find examples of Nazis-as-bad guys in very recent pop culture.
So, what’s my point? We, collectively, associate the word “fascism” with goose-stepping Nazis all marching for Der Führer. We think that using terms like “concentration camp” can only mean “mass death camp.” “Genocide” has to look like the Final Solution.
One possibility is that these terms are, in fact, time-locked in WWII. Another is that we are letting a specific set of images and notions cloud our understanding.
Given the power of our mythology surrounding WWII, we expect fascism to look like the Nazis. Since there are no goose-stepping soldiers wearing caps with skulls on them, this can’t be fascism, right?
So while, yes, Trump not only said he would govern as a dictator, and has actually done so, we take solace in the fact that, well, he didn’t actually send troops to Chicago! Yes, the FCC chair made a direct threat to broadcast corporations, but they only temporarily suspended Kimmel. Sure, he is nakedly using that power of the Department of Justice to go after political enemies, but the indictment sure looks weak.
I mean, to me, those are more about how good he and his cohorts are at governing fascistically, not a list of how normal things are.
Is Trump having massive rallies like Hitler did? Well, not exactly, although I would point people back to his campaign and how it was conducted. I would also note a 2025 twist on all of this. If old school dictators had to go to the balcony and shout to the crowds, all Trump has to do, at any time of the day or night, is post to Truth Social. There, he has 10.8 million followers and immediately amplified on Twitter and in the traditional press. He doesn’t even have to go to the Oval Office or the White House press room.
And yes, the camps for migrants aren’t Auschwitz, and ICE isn’t the Gestapo. But as the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I fear a lot of people are ignoring the rhyme because they hope it is their imagination, or they think people like me are being hysterical. There is this deep belief, which I confess still occasionally grips me as well, that things will surely go back to normal.
Ice, Ice, Baby was no Under Pressure, but there is no denying that Vanilla Ice stole some of Queen’s music to make that song. Total and exact duplication is not needed for copyright infringement to be found. So, I don’t think Trump has to grow a funny mustache and start wearing a military uniform for us to say that he is governing fascistically.
I plan to come back to specifics on this in another post–no, not lame copyright infringement metaphors, but a list of things that I think sufficiently rhyme with fascist governance.
I will leave this thought: if a lot of anti-Trump readers of this site find it difficult to label the Trump administration as “fascistic”, it is no wonder that the typical Republican voter might recoil at the notion (and be prepared to rationalize away the rhymes).
Historical Observation: Context of WWII-Era Fascism
A side note that this topic brings to the fore of my brain. Whenever we talk about how authoritarianism or even fascism might be burgeoning around us, the propensity to want to point back to the fact that things aren’t like 1930s Germany is a potentially appealing salve.
But do remember the following. Germany was still suffering, both in their economy and in their national psyche, from the effects of WWI. The Great Depression was ongoing. There were multiple anti-regime parties competing for power aside from the Nazis (e.g., the communists and the monarchists).
There were serious crises affecting the German polity that created a permissive environment for Hitler’s power grab. There was also the war to consider when making comparisons about what he was able to get away with over time. For example, the Final Solution took place in the context of a war.
I note these facts as both a comfort and a source of alarm.
I think that some of the more extreme actions of the Nazi regime were possible because of the basic context of German politics in the early 1930s, as later exacerbated by war. As we know from history, a government at war often finds itself able to expand powers in ways that it could not do in a time of peace. As such, there is some comfort to be taken in the present moment that the US is not facing the kinds of permissive crises that helped empower the Nazis.
But the fact that many Americans support the overtly authoritarian moves of this president without a crisis is also quite chilling. The list is long: the mass firings of DOGE, ignoring the Congress’s appropriate powers, rounding up people without due process, giving ICE a budget that exceeds most national military budgets, leveraging the FCC’s regulatory power to attack free speech, strong-arming universities and law firms, and nakedly using the DOJ to go after enemies (to name only a portion of what has been happening).
It does make one concerned about what kinds of powers might be asserted if an actual crisis comes around.
Enough for Now
So, maybe clearing this out of my head was useful, and maybe it wasn’t, but here it is nonetheless.
I will preview subsequent arguments by simply noting that, as we continue to consider the appropriate way to describe this administration’s approach to politics, we recognize at least three points.
First, allowing the worst/best example of something to be the model is not a good way to construct a model.
Second, the overall competence of how something is executed doesn’t change the definition of what is being attempted. This is something I want to come to later, but I have seen people argue that because Trump seems to ultimately be bad at doing a fascism, that maybe he isn’t doing one. I would counter that while he may not be as effective as some historical examples (thank God!) I don’t think competence is needed for a definition to apply.
Third, I would suggest that a lot of people are conflating fascism with a particular version of totalitarianism (something I used to do as well). I am increasingly of the view that this is a mistake. I put this out there simply as something to think about.
More to come…
