Still Not Fascism

The Society for US Intellectual History has published what I gather they think is a takedown of a book citing numerous academics who, after 2016, denied that Trumpism was a fascist movement. They note that some academics cited against that proposition before now agree that, in fact, the term is appropriate. 

I notice however that the article doesn't cite a definition of fascism, and indeed tries to evade the question as not important.

The real question to be asked is not how Steinmetz-Jenkins’ mentors finally changed their minds, but what kept them so long? A clue was offered by Moyn, a contributor to this volume, who tweeted after Paxton declared J6 to be fascist: “FWIW, my reluctance was and is rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of the likely political consequences of certain framings.”

To wit: if we call it fascism, we declare the wolves have indeed arrived and we must do all we can to stave them off. Including coalescing with the very “centrist” liberals that socialists viewed as their main ideological adversary, ever since Senator Hilary Clinton voted for the Second Iraq War.

Trumpism may be wrong, if it is wrong, without being fascist. Fascism is not (as Orwell tried to point out) just anything you don't like. It is a Modernist species of corporatism. Trump isn't one not because he's a virtuous or upright person, but because he doesn't believe in that doctrine at all.  

Fascists believe in the state as the absolute center of human life, the definer of all values in the post-religious age, with which all churches and families must align, and nothing can be allowed to oppose. The centrality of the state is total:  as Mussolini put it, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

A movement built around slashing the government so that it exercises less control over individuals and families is certainly not fascist in any sense of the word.... Pushback from within the Republican party is that there's no way it will happen, not because they have designs on conquest but because Congress won't agree to spend that much less.

The Trump administration has also got another sense of meaning and rightness that isn't just state dictates. Rightly or wrongly, they interpret sex according to nature, and want the state to comply with that external natural order. 

There may be fascists in America somewhere, but they aren't at the Daytona 500. 

Nor in the Hells Angels, even though they sometimes wear actual Nazi symbols: that's just not what they're doing. 

The Society publication is really fighting an internal fight between liberals and socialists, and its argument is simply that the socialists now need to compromise with them and give way to them. It's another one of those fights for position within a faction; the question of what is actually going on here is not of great interest to them.

It should be, however, of interest to all of us. We would all benefit from honest grappling with what makes Trump popular, what legitimate complaints he's addressing, as well as where he's going wrong either due to bad ideas or amateur execution. That might actually improve things; hardening the opposition to him, both when he's right and when he's wrong, is only going to prolong the suffering.