After surviving two apparent assassination attempts, Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), are blaming Democrats (specifically Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) and pundits for stoking the flames of violence against him by their repeated claims that Trump is a threat to democracy and by pundits’ assessment that he and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan is a recipe for fascism.
On the right-wing side of the dictatorial strongman’s political spectrum, we find the philosophy and practice of “fascism.” While deployed as an epithet by some, fascism developed as a form of radical authoritarian nationalism in early 20th-century Europe in response to left-wing liberalism and Marxism.
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While fascist elements have always been ingrained in U.S. political systems — even before the term was coined — “fascism” is now the ruling party with Donald J. Trump as its leader.
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Political scientist, Lawrence Britt, enumerates 14 characteristics of fascism as the following:
1. Powerful and continuing nationalism 2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights 3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats [of the country’s problems] as a unifying cause 4. Rampant sexism 5. Supremacy of the military 6. Controlled mass media 7. Obsession with national security 8. Religion and government are intertwined 9. Corporate power is protected 10. Labor power is suppressed 11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts 12. Obsession with crime and punishment 13. Rampant cronyism and corruption 14. Fraudulent elections
While many governmental leaders and candidates for public office may push for some of these tactics while remaining outside the definition of “fascist,” their cumulative effect increases depending on the severity of and the degree to which they initiate these measures.
So, let’s look at Donald Trump’s words, actions, and policy initiatives through the lens of Lawrence Britt’s tenets of fascism.
All the ways that Trump marks the checkboxes for fascism:
1. Powerful and continuing nationalism: Appeals to “nationalism” — with talk of isolationism, building walls, and “sh**hole countries” — presented in the guise of “popularism,” feeding on people’s fears and prejudices, which has resulted in the segregation of people and nations from one another, and threats and dangers of violence. He attacks and suggests separating from long-established alliances like NATO while having obsessive admiration for tyrannical dictators like Putin, Orban, and Kim. CHECK!
2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights: Threats to and rollbacks of many of the rights and protections minoritized peoples have tirelessly fought for over the past decades: reproductive rights, voting rights, citizenship rights, human rights, anti-torture guarantees, immigrant rights, rights of unreasonable search and seizure, rights of assembly, disability rights, freedom of religion, transgender rights, marriage equality and equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. CHECK!
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats [of the country’s problems] as a unifying cause by singling out already disenfranchised identity groups as the internal and external enemies of the United States: Muslims and anyone from Muslim-majority countries, Mexicans and all Latinx people, urban “thugs,” the press, Haitians, Somalis, LGBTQ+ people, Drag Queens, George Soros (representing an alleged world Jewish financial and political conspiracy), Democrats, Mike Pence, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Kamala Harris, the ACLU, most Democrats, etc. – CHECK!
4. Rampant sexism and toxic misogynistic utterances and allegations, primarily against women of color, state prosecutors, and legislators opposing the Republican Party’s political agenda. Add to that credible charges by several women reaching historic proportions and convictions for sexual harassment. Robbing people the right to control their bodies by stacking the Supreme Court with “justices” who reversed Roe v. Wade – CHECK!
5. Supremacy of the military: Promises to enlarge and improve our “failing” military and fire generals whom Trump “knows more than about ISIS,” and his apparent lack of knowledge about or fear of nuclear weapons. Supremacy of the military by perennially proposing exponentially high increases in the budget for the Pentagon. Employing the military for civil projects, like stationing service members on the southern border to engage in duties not directly specified for the military, and even considering instituting martial law rather than leaving the White House after the new president had been inaugurated — CHECK!
6. Controlled mass media: Threats to employ libel laws to sue the “crooked and lying” media (Lügenpresse, “lying press” popularized by the German Nazis to silence opposition), banning books and other school curricular materials like Critical Race Theory and any discussions related to the truth presented age-appropriately about some of the “hard” history of the United States, discussions of LGBTQ+ topics, and topics of gender all in the name of supposedly “protecting parental rights” – CHECK!
7. Obsession with national security: Continual cries against “Islamic jihadist terrorists” and immigrants released from “mental asylums and prisons” as the major threats to our nation, thereby targeting U.S. Muslims, Latinx people, and Haitians in increased calls for a “national registry,” arrests, separation from their children, and surveillance to track their movements – CHECK!
8. Religion and government are intertwined through a tight network of Christian nationalists using selected passages from the Christian Testament as justification for its right-wing stands, attendance at several Christian prayer vigils, and the former president’s appearances at conservative-right Christian conferences and universities like Liberty University, with calls to “Make America Great Again” giving the subliminal dog-whistle message of making America white and Protestant again – CHECK!
9. Corporate power is protected. Increased deregulation of the energy and corporate business sectors with massive tax cuts and other financial incentives. “One of the very first actions of my administration was to impose a two-for-one rule on new federal regulations. We ordered that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated,” Trump said in early 2017. — CHECK!
10. Labor power is suppressed with anti-labor actions to reduce the rights of workers to organize and negotiate collective bargaining agreements. Plans to privatize entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP Benefits), and the Affordable Care Act, advocacy for the abolition of a national minimum wage, non-payment of overtime, and other “neo-liberal” actions – CHECK!
11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts with resentment and attacks on the political, media, and intellectual “elites” to the point of instigating scorn and harassment against the so-called Washington “liberal elite.” Making demands for an apology from the cast of the Broadway show, Hamilton: An American Musical, for voicing concerns over a Trump presidency with Vice President Mike Pence in attendance.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment with calls for “law and order” involving draconian (and possibly unconstitutional) measures of torture and surveillance against groups like Black Lives Matter and antifa, but certainly not toward what Trump referred to as “the patriots” of January 6, 2021 who stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC. Antagonism and intimidation toward the ongoing investigations around Trump’s alleged payment of an adult video star with campaign funds, his large cache of classified documents he stored at his seaside Florida resort, and his possible involvement in the January 6th insurrection, which some in the Republican Party define as a “legal First Amendment protest” – CHECK!
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption while in and out of office. Increasing deployment of his adult children and son-in-law as close trusted political operatives who meet with visiting diplomats and travel to foreign capitals to negotiate political and business deals. Add to that, continuously unresolved conflict-of-interest issues and “emoluments” breeches between his position as president and his worldwide business interests, with so many probes into corruption that they have all become a common occurrence – CHECK!
14. Fraudulent elections assisted by the Republican Party and the Supreme Court gutting the 1965 Voting Rights law, which has resulted in voter suppression campaigns effectively reducing the number of polling stations in primarily minoritized racial communities and the limiting of days and times for pre-election-day voting. Additionally, another fascist ruler, Russian President Vladimir Putin, weighed-in on Trump’s side to sway the presidential election in their (Putin & Trump’s) favor. Despite claiming “elections fraud” when he lost the 2020 election, no such fraud has been found in the states by any court.
Is the United States still considered a “democracy”?
As the attack in our nation’s capital in January 2021 attests, alongside the precipitous rise and deployment to the center of Republican Party politics of right wing extremist armed paramilitary militia groups — like the Proud Boys, The Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and other Neo-Nazi, fascist, patriarchal Christian white supremacist groups that developed with ever-increasing speed following the deadly standoff at Waco, Texas, in 1993 against the Branch Davidian cult – we can now ask to what extent is the United States considered a “democracy.”
“This is democracy’s most challenging hour since Fort Sumter,” argued Historian John Meacham, invoking the battle that kicked off the U.S. Civil War in 1861.
in her book How Civil Wars Start, Barbara F. Walter, U.S. political scientist and Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, warns: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”
“No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline or headed toward war,” but, she writes, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America…you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency: 1. The “pre-insurgency” phase, and 2. The “incipient conflict” phase, and only time will tell whether the final phase is fully activated.
The “open insurgency” phase, began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021.
Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set – the one the CIA task force has found to be most reliable in predicting instability and violence – Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of Trump’s candidacy and administration, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone.
By the end of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.
“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war. “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter states.
“A country standing on this threshold – as America is now at +5 – can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said.
We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, as the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare including assassinations and ambushes.”
Benjamin Franklin was one of the nation’s “founders” who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to draft our now-famous founding document. At the age of 81, though a perennial optimist, he had no illusions and thought it impossible to expect any group of people, no matter how wise or brilliant, to create a “perfect production.”
Even “with all its faults,” however, Franklin believed that this Constitution was far superior to any alternative that could possibly emerge.
He had a warning, though. As the story is told, when departing the Constitutional Convention, a group of citizens approached Franklin and asked him what kind of government had the delegates created?
His response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The time has long-since passed that we can compare the fascist direction the world took during the 1920s through the 1940s with the direction the United States and many other countries are taking today.
Have we learned anything from history?
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