Chapter 29: Dystopia on the Potomac
The American Experiment Faces Its Greatest Test
The set of chapters that make up this Substack was inaugurated on August 1, 2024, to explore the future of our nation in this era of confusion and, for many, despair. The title — “Dystopias and Demagogues” — was chosen in order to explore through history and literature possible futures for the politics we are witnessing in the present.
The central question of this series has been: Can it happen here?
We now know that it can. Many believe that the destruction of our democracy is happening right now, before our eyes. Some historians believe we are living through a coup.1
According to Senator Chris Murphy (D,CT), Elon Musk and his small band of high-tech henchman potentially “know everything about you. . . . [T]his could get dystopian very quickly.”2
Is Donald Trump a fascist? There are two ways to look at this question: politically and intellectually. Politically, it is not useful. Kamala Harris labelled Trump a fascist on October 24, shortly before the election on November 5. In all likelihood this brought her no votes. The term “fascism” is mysterious to most Americans. Using it sounded like standard-issue name calling. Harris’s argument to the nation was essentially: “Vote for me or else.”3 The nation chose: “Else.”
From an intellectual point of view, on the other hand, studying fascism can be helpful to those trying to understand the nation’s situation today and its prospects for the future. Why has public life deteriorated to its present state? What can be done to keep America from falling even further under the power of Trump and his enablers? These are pressing questions.
The rise to power of Mussolini, Hitler, and other fascists could not have taken place without the support of important groups in society. The same is true in the United States. Reasonable people could make excuses for Trump up to his first attempted coup on January 6, 2021, but no longer after that day. Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” according to Robert O. Paxton, an emeritus professor at Columbia University and an outstanding scholar of fascism.4
It was not only the January 6 riot, it is the failure to bring Trump to account for it thereafter which marks his ascendancy in American political life as a profound break from tradition. Trump was impeached (for the second time) by the House of Representatives on January 13, 2021, for inciting an insurrection. He was tried before the Senate. Although 57 senators, comprising the entire Democratic caucus and seven Republicans, voted to convict (with 43 voting to acquit) on February 13, 2021, Trump was acquitted because a two-thirds majority is required for conviction.
The failure to find Trump guilty was disastrous for a number of reasons. First it showed the impotence of those trying to uphold democracy. All other attempts over the next four years to hold Trump accountable also failed. After the Senate vote, “Trump, unrepentant, welcomed his second impeachment acquittal and said his movement ‘has only just begun.’”5
Trump was right. His vindication came on November 5, when he defeated Harris. Inaugurated on January 20, Trump has pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists and has exacted retribution against those who tried to bring him to justice. If Trump had been convicted on February 13, 2021, the Senate could have voted to prevent him from holding elected office in the future. Perhaps the boil would have been lanced.
But perhaps not.
Why, one must ask, did Trump get away with the most brazen attempt to overthrow the government in American history? The reason is that he has the support of a great many Americans. Republican politicians know that to oppose Trump is probably to end their political careers and perhaps to place themselves in jeopardy in other ways. The Republicans in Congress now “have been especially meek, even as he has trampled on their prerogatives and past ideals.” The reason is “that lawmakers have seen what criticizing Trump has done to their colleagues, and they have lost the will to fight him. . . .” Trump is what the Republican party now wants.6
It is at this juncture that we can learn a lot from the history of fascism. Whether or not one wishes to label Trump a fascist, we can certainly say that he is closer to fascism than to any other “ism”, such as conservatism, liberalism, or socialism. The fascist leaders – Il Duce, Der Führer, El Caudillo – always wanted all eyes focused on them.
Trump is the same way. As he said prior to his taking office the first time, his aides “should think of each Presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals."7 But history illustrates that important as the leaders have been, they could not have achieved power without the support of a great many people. We can understand that support by examining the soil which proved fertile for fascism’s growth historically. We can then ask what soil in the U.S. has made possible the growth of Trump’s remarkable popularity.
Fascism exploded on the scene, especially in Europe, following World War I (1914-1918). “Before 1914, no living European could have imagined such brutality in what was then considered the most civilized part of the globe. Wars had become rare, localized, and short in Europe in the nineteenth century, fought . . . by professional armies that impinged little on civilian society.”8
But the heretofore unimaginable had happened. The “slaughter of an entire generation of young men”9 discredited pre-war beliefs and leaders in the eyes of youth. Fascism after the war was a young man’s game – “offering a haven for the angry, an ecstatic experience on the barricades, the lure of untried possibility.”10 “Those who survived the trenches could not forgive those who had sent them there.”11
“Culturally, the war discredited optimistic and progressive views of the future. . . . Socially, it spawned armies of restless veterans . . . looking for ways to express their anger . . . without heed for old-fashioned law or morality. Politically, it generated economic and social strains that exceeded the capacity of existing institutions . . . to resolve.”12 “Everybody expected everything”13 from the Versailles peace treaty which brought a formal end to the war on June 18, 1919. So everybody was deeply disappointed.
The past, it has often been observed, is a foreign country.14 Europe in 1919 was quite a different place from America in 2025. Yet there are some similarities.
Disillusionment has been building up in the United States for years. It was evident in various insurgent Presidential candidacies, such as Barry Goldwater in 1964, George Wallace in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, Patrick Buchanan in 1996 and 2000, Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, and Elizabeth Warren in 2020. The ultimate insurgent and the only one who succeeded in capturing the Presidency, of course, is Trump. Although he refers to his opponents as “radical left lunatics” or “Marxists,” it cannot be said that he himself is a conservative in any traditional sense of the word. No conservative would violate the Constitution as he is doing presently. He is in office for himself; but he has convinced half the nation that he will “make America great again,” whatever that means.
It is in this complete lack of principle that Trump is similar to the most important fascists, Mussolini and Hitler. In September 20, 1922, shortly before he became prime minister of Italy, Mussolini said, “They ask what is our program. Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy.”15 He also said, “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program. It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo.”16 From the beginning, fascists were willing to use terror and shed blood. Soon after he became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Hitler “ridiculed those who say ‘show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.’”17
Successful fascism features a cult of personality. This was true in Germany and Italy and also in Spain, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, the American state of Louisiana in the era of Huey Long, and elsewhere. Fascist leaders often spoke of a crisis which their nation faced before their ascendancy. Being “an affair of the gut more than of the brain,”18 fascism featured leaders whose instincts were thought superior to reason.
This is true of Trump. Note when challenged to explain how he knew that DEI had played a key role in the airplane tragedy over Washington DC on January 29, he answered, “because I have common sense and, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”19 During the height of the Covid epidemic, Trump said, "And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” "So it'd be interesting to check that." Pointing to his head, Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what." His common sense did not serve him well. Injecting disinfectant is lethal.20 Trump needed a better “you-know-what” in this instance.
The important fascist leaders of the last century were outsiders. Mussolini had been a schoolteacher, a “Bohemian minor novelist, and erstwhile socialist orator and editor.” Hitler was a failed art student.21 These men were allergic to power sharing agreements, because that would have violated their mystique. “Playing second fiddle fit badly with fascists’ extravagant claims to transform their peoples and redirect history.”22
Trump was an outsider as well, a playboy who was a staple of the tabloids. He was mocked by politicians who did not take him seriously. Conventional observers noted disapprovingly that unlike all his predecessors, Trump had not done a day of public service prior to attaining the Presidency. What these observers failed to understand was that Trump’s inexperience was a feature not a bug. Can anybody imagine Trump as, say, a senator? Playing such a role would have tarnished his image as a star.
The fascist leader was a charismatic man who promised “to unify, purify and energize [the] community; to save it from the flabbiness of bourgeois materialism, the confusion and corruption of democratic politics, and the contamination of alien people and cultures; . . . to rescue the community from decadence and decline.” “He . . . offered sweeping solutions to these menaces: violence against enemies, both inside and out; . . . the purification of blood and culture.”23
Trump’s assertions and his rhetoric fit well with this description. He speaks of saving America from immigrant hordes poisoning the blood of our country. He promises to expel immigrants by the millions. He promises to defeat the enemy within. Indeed, some of his statements seem so like the kind of thing a fascist leader would say that one wonders whether his speech writers are using fascist leaders as a model. Who can forget his statement that Haitian immigrants were eating pets of native born Americans in Springfield, Ohio? Trump doesn’t merely have enemies, he confronts demons.
The fascist states of the 20th century all failed. Why? They were trapped by their own grandiosity. These countries had to take on “an ever mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges.”24 The logic of fascism demanded war eventually. Germany and Italy were crushed in 1945.
It is in this respect that Trump departs from the classic fascist model. In his first term, he was not a war monger. In this regard, he was quite different from his predecessors, who involved the nation in pointless forever wars. What will happen now? Trump has been making many expansionist noises. He wants Greenland. He wants the Panama Canal. He wants Canada. He has floated the idea of occupying the Gaza Strip. His inaugural address sounded aggressive notes. He praised American ambition, he used the antiquated 19th century phrase “manifest destiny,” he spoke of expanding America’s territory, he wants to plant the flag on Mars. “The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.”25
Does this sound like “an ever mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges”?
Trump’s bluster in the first few days of his second term has alienated longtime American allies. Canadians, for example, have been booing the American national anthem when it is played at sporting events. However, Trump’s aggression so far has been focused more internally on his own country than externally.
In pursuit of what, as noted above, has been called a coup, Trump is dismantling the federal government piece by piece. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has apparently seized control of the nerve center of the nation’s government. Apparently, and accounts differ, Musk has at his command the confidential information of millions of Americans. He has the power to ruin a lot of lives.
Trump’s appointees are, by and large, comically unqualified. But he does not care about their competence. He cares about their loyalty. And he certainly seems to have that. Some of these people would be unemployable if Trump had not hired them.
After this discussion, you are owed a definition of fascism. I will give you here the best one that I know.
“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, abandon democratic liberties and pursue with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”26
Is Donald Trump a fascist? You tell me.
For example: Heather Cox Richardson,” Letters from and American,” Substack, February 2 and 3, 2025; Timothy Snyder from "Thinking about...,"Substack, February 5, 2023.
Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American,” Substack, February 5, 2025.
https://buchanan.org/blog/democrats-not-democracy-at-risk-today-159768
Robert O. Paxton, “I’ve Hesitated to Call Trump a Fascist. Until Now,” Newsweek, January 11, 2021.
Lisa Mascaro, Eric Turner, Mary Clare Jalonick, “Trump acquitted, denounced in historic impeachment trial,” APnews.com, February 13, 2021
Aaron Blake, “The GOP’s meek acquiescence to Trump’s power grabs,” Washington Post, February 3, 2025.
Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American,” Substack, February 6, 2025.
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004) p. 29.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 8.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 83.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 30.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 28.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Floyd, VA: Wilder Publications, 2014) p. 120.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Boston: Addison Wesley, 2000; originally published in 1953)
Paxton, Fascism, pp. 63-64.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 17.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 17.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 41.
James E. Garcia, “Trump’s ‘common sense’ about DEI and government workers is rank bigotry and racism, pure and simple,” AZMirror, February 3, 2025.
“Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment,” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Paxton, Fascism, p. 7.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 110.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 148.
Paxton, Fascism, p. 148.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/01/the-inaugural-address/
Paxton, Fascism, p. 218.