I keep coming back to the quote.
Amid concerns about Project 2025 and reports that Donald Trump wants generals like Hitler’s and Trump’s plan to use the military to keep citizens in line, I keep thinking about something from four years ago. That is when I reached out to Peter Hayes, a former professor at Northwestern University.
Hayes is a smart guy. Author of “Why? Explaining the Holocaust” and a bunch of other books; editor of “How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader”; former scholar-in-residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In other words, he understands fascism about as well as anybody.
And when talking about the prospects of another Trump presidency, we have to talk about fascism.
It is incomprehensible that it has gotten to this point. Trump, after all, tried to overthrow the government. Literally. He supported a fake-elector scheme and failed to respond when his acolytes attacked the U.S. Capitol.
The fact that the former president might be the future president is absurd, yet here we are. Whether or not that places us on the precipice of fascism is open to debate. Hayes describes fascism as “an authoritarian, militaristic, and patriarchal form of hyper-nationalism, with strong admixtures of romanticism about a country’s past, hostility to social change and specialized expertise, and intolerance of internal disagreement.”
Which, after nine years of watching Trump on the political stage, seems to be a spot-on definition. But Hayes adds: “He lacks the discipline and commitment to ideas (however crazed) that characterized such figures as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. He clearly echoes their populism (i.e., the view that my people are the people), and their readiness to divide their countries from the wider world and even their own societies between us and them. But he only plays at militarism in the form of parades, displays, and the occasional missile launch, rather than in the form of territorial aggression.”
So, the only dividing line between Trump and fascism is that he has not invaded Mexico. It’s a thin line.
But that’s not the quote I am reminded of. We’ll get to that in a minute. First, we must take a look at Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel about fascism, “It Can’t Happen Here.”
In Lewis’ story, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip uses populist rhetoric to ascend to the presidency. Windrip is described as “ascending from the vulgar fraud of selling bogus medicine … to the dignity of selling bogus economics.” He has the “power of bewitching large audiences” despite being “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.”
That might or might not sound familiar.
And we must turn to a 1946 short from Encyclopedia Brittanica Films about the differences between democracy and despotism. One character says to another: “Why are you so afraid of the word ‘fascism?’ Might not be so bad, with all of the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays and living on my income tax and yours. Not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini … and have ’em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again.”
Meanwhile, the narrator points out, “If a community’s economic distribution becomes slanted, its middle-income groups grow smaller and despotism stands a better chance to gain a foothold.”
That also might or might not sound familiar.
But as we ponder the prospects of another Trump-led kakistocracy (great word; look it up) and as we debate whether or not he is a fascist, there is another thought from Hayes that is even more pertinent.
“The principal danger from Trump is not that he’ll make America fascist, but that he is making America fail,” Hayes wrote to me. “We are becoming a country that cannot meet the challenges of the present (a pandemic) or the future (climate change). He thinks only about the show and the short term, which is a catastrophic combination.”
And that is the quote that sticks in my mind.
