While I appreciate Prof. Browning’s history lesson on “How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy In Germany,” I was left utterly bewildered by the argument he furthered therein: Americans should be suspicious of using the term “fascism” to describe our current historical moment, even if the fate of the Weimar Republic does provide “some instructive parallels and important warning signals” as regards what is happening in our own ailing democracy. In other words, he’s telling us that yes, American democracy is under threat, and yes, there are parallels between the rise of Hitler and the rise of Trump, but no, there is no reason to think that problem might actually be fascism because America is too different from interwar Germany to ever become a Nazi dictatorship. While Browning’s position may have merits, there are serious gaps in his reasoning that should leave any reasonable person unconvinced.
“Fascism,” Browning reminds us in the second of two instances where he uses the term, “openly condemned parliamentary democracy.” Well, America is proud of being a democracy. According to Browning, America is much more prone to adopt the “illiberal democracy” being forwarded by Western authoritarians such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán than we are Nazism. These “illiberal democracies,” Browning says, prefer to exploit the appearance of free and democratic elections as a legitimizing force for their agenda while consolidating their power through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the like. In essence, Browning would have us believe that fascism just isn’t America’s style and that is why we aren’t actually facing the threat of a Nazi dictatorship.
Throughout the article, Browning’s argument relies heavily on an equivocation of the term “fascism” with the term “Nazism.” “Fascism” as such is only mentioned twice, as the article is primarily concerned with Nazism–a specific for-instance of fascism that arose in interwar Germany. The result of Browning’s equivocation is to create a sense of ridiculousness at the idea that America could become a Nazi dictatorship, which in turn obscures the possibility that we could very well still end up with fascist authoritarians as the political majority in D.C. It’s easy to point out how different contemporary America is from interwar Germany and claim that as a reason that such a thing will never happen here. It’s much more difficult to look closely at what is happening legislatively and socioculturally in America’s red states and deny that they are clearly being overrun with Christian Nationalists pushing a punishing and oppressive fascist agenda. By sticking to Nazism in his argument, Browning can sidestep reckoning with the fascist impulses that are steadily growing in red states and still claim that America is not threatened by fascism.
Browning’s equivocation also obscures the facts that fascism was born in Italy, and that Hitler created his Nazi ideology by borrowing some ideas from Italian fascism. He took those ideas and applied them to the historically and culturally specific context of interwar Germany to create his Nazi ideology. Hitler’s creation of Nazism is proof that fascism is a protean ideology; any sufficiently motivated person can adapt it to their purposes. Indeed, when one looks closely at the suppressive laws and oppressive agendas being passed in red states by the Christian Nationalist regimes that have come to dominate the GOP, that is exactly what is happening here, now. These American fascists have borrowed parts of their tactics and ideology from both Mussolini and Hitler, but they are mixing it with heaps of jingoism, evangelical Christian authoritarianism, Adam Smith, and ill-informed constitutional literalism. Browning might be right: perhaps Nazism is impossible in America. That hasn’t stopped Americans from creating their own version of fascism in the same way that Hitler created Nazism. Nazism is indeed a strain of fascism, but not all fascists are Nazis. Some fascists are American Christian Nationalists, and Christian Nationalism is very much the GOP’s preferred style of fascism, if not all of America’s.
Of course, anyone reading Browning’s examples of how the Nazi party exploited the machinery of German democracy to wrest and consolidate their absolute power cannot fail to notice that the ultimate goals of American “illiberal democracy” under the GOP aren’t really all that different from those of the interwar European fascists. The Christian Nationalist wing of the GOP has been in the ascendancy since 2015, and they want to consolidate as much power at the state and federal levels into their hands as they possibly can. So far, it’s been pretty easy: several influential GOP stalwarts–Graham, McConnell, Jordan, Cruz, and Rubio among them–have openly embraced the discrimination, nationalism, misogyny, theocracy, and authoritarianism that have come to characterize this subset of the Republican Party. Just as Germany’s traditional conservatives cast their lot with the Nazis to gain power America’s GOP has cast their lot with the Christian Nationalist fascists to achieve the same end–a fact that Browning practically admits.
Is it really so impossible, then, to think that the GOP would likely go much farther than “illiberal democracy,” given that one of their main objectives is to have enough states in their camp to call a constitutional convention? The interwar fascists in Italy and Germany won legitimate elections to get into power, and as soon as they were in office, they brought out the authoritarian sledgehammer to rewrite their constitutions in the image of fascism. Is it really so ridiculous to think that the Christian Nationalists in the GOP will try exactly the same thing when they get the chance?
There is one particularly instructive comparison between 21st-century America and interwar Germany that Browning makes–a “big lie” has victimized both. Hitler’s early propaganda campaign was a “big lie” intended to delegitimize the Weimar Republic: he claimed that the republic had been installed by the “November Criminals” to enrich themselves and destroy the German people. Trump’s “big lie” came in 2020, as he claimed that a rigged election had cost him the presidency and America was laboring under an illegitimate Democratic administration.
The goal of Hitler’s “big lie” was to undermine the Weimar Republic. His ruthless excision of any democratic impulse within the German state came only after he had come to power. The goal of Trump’s big lie was to delegitimize the institution of voting, without which we cannot have democracy. Of the two lies, Trump’s was the bigger. Hitler’s “big lie” destroyed a democratic republic; Trump’s big lie destroyed the only means by which a nation can achieve and maintain a democracy. If this lie doesn’t display the hallmark fascist contempt for parliamentary democracy, I don’t know what does.
Despite this obvious circumstance, Browning assures us that America is not under threat by fascism because “Trump is no Hitler,” He goes on to argue that, “compared with Hitler’s national-socialist ideological fixations, which led to brutal dictatorship, war, and genocide, Trump’s preoccupations seemed mainly to involve attention, adulation, and fundraising.” The only way that Trump’s “preoccupations” could seem so anodyne is if one utterly ignores the massive waves of authoritarian hate speech that have been spewing from Trump since he hit the campaign trail in 2015–as Browning clearly has.
A massive number of the January 6th rioters honestly believed that they were acting at the behest of Trump; some believed they were following his direct orders. The Proud Boy militias no doubt think the same thing whenever they march, armed to the teeth, into libraries to terrorize families and library patrons who are enjoying public programming offered by the library and minding their own business besides. I’m certain that the 31 heavily armed Patriot Front militiamen also believed that they were acting at Trump’s behest when they decided to violently demonstrate their opposition to a public Gay Pride event last June in Idaho. The fact that Trump is “no Hitler” doesn’t really matter. Trump IS Trump, and what he has done has eroded America’s democratic institutions and civil liberties. Trump doesn’t have to be Hitler; he just needs to command the same loyalty from his followers, who he knows will act–with certainty and violence–on the hatred he habitually vomits forth. No Hitler comparisons should be needed here to recognize Trump as the dangerous, pro-fascist force that he is.
In all honestly, Browning is probably correct in surmising that Trump has no chance to take back the presidency in 2024. To be honest, Trump currently serves the GOP as a figurehead and a propagandist who spurs Christian Nationalists onward toward committing acts of terrorism and violence against their neighbors and the children of their communities. Trump’s hatred and his minions’ vicious antics distract the rest of us from paying any attention whatsoever to the clever pro-fascists currently working over the leadership of the GOP. At this moment, there are at least three major pro-fascist front-runners who are jockeying to take the Republican nomination in 2024. Former Trumpist and current autocrat Rick DeSantis is a darling among Trump supporters. White supremacist replacement theorists J.D. Vance and Blake Masters–who are both backed by a shadowy, foreign techno-elitist billionaire–are practically champing at the bit to take that nomination. We need to start paying close attention to them.
Unlike Trump, these men don’t act out in piques of cranky toddler narcissism, and they are far better at building alliances with the traditionalists and moderates within the Republican Party. Any of the three of them would take the task of enshrining Christian Nationalist fascism in our constitution quite seriously indeed. And they would all make certain that we were too busy reacting to Trump’s antics to notice what they were doing until it was too late. Trump is no Hitler, but that is no matter. DeSantis, Masters, Vance, or some other pro-fascist figure will be very keen to institute policies at the federal level in service to this newly emergent American strain of fascism as soon as they can get away with it.
Browning criticizes the “facile comparisons” being made between contemporary America and interwar Germany that invoke “fascism” as an “imprecise epithet” to describe the political tides currently drowning the American system. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really succeed in dismissing these comparisons altogether because he fails to define fascism precisely enough for us to recognize–or deny–those comparisons for ourselves.
A user-friendly definition of fascism is clearly in order, and the Merriam-Webster online dictionary happens to have a great one. Therein, Fascism (“a term often capitalized”) is defined as
“a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Granted, some of the aspects of this newly emerging American fascism don’t much seem to resemble that definition at first blush. But just because fascism is manifesting differently in contemporary America than it did in interwar Europe doesn’t mean that that’s not exactly what is happening. One need only be willing to look past the pedantic in order to see the obvious. Despite formal differences, the underlying impact of Christian Nationalist fascism will more or less prove to be the same in America as was seen in interwar Europe.
For example, one would be hard-pressed to deny that the Christian Nationalist fascists in the GOP exult national identification over individual freedoms. Civil liberties are one instance of a government preserving an individual’s freedoms and human rights. The red state GOP fascists keep passing laws to curtail the civil liberties of people they don’t like, or who are likely to say things they don’t like. They are in favor of any and every measure that would compel Americans to work with as few job and safety protections as possible, for as little pay and benefits as possible. They continue to champion the notion of socio-economic mobility as a justification for clinging to an economic system that has generated incredible socio-economic disparity and gutted the American middle class.
About the only aspect of fascism that doesn’t seem to be in place currently is the “centralized autocratic government aspect. Now, it is absolutely true that America is federal system built to ensure that any centralized federal government will not impinge upon the rights of the states to govern according to their leaders’ wishes. Logically, that should be enough to prevent a centralized autocracy from ever happening. However, it is instructive to remember that neither Italy nor Germany had an “autocratic centralized government” before the fascists took them over. Indeed, the fascist demand for centralized autocracy was one of the things that both Mussolini and Hitler managed to heed as soon as they possibly could after they had seized power in their respective nations. There is really no telling what in our constitution would be rewritten if committed Christian Nationalists in the GOP managed to have enough power to call a convention and shape the future governance of our country according to their fascist objectives.
As we all know, the constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any state laws that conflict with what is in the constitution are inevitably struck down. If the Christian Nationalist faction of the GOP were to achieve the super-majority they would need in both houses of Congress, they would absolutely change our constitution to reflect their bigotry and their priorities. In that case, blue states that have enshrined democracy, equal protection under the law, and civil liberties for all of their citizens in their state constitutions could very well end up having those constitutions struck down for being out of compliance with the federal constitution. Those states could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for infrastructure, social safety net programs, and education–and that’s just to start.
In the face of such a devastating turn of events, how many of those beautiful blue bastions could successfully resist the demands of a federal government that has found them to be out of compliance with the “law of the land?” If any managed to resist at all, it would be very few who successfully could for any length of time. As it turns out, you don’t need a ready-made centralized government to inflict fascist autocracy upon the whole of this nation; you just need the willful and egregious tyranny of a pro-fascist super-majority willing to exploit the mechanisms of federalism so that they could force every state in the union to follow their agenda.
Ultimately, Browning’s argument that America is in trouble, but not actually fascist trouble, falls flat because he fails to take his own warning signals seriously enough. He’s right that America is unlikely to become a Nazi dictatorship. He is wrong to use that idea as a justification for dismissing the fascism already occurring in our midst and the very real threat it poses to all of America–not just the red states. America is in danger of becoming something far worse than an “illiberal democracy,” whether Browning wants to admit that or not. Fascism is already here in America, it just isn’t evenly distributed…yet.
