The Liberalism of the MAGA Voters Explains Trump's Election. But Trump's Illiberal Presidency Could Become Fascist.

Leading up to the presidential election, commentators like Robert Kagan and Steven Hahn argued that if Donald Trump were elected, this would show the triumph of the illiberal tradition of American politics in defeating the American liberal tradition.  

I agree with Kagan and Hahn that the political history of America has been a continuing battle between liberalism and illiberalism.  But I see that the liberal tradition of American political thought--as expressed in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence--has ultimately prevailed over the illiberal tradition.  And I see that even in the MAGA movement.  I agree that much of Trump's rhetoric has illiberal, and even fascist, overtones.  But most of the MAGA voters accept the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence.  (I have written previously about the prominence of the Declaration of Independence in the rhetoric of the 2020 Republican National Convention.)

Here I use the term "liberalism" in the broad Lockean sense that includes both those who we call "liberals" in America and those we call "conservatives"--as opposed to the illiberal Left (such as the socialists), on the one extreme, and the illiberal Right (such as the fascists), on the other extreme. 

We can see the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election.  The American illiberal tradition defends the national cultural homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies.  (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.)  But Trump's electoral victory depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.  As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump.  If Trump's presidency gives into his illiberal propensities, he will alienate these MAGA voters.

Steven Hahn doesn't understand this because in his book Illiberal America, he describes the MAGA voters this way:

". . . When supporters of Donald Trump channel his slogan 'Make America Great Again,' they are looking back to a world before a Black man could be elected president, before people of color demanded equal rights, before feminists battled against gender exclusions and inequalities, before sexual identities began to be redefined, before American Protestants had to confront growing spiritual diversity, before immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to threaten the majority status of white people, and before the federal government served as an enabler of all these developments.  The tradition they value is anything but liberal.  It emphasizes state rights, community control, patriarchal families, rugged individualism, Christian nationalism, and some form of white supremacy" (35).

White supremacy?  Hahn offers no evidence for this. Perhaps he could point to people like Luke Meyer and Richard Spencer--white supremacists who have supported Trump.  But these people have been ostracized by the MAGA movement.  For example, Meyer was a 24-year-old regional field director for the Trump campaign in Western Pennsylvania.  But when a reporter for Politico exposed him as the person who goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa, who co-hosts a white supremacist podcast with Richard Spencer, who was the organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Meyer was immediately fired.  The Republican Party of Pennsylvania issued a statement: "The employee in question was background-checked and vetted, but unbeknownst to us was operating separately under a pseudonym.  If we'd had any inkling about his hidden and despicable activity, he would never have been hired, and the instant we learned of it, he was fired.  We have no place in our Party or nation for people with such shameful, hateful views."  Similarly, Spencer has been condemned by Republican leaders.  After being spurned by the Republicans, Spencer endorsed Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024!

So while there have been a few white supremacists who have voted for Trump, they know that as soon as they are openly identified as white supremacists, they will be expelled from the MAGA movement.  Moreover, if Trump appealed only to illiberal voters like the white racists, he would never win any election.  Given the racial and ethnic diversity of the American electorate, Trump can win only with the support of what Patrick Ruffini has called the "multiracial populist coalition" that includes most of the white working-class voters with large portions of the Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters.  The evidence for that became clear in the 2020 election, as compared with the 2016 election, in which Trump's vote share in each of these groups trended in his favor.  That trend continued in the 2024 election.  

The crucial factor here is that many Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters are politically and culturally conservative in their values; and therefore, as the Democratic Party shifts to the Left, these conservative voters are open to being persuaded by the more conservative Republican Party.  In the 2020 election, the Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters who described themselves as conservatives moved 35 to 40 points toward Trump as compared with the 2016 election.

Democrats have assumed that Trump's threat to deport all the illegal immigrants would alienate all of the Hispanic immigrant voters.  But Ruffini's studies of Hispanic voters in Miami Dade County in Florida and along the Rio Grande in Texas found that many Hispanics who are legal immigrants resent those Hispanics who have entered the U.S. illegally, and they think they should be deported.  Amazingly, almost all of the counties along the Rio Grande, which has the largest concentration of Hispanics in the U.S., went to Trump in 2024.

The "AP VoteCast" survey for the 2024 election shows this multiracial and multiethnic shift towards Trump.   White voters split 56% for Trump and 43% for Harris. While Harris won the Black vote (83%), Trump's share (16%) was an increase over 2020.  Among Black men, Trump won 25%.  Latina women went 59% for Harris, 39% for Trump.  Latino men split evenly--49% for Harris and 48% for Trump.  Since Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in America, it's hard to win a presidential election without them.  Although Harris is of South Asian ancestry, Asian Americans split 54% for Harris and 39% for Trump.  In all categories, Trump's share of the nonwhite vote increased from 2016 and 2020; and that's why he won the popular election for the first time this year.  

So, how can Hahn see this as a vote for white supremacy?  

It would be better to say that this was a vote for the working class, because in all of the racial and ethnic categories, Trump got most of the votes from those people who have no college degree, while Harris got most of the votes from those with a college degree.  This gives Trump a big advantage because seven in ten American adults have never graduated from college.  Trump appeals to the natural working-class majority in American politics, while people like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris appeal to the professional elites with advanced educational degrees who work with their heads rather than their hands.

Furthermore, it's ridiculous for Hahn to claim that the MAGA voters are "looking back to a world before a Black man could be elected president," because many of the white working-class voters who have voted for Trump voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  Indeed, Obama would have lost those elections if he had not won large portions of the white vote.  In 2012, he got 46 percent of the white vote in Pennsylvania and 47 percent in Michigan.  In 2008, 51% of the eligible voters belonged to the white working class (that is, white people without a college degree).  So, Obama could not have won without a big share of their vote, and he made explicit appeals to them in his campaign rhetoric.

And what about women?  Hahn asserts that Trump's supporters are looking back to a world "before feminists battled against gender exclusions and inequalities."  What world is that?  The world in which under the common law doctrine of coverture, married women had no legal identity separate from their husbands?  The world in which women had no right to vote?  If so, where's the evidence that Trump's supporters want to return women to that patriarchal world?  In this year's election, women between the ages of 18 and 44 split their vote between Harris (55%) and Trump (44%).  Women over 45 voted 51% for Harris and 48% for Trump.  Isn't it hard to believe Hahn's suggestion that close to half of the women voters want to repeal the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, so that they will never again have the right to vote?

But what about Hahn's claim that the MAGA voters want to go back to a world "before sexual identities began to be redefined"?  It is true that one of the themes of the Trump campaign was that allowing biological men to compete in women's athletics was unfair to women.  Another theme was that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for transgender treatments for prisoners.  But what makes such arguments illiberal?  (I have argued that liberal principles and the biology of sex differences justify sex-segregated sports and perhaps a new category of intersex sports.)

Finally, is it true that MAGA voters want to go back to a world "before American Protestants had to confront growing spiritual diversity"?  I assume that Hahn is pointing in particular to the time when Catholics were persecuted, and Protestant Christianity was considered an essential part of American national identity.  Well, again, I can't see any evidence that the MAGA movement is devoted to persecuting Catholics.  If that were so, it would be hard to explain why so many Catholics have voted for Trump--50% of them in 2020, 54% in 2024.  Since Catholics represent 22% of the electorate, Trump's winning the Catholic vote was crucial for his winning the election.

And, of course, J. D. Vance is a serious Catholic.  Moreover, one of the criticisms of Harris brought up by the Trump people was that she was anti-Catholic.  As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Harris suggested that a Trump judicial nominee should be disqualified because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus!

On all of these points, I see no evidence to sustain Hahn's claim that the MAGA voters want to go back to an illiberal America.  On the contrary, they seem to belong to a liberal coalition of voters who belong to a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, and working-class majority in American politics.

Let's also keep in mind, as I have argued previously, that the one issue that decisively favored Trump's election was high inflation--in the summer of 2022, the highest inflation in 40 years--and no one suffers more from high inflation than working-class voters.  But there's nothing illiberal about hating high inflation.

Nevertheless, as I have argued on this blog, I also see an illiberal propensity in Trump's rhetoric towards fascism that must be restrained if he is to keep the support of his liberal coalition.

And as we see Trump appointing loyalists throughout the government who will carry out his orders, even if they are unconstitutional, his move to fascist rule appears ever clearer.   It appears that most of Trump's voters made a mistake in thinking that he was not serious about his fascist rhetoric, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake for America.

If Hahn is right about how MAGA voters understand the slogan "Make America Great Again," then we can predict that shortly after his inauguration, Trump will proclaim that his voters have given him a mandate to make America into a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant theocracy and patriarchal society in which Catholics and non-Christians are persecuted, women have no voting rights, married women have no independent legal identity because they are under the authority of their husbands, all nonwhite people are treated as inferior, and only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are permitted to immigrate to America.  

I predict that that will not happen because most Americans do not want to live in that kind of illiberal America.  They want to live in a Lockean liberal social order that is better than any illiberal order in satisfying the natural human desires of our evolved human nature.

REFERENCES

Hahn, Steven.  2024a. Illiberal America: A History.  New York: Norton.

Hahn, Steven.  2024b.  "The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism."  The New York Times. May 4.

Klein, Ezra.  2024.  "The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election."  The New York Times.  November 9.

Moore, Amanda.  2024.  "A Trump Field Director Was Fired for Being a White Nationalist."  Politico.  November 4.

Ruffin, Patrick.  2023.  Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.  New York: Simon and Schuster.

Is Trump's Populist Authoritarianism What America Really Wants? Or Do Americans Really Hate High Inflation?

I was wrong.

For years, beginning in 2016, I have argued that Trump's populist authoritarianism was not really popular enough to win the popular vote.  After all, he lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020.  This indicated to me that although he had a solid base of 35 to 40 percent of the voters, he did not have a majority, although he could win in the Electoral College.  That's why I predicted that Harris would win the election yesterday.

So, now that Trump has won the popular election, we face two questions.  First, will Trump be the kind of populist authoritarian that he has promised to be?  

If he does fulfill this promise, he will use his power as Commander-in-Chief to use the military to punish "the enemy within"--those who disagree with him.  He will use his pardoning power to protect himself and his supporters from criminal prosecution (including the January 6th insurrectionists).  He will also act vigorously within the immunity from criminal prosecution for "official acts" recently granted to him by his Supreme Court.  He will use the military to help him in forcibly deporting over 10 million illegal immigrants.  He will raise tariffs on imports so high as to impede international trade and create what will be effectively a high sales tax on imported goods.  He will establish an isolationist foreign policy that weakens the NATO alliance and withholds support for Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion.

Trump and his supporters have said that he is God's Chosen One to save America.  After all, didn't God miraculously intervene to turn his head away from the assassin's bullet?  If they believe this, will they treat Trump's opponents as evil enemies of God?

If Trump carries out these and other promises for acting as a populist authoritarian, that will raise a second question:  will the Americans who voted for him say yes, this is just what they wanted?  Or will they regret their choice?

Actually, I see no evidence that Trump's supporters voted for his populist authoritarianism.  But I do see evidence that they voted against the inflation during Biden's term.  In the summer of 2022, the inflation rate was over 9 percent--the highest inflation rate in 40 years.  Overall, consumer prices have gone up over 20 percent under Biden.  Home prices have gone up 37 percent.  Gasoline prices 33 percent.  It is true that over the past year, the inflation rate has dropped to about 2.4 percent.  But notice what that means:  Prices are not dropping.  But the rate of increase has slowed.

Among voters who said that the poor economy--and particularly high inflation--was the primary issue for them, the great majority (60 to 70 percent) said that they were voting for Trump.  This would explain the Latino and Black male vote for Trump.

Yesterday, the Associated Press released its AP VoteCast--a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide--that shows the primacy of the high-inflation issue for the Trump voters.

My mistake was not seeing that the American voter's hatred of high inflation will defeat any candidate who is identified as responsible for inflation.  Harris pointed to the indicators of a growing economy with low unemployment.  But she could not escape responsibility for inflation.

One of the Trump campaign's most effective tv ads juxtaposed these comments from Kamala Harris:

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS, 2024: Everyday prices are too high... Food, rent, gas, back-to-school clothes.

HARRIS, 2023: That is called Bidenomics!

HARRIS, 2024: A loaf of bread costs 50% more... ground beef is up almost 50%... There's not much left at the end of the month.

HARRIS, 2023: Bidenomics is working!

HARRIS, 2024: The price of housing has gone up. It feels so hard to be able to just get ahead.

HARRIS, 2023: We are so proud of Bidenomics!

That one ad might have been enough to defeat Harris.

How could Harris have answered this charge that Bidenomics caused high inflation?  She could have argued that Bidenomics was an extension of Trumpenomics.  Four years ago, the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats enacted the American Rescue Plan that pumped $1.9 trillion into the economy, which included $1,300 payments to American families.  As predicted by economists like Larry Summers, this overstimulated the economy and created a surge in inflation starting in 2021 and peaking in 2022.  But Harris could have argued that this ARP stimulus was simply adding to the $2.7 trillion in pandemic relief spending enacted under President Trump.  So, if this was a mistake, it was a mistake made by both Trump and Biden.

Nevertheless, the American economy has recovered from the pandemic economic downturn faster and more robustly than any other economy in the world.  And the rate of inflation has gone down dramatically in the past year, although Americans are now suffering from the overall increase in prices of over 20% over the past four years.

When Harris was asked whether she would have done anything different from what was done during Biden's term, she said she couldn't think of anything she would have done differently.  What she should have said is "Yes, of course, the big spending programs supported by Biden--and by Trump!--drove up inflation.  So, I promise to keep inflation low, and if inflation rises during my term, I promise that I will not run for a second term."

Harris could then have argued that if Trump were elected, voters would quickly become dissatisfied with Trump when his policies (such as high tariffs on imports) create a new surge in high inflation.  The U.S. is the world's largest importer.  The value of imported goods and services is over 3.8 trillion dollars a year.  Imagine the higher prices that would come from putting tariffs of over 20% on all of that.

If this happens, the voters will turn against the Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election, just as they turned against the Democrats in this year's election.

ADDENDUM (November 21)

On election night, Trump claimed that he had won an "unprecedented and powerful mandate."

As more late ballots have been counted, we now know that that is not true.  In fact, Trump did not even win a majority of the national popular vote.  His percentage now stands at 49.87 percent.  

His popular vote margin over Kamala Harris now stands at 1.62 percent.  That's about a half-percent smaller than Hillary Clinton's national popular vote margin over Trump in 2016.  By comparison, Obama won the popular vote by 3.9 percent in 2012 and 7.2 percent in 2008.  George W. Bush won the popular vote by 2.4 percent in 2004.

We can now say that having run for the presidency three times, Trump has never won a majority of the popular votes.  That's not an "unprecedented and powerful mandate."

Trump and the History of Fascism: He Cannot Take Power by Majority Vote or by Force

The Roman Fasces, A Symbol of the Authority and Unity of the Ancient Roman State

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                                 The January 6th Insurrectionists Storm the Capitol Building

Is Donald Trump a fascist?  If he is, does the history of fascism help us to predict whether he is likely to take power as a fascist ruler?

My answer to the first question is Yes.  My answer to the second question is that the history of fascism tells us that fascists cannot take power by majority vote or by force, because they need to be given power by conservative elites.  For Trump to become a fascist ruler, he would have to be put into power by the political and military elites.

THE CONCEPT OF FASCISM

Since he is one of the leading historians of fascism, Robert Paxton has often been asked whether he identifies Trump as a fascist.  Up to the end of Trump's term as president, Paxton said No.  But on January 6, 2021, as he watched the Trump-inspired insurrection on Capitol Hill, which was meant to overturn the election of 2020 and keep Trump in power, he changed his mind.  A few days after the insurrection, he wrote an essay for Newsweek explaining how that insurrection was the final piece of evidence pointing to Trump's character as a fascist.

We now have even more evidence for that conclusion coming from General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's presidency, and retired General John Kelly, who was Trump's Chief of Staff for almost a year and a half.  They have reported that Trump wanted to use the military against his political opponents and that he expressed his admiration for how Hitler had used his generals.  Both Milley and Kelly told Trump that their oath to uphold the Constitution would take precedence over their loyalty to the President.  And both concluded that Trump was a fascist.

Paxton's position in the debate over Trump's fascism is unusual.  There are two questions in this debate.  Is Trump a fascist?  And is it helpful to identify him as a fascist?  Most people in the debate either say yes to both questions or no to both.  As he told the New York Times, Paxton says yes to the first question but no to the second.  Yes, Trump is a fascist.  But no it doesn't help the debate to say that, because "fascist" is "a word that generates more heat than light."  

I agree that most of the time "fascist" is a sloppy epithet that we throw around to express our moral disgust with someone we disagree with strongly, and therefore using that word enflames emotions without clarifying the debate.  But when a historian of fascism like Paxton says that Trump is a fascist and explains the exact similarities and differences between Trump and fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, that illuminates the debate by showing how the history of fascism might explain and predict Trump's behavior.

Recently, Trump has said that he is planning to use military force against the "enemy within," which includes "bad people" like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.  This convinced John Kelly (Trump's Chief of Staff from July 2017 to December 2018) that he needed to speak out, and he was interviewed by the New York Times.  Kelly read aloud a definition of fascism:

"Well, looking at the definition of fascism:  It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy."

"Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators--he has said that.  So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

Much of the discussion among historians is about whether there really is a "general definition of fascist."  Some historians argue that since Benito Mussolini originated the term, it should apply only to the specific historical movement of Mussolini's Italian fascism.  In 1919, Mussolini coined the Italian fascismo from fascio--a bundle or sheaf--recalling the Latin fasces:  an axe encased in a bundle of rods carried in public processions to symbolize the authority and unity of the Roman state.

This explains why the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the primary definition of "fascism" as "a nationalist political movement that controlled the government of Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini."

But then the OED also provides a generic definition of "fascism": "an authoritarian and nationalistic system of government and social organization which emerged after the end of the First World War in 1918, and became a prominent force in European politics during the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in Italy and Germany; (later also) an extreme right-wing political ideology based on the principles underlying this system."

As Paxton indicates, there are two reasons for why it's hard to reach agreement on these or any other definitions of fascism.  First, it is hard to define fascism as an ideology because the fascists did not care very much about ideas or doctrines.  They were devoted more to action than thought--they were driven more by feelings than by reason.  That explains why there is no authoritative statement of their ideas comparable to say Marx's Communist Manifesto as a statement of communist doctrines.  Mussolini and Hitler did issue some programmatic statements of fascist ideas.  But then their actions often contradicted what they had promised to do, and they never felt compelled to justify their actions as consistent with their ideas.  By contrast, Marxist leaders like Lenin and Stalin had to make elaborate arguments for why their actions were in conformity with the texts of Marx and Engels.

The second reason for why it's so hard to define fascism is that fascism never had a fixed or static identity because it changed as it passed through five stages: (1) the initial creation of a fascist movement, (2) the rooting of the movement as a party in a political system, (3) the acquisition of ruling power by the fascist leader and his party, (4) the exercise of that ruling power, and (5) the long term development of fascist power towards radicalization or dissolution.  Fascism looks different at each of these stages.  And while every fascist movement reaches Stage One, only a few reach Stage Two.  And very few--maybe only in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany--reach Stage Three by actually gaining ruling power.  (Most of what have been commonly assumed to be examples of fascists taking power--like Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal--are really examples of traditional authoritarianism rather than pure fascism.)

Paxton has explained this fascist history of five stages in an article--"The Five Stages of Fascism" (1998)--and he has elaborated this history and analysis in a book--The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).

Despite his reluctance to reduce fascism to a single definition, Paxton does think that from this history of fascist actions in five stages, one can deduce the ideas implicit in those actions, which he summarizes in one long "functional definition of fascism":

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion" (1998: 21; 2004: 218).

He also states this as nine "mobilizing passions" that "belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions":

(1) "a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;"

(2) "the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;"

(3) "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;"

(4) "dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;"

(5) "the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;"

(6) "the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;"

(7) "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;"

(8) "the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;"

(9) "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Do Trump and his MAGA party manifest most of these fascist passions?  You can answer this for yourself by watching the video of the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden and checking off the items on this list.

Okay, so you're not going to watch all six and a half hours of this!  But you can skip around it and see if it shows the "mobilizing passions" of fascism.

Now there are a few items in Paxton's definition and list of passions that don't show up here.  For example, Trump and his people don't express any interest in "external expansion"--they're not proposing to invade other countries.

We also might question whether there's any "collaboration with traditional elites" here, since the speakers repeatedly attack the "elites" in the Democratic Party.  But there is certainly a collaboration with some economic elites (such as Elon Musk) and some of the conservative elites in the Republican Party.

On the other hand, there are some distinctive traits of American Fascism here that are not prominent in Paxton's sketch of fascism.  While fascists like Mussolini and Hitler have been secular or perhaps pagan, American Fascists are often Christian Nationalists defending American Christians as the Chosen People of God against their godless enemies.  So, you'll notice that the Madison Square Garden rally begins with a prayer read by Tiffany Justice, one of the founders of "Moms for Liberty," who prays for God to intervene in support of Trump's election, and she thanks God for His miracle in saving Trump from being assassinated.  Later in the rally, David Rem holds up a cross at the podium and declares that Kamala Harris is the "Devil" and "the Antichrist."  Thus, we have the image of Trump as God's Chosen One fighting for America against the forces of demonic evil led by the Antichrist in the Last Battle as described in the book of Revelation.

Previously, I have written about the Christian Evangelicals who identify Trump as being the Messiah like Cyrus in the Old Testament.

NEITHER BY VOTE NOR BY FORCE

So, how do fascists come into ruling power (Stage Three)?  And does the history of fascists taking power help us to predict whether Trump's fascism could come into power in America?

It has been commonly assumed that fascists have come to power by force alone--through a coup d'etat.  Or, occasionally, you'll hear people say that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler took power through majority vote at the ballot box.  As Paxton and other historians have shown, both claims are false.

"Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors.  Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg.  Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted."  We should see then that "no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power" (Paxton 1998: 17; 2004: 96-97).

The story that Mussolini's Fascists seized power over Italy through their "March on Rome" is fascist propaganda.  It is true that on October 28, 1922, about nine thousand Blackshirts marched to the gates of Rome.  But they were "poorly armed, wearing makeshift uniforms, short of food and water, and milling about in a discouraging rain" (Paxton 2004: 89).  Mussolini arrived in Rome from Milan on the morning of October 30, and he met with the King.  Although the King had plenty of soldiers who could have dispersed the Blackshirts, he foresaw that this would be bloody.  He decided, instead, to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister.  Mussolini was bluffing, and his bluff worked.

The next day--October 31--with Mussolini already in office, ten thousand Blackshirts marched in a parade through Rome.  That evening, Mussolini had all of his Blackshirts sent out of town in fifty special trains.  The parade had established the myth that his Blackshirts had taken power by their own will and force.  October 28 became a national holiday and the first day of the Fascist New Year.

A year later, Hitler showed that he had been taken in by Mussolini's propaganda about the "March on Rome."  He attempted his own "march" on November 8, 1923.  During a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, he tried to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to launch a coup d'etat against the federal government in Berlin.  This "Beer Hall Putsch" was easily put down by police who fired on the Nazi marchers.  Hitler was arrested and imprisoned.  He learned the lesson that fascist political power could not be taken by force alone as long as the police and soldiers remained loyal to the government.

Hitler also learned that while he would have to work within the parliamentary party system, he could not come to power by winning a majority vote for his party.  The Nazis became the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary elections of July 31, 1932, when they won 37.2 percent of the vote.  But this dropped to 33.1 percent in the election of November 6, 1932.  Even when Hitler had become chancellor, and he could use his Storm Troopers to intimidate voters, the Nazi Party won only 43.9 percent of the vote in the elections of March 6, 1932.  By comparison, the Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats in the parliamentary election of May 15, 1921.

Just as Mussolini had become the Italian Prime Minister by the appointment of the King, Hitler became the German Chancellor by the appointment of President Paul Hindenburg.  In both cases, conservative elites decided that appointing fascist leaders as the heads of government was the only way to form parliamentary majorities capable of vigorous governing without having to form coalitions with radical socialist and communist parties.

These conservatives saw this as the only way to resolve the unprecedented crises that they faced.  The first crisis was the social and political crisis created in the wake of World War One, which included the threat of a communist revolution in Western Europe sparked by the Russian Revolution.  The second crisis was the Great Global Depression that began in 1929.  By 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, over 30% of the German workforce was unemployed.  Part of this was the "crisis of liberalism" insofar as it seemed that liberal democracy could not solve these problems.

On February 28, 1933, a fire set by a Dutch communist youth gutted the Reichstag building in Berlin.  This was generally believed to be the beginning of a communist coup.  This provoked President Hindenburg into using his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, and he issued a decree suspending the legal protection of personal liberties.  This allowed Hitler's Brownshirts to use violence against Jews and others suspected of left-wing activities.  Then, on March 24 of 1933, parliament passed an Enabling Act that delegated its legislative powers to the executive.  This allowed Hitler to rule by his own personal authority from 1933 to the end of the war.  He was free to use violence against the "enemies of the people."  Here we see the fatal flaw in the Weimar Constitution--its openness to unchecked executive prerogative powers.

So, what does this history suggest as to whether and how Trump's fascism could gain ruling power in America?  First, we should say that Trump has never won an election by majority vote, although he won in 2016 in the Electoral College.  Like Hitler, he seems to have about 35-40 percent of the voters as a solid base.  When he ran in 2016, he was not clearly identified as a fascist candidate.  But now, after the January 6th insurrection and his open threats to use military force against the "enemy within," his fascist propensities have become clear to many voters.  And that's why I am predicting that Harris will win this election.

But if he does win, perhaps only in the Electoral College, can't we predict that he will make himself a fascist dictator?  And even if he loses, can't we predict that Trump will say the election has been stolen again, as it was in 2020?  And won't he lead his MAGA movement into a violent insurrection to take power by force alone?  

Well, sure, we can imagine that he will try something like this.  But from what we have seen from his failure to overturn the election of 2020, we can predict, as I argued a few years ago, that Trump will not have the guts or the guns to launch a successful coup.  

In his last year in office, Trump's fascist advisors told him that he needed to declare martial law (under the Insurrection Act) and order the military to suppress the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and to overturn the election.  He did not act on their advice because he lacked the courage to try this, and because his generals had told him they would not obey his orders if they violated the Constitution.  There is no reason to believe that there will be any change in these circumstances after the election.

Here is where I disagree with Robert Kagan's argument that regardless of whether Trump wins or loses the election, his fascism will destroy liberal democracy in America.  As I explained in my response to Kagan, the "crisis" that America faces today is nowhere near as deep as the crisis faced by Italy and Germany between the wars.  There is no threat of Communist Revolution in America despite Trump's silly assertion that the Democrats are Communists.  There is no Great Depression in America.  The American economy is more prosperous than it has ever been.

And, most importantly, there is no "crisis of liberalism" in America today comparable to what may have happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.  While I agree with Kagan's claim that Trump's fascism is rooted in an American tradition of illiberalism, the American liberal tradition is stronger today than it has ever been.  One sign of that is that Trump and his supporters must insist that of course Trump is not a fascist, and of course the theme of his campaign is "freedom."

Moreover, even Kagan recognizes that illiberal fascists like Trump are desperate to win this election because they recognize that America is experiencing a "demographic shift" that favors liberalism over illiberalism:  as America becomes ever more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and religiously pluralistic, it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and culture, and the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a pluralistic society together will grow ever stronger.

In this election and its aftermath, we will see the confirmation of Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history":  liberalism will prevail over fascism.

THE LIBERAL REFUTATION OF ILLIBERALISM: BY FORCE OF IDEAS AND ARMS

Remember the ninth "mobilizing passion" of fascism:  "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Lockean Liberals can accept that challenge and agree that liberalism must prevail over illiberalism through Darwinian cultural group selection in the war of ideas and arms.

Although ideas don't matter very much to fascism, particularly in its later stages when it takes political power, ideas do matter in the early creation of fascist movements.  I have written about the "Nazi philosophers"--from Plato and Fichte to Nietzsche and Heidegger.  And I have suggested the ways in which liberalism wins the intellectual war with illiberalism.  Indeed, the intellectual victory of liberalism has been so clear that even those who pose as antiliberals--Patrick Deneen, for example, turn out ultimately to be liberals.

Moreover, as Locke saw, there is a practical expression of the theoretical appeal of liberalism when people "vote with their feet" and choose to immigrate to those countries with more freedom, which is one form of cultural group selection.

But Locke also saw that the power of liberal ideas must ultimately be backed up with the power of liberal arms in the "Appeal to Heaven."  So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was not only a declaration of the "self-evident truths" of equal natural rights but also a declaration of war, in which the outcome would depend on the "popular Lockeanism" of the Americans fighting in the war.

Then, in 1861, the Confederate States of America declared themselves a nation conceived in the liberty of white men to enslave others and dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal; and they engaged in a great war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  That nation did not endure because it was defeated by a Lockean liberal regime with a larger population of well-armed fighting men, including emancipated slaves, many of whom understood that they were fighting for the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  As the proslavery Southerner George Fitzhugh admitted, the Union defeat of the Confederacy was the victory of John Locke over Robert Filmer.

But that was not enough to ensure the "new birth of freedom."  The use of military force to suppress the fascist militias of the Klan in the Reconstruction Era and then in the Second Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Movement) to reform the Jim Crow South was required for overthrowing the illiberal tradition of the American South.  This included a Black tradition of armed self-defense and rebellion.  Ultimately, Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty defeated George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as domination.

Similarly, in World War Two, we saw a test in war of the fascist "right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint."  And with the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in war, we saw that there is a sense in which might does make right, when people in the state of nature exercise "the executive power of the law of nature" to resist and punish those who would dominate them.

REFERENCES

Kagan, Robert.  2024.  Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again.  New York: Knopf.

Paxton, Robert O.  1998.  "The Five Faces of Fascism."  The Journal of Modern History 70 (March): 1-23.

Paxton, Robert O.  2004.  The Anatomy of Fascism.  New York: Random House.

Paxton, Robert O.  2021. "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist.  Until Now."  Newsweek, January 11.

Schmidt, Michael S.  2024.  "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator."  The New York Times, October 22.

Zerofsky, Elisabeth. 2024. "Is It Fascism?  A Leading Historian Changes His MInd."  The New York Times, October 23.