Is America Turning Fascist?

By Vincent Cook via Mises Institute | November 18, 2024

On October 25, ABC News published the results of a survey of 2,392 registered voters where 44 percent of the respondents said that Donald Trump is a fascist, while 23 percent said that Kamala Harris is a fascist. There was even a 5 percent overlap between the two groups—respondents who characterized both Trump and Harris as fascists. Only 32 percent of the respondents thought that neither candidate is a fascist. Is America really in danger of turning fascist?

The survey defined “fascist” rather broadly as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” This definition is misleading (perhaps intentionally so), since most Americans view communism as being an alternative form of political extremism and would hesitate to apply the fascist label to any communist. If the question had been reworded to ask whether or not a given candidate was “fascist or communist,” many more respondents would likely have moved Harris into the extremist category.

Another difficulty is that the words like “fascist” and “Nazi” have been routinely used as fear-evoking smears for a very long time. One of the keenest critics of the political abuses of language, George Orwell, despairingly called attention to the ambiguity of the word “fascism” in its ordinary usage in his 1944 newspaper article “What is Fascism?”:

It will be seen that, as used, the word “Fascism” is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if “Fascist” means “in sympathy with Hitler”, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word “Fascist” in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By “Fascism” they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one—not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

There is little doubt that the word “fascism” has been used in an equally-ambiguous manner lately, with President Biden explicitly using the word against Trump and partisan legacy media outlets supporting Biden’s accusation with witnesses claiming Trump wanted to coerce political opponents on various occasions by using military, police, or angry mobs and of resorting to viciously-racist rhetoric and policies, particularly regarding illegal immigrants.

Conservative commentators, in turn, accused Democrats and Democrat-friendly elites and bureaucrats of instituting censorship of social media, of instigating frivolous prosecutions and litigation directed against Trump and his supporters, of funding violent street protesters, of engaging in fraudulent vote counts, and of concocting numerous fabrications and misrepresentations against Trump with the assistance of numerous members of the intelligence community. Suspicions were also aroused by at least two assassination attempts against Trump by individuals having unknown motives and affiliations.

To assess if American political trends bear more than just a superficial resemblance to the original Italian model, it is important to take up Orwell’s 1944 challenge and provide a clear definition of what qualifies as fascism, and to better understand how democracies are transformed into fascist states.

The original Italian promoters of Fascism, dictator Benito Mussolini, and idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, were prolific writers who authored numerous works attempting to explain and justify fascism, including Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals (1925), Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (1929), and The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1932). However, it is not easy to formulate a clear definition of fascism from their works, in part because they rejected all-encompassing ideological explanations for what they viewed as spontaneous political developments driven by the practical political needs of the moment. What does emerge as a positive doctrine in their works is an elevation of the state to the status of an Absolute (not unlike G.W.F. Hegel’s deification of the Prussian state)—an organic entity that supposedly gives spiritual meaning to life and actively creates nationhood, and where mere individuals (contra classical liberalism) or economic classes (contra Marxism) count for nothing except to the extent they are harmoniously integrated together as parts of the nation-state whole. Another clearcut fascist doctrine is that the interests of different states are irreconcilable and, therefore, a state must go to war with other states in order to prosper.

Again, in 1944, three classical liberals cut through the conceptual fog that bedeviled Orwell, writing books warning about the dangers of fascism—American journalist John Flynn (As We Go Marching) and Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises (Omnipotent Government) and Friedrich von Hayek (The Road to Serfdom). Flynn and Hayek offered troubling political, economic, and ideological comparisons between the two leading fascist nations and western nations (America and Britain respectively), warning that the prevailing ideas and policies of the New Deal in America and of Labour partisans in Britain were leading those countries down the same road that Italy and Germany had followed. Mises and Hayek analyzed the ideological origins of fascist regimes and the causes of their political success, with a particular focus on the rise of Nazism in Germany.

Flynn listed eight defining characteristics of a fascist social system:

(1) Governmental powers are unrestrained (totalitarianism);

(2) Governmental powers are concentrated in the hands of a dictator supported by a political elite (the leadership principle);

(3) Production and distribution are in private hands, but directed by state planners (“public-private partnerships” or corporatism);

(4) State regimentation of production is effected through regulations promulgated by immense bureaucracies;

(5) Investments are also regimented through an integration of government and private finances (“industrial policy” and “monetary policy”);

(6) Consumption is also subjected to government planning on a large scale via the deficit-financing of government spending (e.g., welfarism, public works) and the creation of purchasing power (inflation);

(7) Militarism is also embraced as an element of planned consumption;

(8) Imperialism also follows as a consequence from militarism and other elements of fascism

Flynn aligned with the original Italian fascists in associating fascism with totalitarianism, corporatism, and military conquest, but he notably cited neither nationalism nor racism in his definition. While many protest Flynn’s omission, Mussolini and Gentile tended towards the view that states made nations and peoples, not the other way around. Unlike many Nazis, they were not reflexive chauvinists or eugenicists. For them, the state, not the nation as such, always comes first.

To be sure, demagogic appeals to nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, etc. can explain why totalitarians gain public support in specific instances. Mises and Hayek offered critical qualifications about this though. In their view, interventionism, welfarism, and inflationism are what ultimately destabilized economies, democratic institutions, and international peace in spite of sincere democratic intentions of most of those who instituted such policies. While it may be an obnoxious nationalist demagogue who delivers the final coup de grace to a democracy, one could never succeed in seizing power without the institutions and ideology of economic collectivism already being in place. The illiberal policies that caused the First World War and the Great Depression and the economic chaos following from those events were necessary antecedents to the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Hayek also presciently warned that multinational institutions would fail to keep peace among nations if central planning to continued to exist, either by states at a national level or by supranational authorities at a global level—a severe rebuke to the “anti-fascist” pretensions of contemporary Davos elites. America is indeed in serious danger of turning fascist; not specifically because Donald Trump won the election, but because partisans on both sides, together with globalist elites and Deep State operatives, have built a system with most of Flynn’s fascist elements already in place, lacking only a willful executive empowered by an enabling act.

Vincent has been a supporter of the Mises Institute since its founding in 1982 and has hosted the Epicurus & Epicurean Philosophy website since 1996.

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