What is Fascism? Experts reveal the ideology: NPR

A protester holds a sign that reads, “Make the fascists afraid again!” during a demonstration at the University of Washington on January 20, 2017 in Seattle.

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Even before his first run for president in 2016, former President Donald Trump was accused of invoking the leadership style of the world's most notorious fascists, namely Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who popularized fascism, and Adolf Hitler.

With Election Day approaching, the fascist accusations against Trump have become increasingly louder over the past week.

Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump's longest-serving chief of staff, said in an interview with The New York Times published on October 22 that Trump “certainly falls within the general definition of fascism.”

The next day, the Republican presidential nominee's Democratic opponent, Vice President Harris, said on CNN when asked if she thought Trump was a fascist: “Yes, I do.”

She later added that it was important to many people “not to have a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Name-calling is common, especially in the final act of a presidential election. But many experts who say the label “fascism” is accurate argue that it is more than just political polemic. They say the term is useful – it serves as a distress signal about threats to democracy.

Other experts say it is an inaccurate criticism that obscures other, very real threats to Trumpism.

The Trump campaign responded to NPR's request for comment on the allegations with a statement that insulted NPR.

Here's a closer look at what fascism is—and what it isn't—according to scholars who study ultranationalist ideology.

What is Fascism?

Scientists have long argued about the definition of fascism.

Roger Griffin, professor emeritus of modern history at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom and a widely cited political theorist on the subject, offers an explanation: an authoritarian, “revolutionary form of extreme nationalism” that often includes racism, xenophobia, male chauvinism, etc . includes The Culture of Violence.

“She sees things like communism and liberalism as threats to society,” he told NPR. “Fascists themselves want to overthrow either a communist state or a traditionally conservative or liberal state in order to create a new order.”

In the past, fascists like Mussolini and Hitler relied on military might to suppress opposition.

Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, center, hands on hips, with members of the Fascist Party in Rome on October 28, 1922.

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In October 1922, Mussolini, leader of the National Fascist Party, declared his plan to seize power before members of the armed fascist militia – so-called Blackshirts – marched on Rome. In Germany, Hitler's Nazi Party had an army of “brown shirts” to carry out a violent intimidation campaign against leftists and the Jewish population. Both leaders censored the press and promoted racism through propaganda.

The word “fascist” has since acquired a looser definition, Griffin said. It's not just Trump – it's become a popular epithet in the political sphere on both sides. Many on the left have thrown the term at other conservative and right-wing leaders, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Conservatives have also been known to compare Democrats to fascists.

“Anything that smacks of authoritarianism or chauvinism or control freakism can be dismissed as fascist,” Griffin said.

Why Some Scholars Call Trump “Fascist.”

Those who support the former president's fascist label have pointed to the following features of Trump's campaign and presidency: When announcing his 2016 presidential bid, Trump denounced Mexican migrants as rapists and promised to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. He quoted Mussolini and, according to former employees, praised Hitler highly. He attempts to delegitimize news media by calling the press the “enemy of the American people.”

He tried to overturn a free and fair election he lost, convinced most Republicans that President Biden's victory was illegitimate and spread lies about a stolen election, sowing distrust in the democratic process.

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday.

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For many scholars, the answer to the question of whether Trump qualifies as a fascist boils down to the events of January 6, 2021, when Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the Democratic transfer of power.

“If Trump intended (on January 6) to overthrow the American Constitution and establish a new order based on the charismatic power he wielded, then he was absolutely a fascist,” said Griffin, the British political theorist .

But according to Griffin, Trump himself lacked intent that day because he doesn't represent a fixed ideology.

“You can associate him with racism, xenophobia, male chauvinism, extreme capitalism and the whole host of -isms,” he said, but he sees “no evidence that Trump has a sufficiently coherent ideology, let alone a coherent ideology of the overthrow of the state by a coup, to deserve the word fascism.”

For Robert Paxton, one of the leading scholars in the field of fascism, it is equally important to focus on the followers in order to understand fascism Just.

Paxton, a former Columbia University professor and author of The Anatomy of FascismSo far he has only been convinced that Trump has some elements of fascism. But he said his mind changed after Jan. 6 Just In an interview published last week, he confirmed that he no longer opposes calling Trump a fascist after the Capitol siege.

Trump's brand of fascism, Paxton told the Justis bubbling “from below in a very worrying way, and that is very similar to the original fascisms,” when Mussolini and Hitler exploited mass discontent to gain support.

Trump’s “enemy” rhetoric

A recent NPR investigation found more than 100 cases in which Trump said his opponents, critics and private citizens should be investigated, prosecuted, imprisoned or otherwise punished.

He accused ideological opponents of being “the enemy from within.”

For Kelly, the highest-profile official of the Trump era to publicly denounce the former president, it was those comments that moved him to speak out against Trump, he said in an interview with the Just.

The “enemy within” rhetoric is a central aspect of fascism, said Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism.

“Fascists are obsessed with the idea that the current state of the nation is decadent. The world is collapsing. It has internal and external enemies. There are forces at work that are destroying sacred, eternal truths or important things about the nation or the race,” he said.

Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How fascism worksTrump said he was also targeting the same people as Hitler. He told WNYC's About the media last week that “the word is needed now to keep us out of the history books as complicit in the rise of fascism.” But he also acknowledged that it wasn't a perfect fit: “I use the word fascism because we don't have another word for it have something that looks so much like fascism.”

However, Griffin said the fascist label was a red herring. In his view, what we are experiencing with Trump is “far more dangerous because it can persist in a democracy.”

“Trump is dangerous not because he is a fascist,” he said, “but because he is systematically trying to destroy the basic principles of liberal democracy – freedom of speech, respect for experts and open-mindedness – all of those things that are fundamental to a healthy world “Democracy around the world.”