8. The Nitty Gritty: Capitalism & Fascism

But to deny that Trumpism is a contemporary form of fascism one must put forward at least one of those plausible definitions and provide evidence of how MAGA fails to fit. This Bessner does not do.

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.

I think it’s short a few key elements: class dynamics in place of the weaker sociological notion of “elites”; the role of the charismatic, all-knowing leader; and the destruction, once in power, of the helping parts of the state apparatus while bulking up the repressive apparatus.

For instance, in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s there was a polarized, blocked democracy in which neither the traditional center-left nor center-right coalition forces were able to vanquish the other. This led to an inability to decisively address the most important challenges afflicting the society through the usual political mechanisms.

Key to fascism is the blockage, not the particular time- and place-bound issues. Fascism represents a breakthrough solution (in the wrong direction, toward the most reactionary sectors of capital) to resolve fundamental issues around capitalist development. In Italy, fascism was a solution to the modernization of the rural economy; in Germany, a response to the crushing burden of war debt; and here in the United States, the antiquated political structures bequeathed by the founders’ concessions to the slavocracy, and the death grip of fossil fuel capital over our planet’s future.

for advocates of the American fascism thesis, these developments all prove that there’s an unbroken line of fascism stretching back to the nation’s founding.” I don’t know to whom he is ascribing this overreaching position; he doesn’t identify anyone. Scholars who argue for fascist precedents in American history, like the rise of the first KKK during Reconstruction, are pretty careful to avoid sweeping statements of this nature.

Trump and especially his movement — because that’s one of the key ingredients of the phenomenon — qualify. What convinced Paxton to publicly change his mind? The January 2021 insurrection sealed the deal for him; he no longer thought that academic quibbling about labels or reservations based on popular usage outweighed the danger of the reality.

While dismissing “extreme far-right ideology” as too baggy a definition, nowhere does Bessner offer a replacement of his own or someone else’s that he agrees with. Instead, he seemingly views fascism mostly as a misguided analogy for three reasons: its analogs are Italy and Germany; it is a foreign ideology only; and because Trumpism is American born and bred, therefore it can’t be fascism. These arguments are tautological and unconvincing. "Fascism represents a breakthrough solution to resolve fundamental issues around capitalist development."

Because the “structures, processes, discourses and patterns” show us the pathways history can take — not so we can peer into our crystal balls and foretell the precise duplication of past events in the present, but so that we can master the critical capacity to see what the man behind the curtain is attempting to put over on us and stop it from happening.

Throughout the article Bessner sets up one straw man after another and knocks them down. He tells us, “The powers that Trump is deploying, and the laws and theories that he is building his attempt to reshape the US state and society upon, are not fascist. They are American…” This assumption, that “fascism” and “American” are nonoverlapping categories, is one Bessner, at no point, proves or even argues for. To the contrary, my argument is that they combine: American fascism.