Robert Paxton talking:
Fascism is a mass nationalist movement intended to restore a country that’s been damaged or is in decline, by expansion, by violent attacks on enemies, internal as well as external enemies, and measures of authority, the replacement of democracy by an authoritarian dictatorship.
in the case of Hitler, it took him 13 years. It started in Munich as a minor fringe movement of disgruntled war veterans, and it percolated along. From World War I. This is 1920, early 1920s. In the election of 1924, he did very poorly, for a marginal party. Then you have the Depression in 1929 and 1930. And there are two things: There’s this huge economic crisis with millions and millions, tens of millions, unemployed, and there’s also a governmental deadlock. You cannot get any legislation passed without bringing in the social democrats. And the middle—center and right absolutely won’t work with social democrats, although they’re really quite moderate.
the German Weimar Republic really ceased to function as a republic in 1930, because nothing could be passed, and the president acted under Article 48 of the Constitution, which gave him powers in an emergency to rule by decree. So, between 1930 and 1933, President von Hindenburg ruled by decree. And the political elites are desperate to get out of that situation. And here’s Hitler, who has more votes by this time than anybody else. He’s up to 37 percent. He never gets a majority, but he’s up to 37 percent. And they want to bring that into their tent and get a solid mass backing. And so they co-opt Hitler. They bring him in.
The other party that’s growing is the Communist Party. And that’s what’s very different from today. There are two parties that are growing in 1932: the Communist Party and the Nazi Party. And if you don’t bring in the Nazi Party, then maybe it’s the Communists who are going to take over. There’s that dynamic of social panic. They bring Hitler into the tent. And once he’s there, he doesn’t have full power when he’s chancellor. He doesn’t even have all the ministries. But he then—then he takes over full power, and nobody is willing to fight him, because that would mean helping the Communists.
Then he becomes a dictator. He gets a four-year—he gets the Parliament to pass a four-year Enabling Act. It allows him to govern without consulting Parliament, in ’33 and ’37. And he uses that to build an unbeatable machine. He doesn’t bother to get it renewed. He gets it renewed, but it’s meaningless by that time. He does what he wants. And he has these huge rallies. He’s enormously successful in restoring the economy and in bringing German power back and dismantling the Versailles Treaty. And he has these delirious mass rallies. And no one will dare to try to stop him, because it’s either him or the Communists.
Donald Trump is a thoroughly self-centered and aggressive personality. The danger, it seems to me, is that in a deadlock between Trump and the Congress or Trump and the courts, he would indeed take some kind of nonconstitutional action, and people would be afraid to say no.
Fascism confuses a lot of people, because at the very beginning, when it was a handful of disgruntled veterans, it sounded quite radical. But when it’s in power, it allies with banks, industrialists, the army, churches and so forth. And so it changes. As it comes close to power and it makes the bid for power, there’s an opportunist adjustment, whereby it gets along with the previously hated conservatives. So, you have to look at each stage somewhat separately. But in general, I’m very leery of the use of the term too casually. And I do see great differences between Trump and fascism.
Donald Trump’s pandering to the hatreds and violent instincts of some of these crowds is very alarming. But I think in a longer perspective of we’ve had greater acts of violence than this during the civil rights campaign. People were shot, dogs were put on them, fire hoses were put on them, people were killed in the civil rights campaigns. And this is—this is relatively small potatoes. I think it reveals a man of violent temperament and a dangerous person, but I think it’s still on a relatively small scale. Mussolini and Hitler fought in the streets with the Socialists and the Communists. And they were dead. There were a few dead in Germany. There were actually more dead in Italy, when Mussolini was sort of conquering the streets with his Blackshirts. That’s real political violence. If Donald Trump puts his followers in colored shirts and they begin to fight in the streets, then you’ve got fascism.
In Italy after the First World War, there was a global depression. Everybody was worse off. In Germany in 1933, everybody was worse off. Now, we’ve got this strange dichotomy of a few people doing incredibly well, amassing pharaonic wealth, and most people in the middle doing somewhat better, and a group of people doing worse, with stagnant wages, with job opportunities that are limited to people with technical skills that poorly educated people don’t have. So we’ve got a group of people who see the others getting ahead by leaps and bounds, and sometimes they think that black people are getting fair advantages to get ahead, and they’re slipping behind. And so, this is a very angry crowd of people.
Trump was a guaranteed laugh line. He was considered a buffoon. All you had to do was to show the hair and call him “The Donald,” and everyone kind of snickered. And suddenly he’s this—he’s this immense power. He’s touched the nerve with his style, which has fascist overtones, encouraging violence, attacking the internal enemy and so forth, saying that the system is rotten and it needs an outsider to fix it, which is a fascist kind of appeal—make Germany great, make America great. Suddenly he’s touched a nerve, and for millions of people he is suddenly seen taken more than seriously. And that’s a strange flip. That’s a strange transformation.
I think people are driven absolutely wild, people who are not doing well in this economy. The recovery is incomplete, it’s partial. And there’s many people who are doing extremely well or fairly well, and then there are a group of people who can’t get jobs because they’re not sufficiently educated in technology, whose wages are stagnant, and they’re driven wild by this disparity.
63 of the world’s richest people have more wealth than three-and-a-half billion people. And 42 of them are right here in the United States.
it’s ironic that Trump is one of them, and somehow he’s seen as the outsider who will fix it. But I think there’s this bitterness that suddenly, with his—with his aggressive style, which recalls Mussolini and so forth, he’s suddenly seen to them as some kind of savior. And I think that transformation—a year ago, they would have laughed at him. Now, suddenly, he’s seen as a savior. I think that’s absolutely astonishing and, I guess, a tribute to the power of social media and suggestion and crowd behavior. It’s very strange.
one of the troubles with using the term “fascism,” is that blinds us to a lot of really bad things that are happening, such as the power of money in politics, the decay of community feeling, the decay of the feeling that we owe something to the community and to our neighbors. These are other kinds of problems that calling Trump a fascist doesn’t help us understand. It’s one of the objections I have to using the term. The way the political system has slipped out of the hands of the people who used to decide things and opening the gates to outsiders, which sounds like a democratic thing, but the—when the outsiders use crowd behavior and use the media with such skill, and then it’s—then you come up with dangerous people
it’s in the rallies that Trump’s established this rapport with a lot of angry people who felt that nobody else was speaking for them. It’s an incredible achievement. He’s very good at sensing the deep feelings of a crowd and playing them. This is another thing that sounds like Mussolini. Mussolini used to stand on the balcony and have exchanges with the thousands of people assembled in the streets below, and they would chant back and forth. He has brought those people into political activity. He’s given them a focus. And he’s installed himself as their spokesperson. And that’s an astonishing achievement.
the media nowadays make everything happen in an instant. And there’s no—it’s very difficult to arrive at mature judgment when things are happening on a six-hour news cycle.
one of the qualities of fascism was that they admired violence. They thought that violence had an esthetic quality, provided it was violence directed toward the revival of a damaged country or damaged state. And a little of that redemptive violence is showing up in Trump’s rhetoric, because he’s suggesting to the crowd and encouraging them to think that it’s good to rough up people they disagree with. And this is an ominous development.
economic deprivation was universal in Germany, in Weimar Germany. First of all, there was the massive inflation of 1923. If you had savings, they disappeared. The whole middle class went through the trap door. And then everybody was unemployed in 1930. Every—it was total deprivation. We have relative deprivation. We have the richest economy on Earth, with a group of people who feel they’ve been left behind, while others, perhaps including black people, are given unfair advantages.
I’m a little leery of using the term “fascism” too loosely. I think Trump adopts fascist themes. He revels in fascist techniques. He’s good at manipulating a crowd. There are, at the same time, profound differences. The original fascisms wanted to solve the problems of Germany and Italy by creating a strong state, and they wanted to—they wanted to subordinate the conflicting interests of individuals to the overarching interest of the community, which is the opposite of what’s going on now in America. There’s the—there’s individualism to the extreme, and people are unwilling to accept any kind of community discipline—environmental legislation, action on global warming, protection of workers—all of this, for people who vote for Trump or, indeed, largely, any of the Republican candidates want to throw out all of these community obligations. That’s the opposite of fascism.
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Robert Paxton
professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University. He specializes in modern European history with particular focus on the rise and spread of fascism. He is the author of several books, including The Anatomy of Fascism.
— source democracynow.org