“If This Were Fascism, You Couldn’t Say So”

This argument is garbage.

Yesterday I talked about why scholar Corey Robin was wrong to argue that there is a dichotomy between fascism and incompetence or fascism and weakness. Robin believes that Trump can’t be a fascist because he is a stumbling dolt. But, as I explained, fascists are often stumbling dolts, and even of necessity have to be stumbling dolts. Stumbling dolts can still be very dangerous—and can still be fascists.

Robin made another assertion in passing which I didn’t manage to get to, but which I think is worth engaging. He argued that Trump could not be a fascist because people were able to say that he was a fascist.

During Trump 1.0, people found it useful, for reasons I remain unclear about, to say that we were living under a fascist regime, even though the very fact that they could say that publicly suggested otherwise, and to warn of fascism as a way, I guess, of mobilizing people to vote or act. [italics mine]

This has been a pretty common argument among people like Robin who insist that we’re not facing fascism. If you are facing fascism, they said, you wouldn’t be allowed to say you were facing fascism. Therefore, no one can ever accurately accuse a regime of fascism. If the regime is fascist, it would prevent you from saying so. If you can say so, you’re wrong and it’s not fascist. Nifty, huh?

I think the problems here are pretty obvious. But Robin seems to be unable to think them through, so it’s worth helping him out.

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Fascists are not all powerful

First, no fascist regime is instantly and everywhere able to stifle all dissent. There is a period of time during which fascists attempt to achieve power but are not yet in full control. It is possible to criticize them at that point before they attain hegemony, and, in fact, it is vital to do so.

It’s trivially easy to think of examples. Hitler was arrested for treason in 1923 and sent to prison. Obviously, criticizing Hitler at that point was possible. Does that mean that Hitler was not a fascist in 1923, and only became one once he had seized control of the state? Of course not. He was a fascist piece of shit in 1923, just as he was a fascist piece of shit in 1945. It’s just that he didn’t have complete power in 1923.

Robin might respond, “well, of course, you can criticize fascists when they are out of power. But Trump was in power, and people still criticized him. Ergo he’s not a fascist!”

The thing is, people continued to criticize various Nazi policies even at the height of fascist power in Germany. Ian Kershaw, in his book the Hitler myth, noted that the Nazis were quite unpopular through much of their reign in Germany. People were willing to criticize them openly and sometimes even to resist openly—many Germans, including Nazi party members, refused to boycott Jewish stores early on under Hitler’s reign, for example, and Church officials pushed back against Hitler’s eugenic policies directed at the disabled.

The exact boundaries of what was acceptable criticism were complicated and always under negotiation—in general, criticizing Nazi policies was safer than criticizing Hitler personally. But if you defined fascism as a movement under which no criticism of the regime is allowed without instant violent suppression, then the Nazis would not be a fascist regime, because people living under the regime criticized it.

The same is true in other fascist regimes—like, say, Jim Crow. Jim Crow is reasonably characterized as fascist, as I’ve discussed here. And criticism of white supremacy in the Southern US in the first half of the twentieth century could and did lead to horrific violence. Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote an anti lynching editorial in Memphis, for example, which made her the target of white mob violence. White supremacist thugs destroyed her paper’s printing press and forced her to flee to the north.

Jim Crow’s influence was somewhat delimited by region, however, which meant that once she reached the north, Wells-Barnett was able to continue her anti lynching writing and campaigning with less personal danger. Was Jim Crow not fascist because Wells-Barnett could criticize it in the north? Of course not; that was simply a sign that Wells-Barnett was very brave, and that the fascist regime was not all powerful.

MAGA is in fact trying to silence critics, as fascists do

Robin’s argument rests on the assumption that no one would ever defy a fascist regime despite risk. It also rests on the idea that fascist regimes are all powerful. But fascist regimes are never all powerful, because no human institution is all powerful.

Nonetheless, fascist regimes use state power to try to suppress as much criticism and speech as possible. And that is exactly what Trump and MAGA are doing. Trump has launched aggressive civil lawsuits against the Des Moines Register and ABC News for perceived slights. He’s threatened to jail reporters. And he’s launched personal attacks on journalists who question him in order to encourage his followers to send them death threats.

Most recently, Trump and his henchstooge billionaire Elon Musk have said that they are going to use the FBI to target and prosecute journalists and social media users who reveal the names of Trump staff members illegally seizing control of government computer systems and payment processors. This is a straightforward authoritarian effort to silence criticism and prevent public scrutiny of government.

Obviously, it is still possible to criticize Trump and Musk; I’m doing so here. But I am doing so in the knowledge that, if I came to their attention, Trump and Musk could quite feasibly sue me or prosecute me. Everyone who writes about the current regime does so knowing that they could become targets, because Trump has worked hard to make sure that journalists know that they are targets.

Fascism does not mean that instantly, all at once, criticism of the regime becomes impossible. Rather, a fascist regime is one that believes that contrary opinion is fundamentally illegitimate, and which uses its power and resources to reduce the range of acceptable criticism. Trump and MAGA have not succeeded in shutting down all dissent—but, again, Jim Crow and the Nazis didn’t succeed in shutting down all dissent either. Fascists do not need to be all powerful and all effective to be fascists. They just need to be committed to violent authoritarianism—and the commitment means that they tend to close down more and more speech as they consolidate more and more power.

What the fuck, Corey?

These are not particularly complicated or abstruse arguments. You do not need to be a genius or an expert on fascism to understand that fascists do not instantly gain total power; you do not need to be a seer to realize that you want to point out fascist dangers before the fascists have the ability to silence the bulk of criticism. Corey Robin is not a dunce; he has access to the same scholarship I do. So one is forced to ask, what the fuck is his problem?

I’m not a mind reader, so I can’t say for sure. It’s possible that he staked out the “this isn’t fascism” position early on and keeps doubling down because he doesn’t want to be wrong and (even more importantly) doesn’t want his critics to be right. Despite being a scholar, he may have bought into the pop culture Nazi supervillain tropes and so be unable to get his mind around the very banal, petty ways in which real-life fascism manifests. Who knows?

As I did yesterday, though, it’s worth once again underlining that the refusal to name fascism makes it more difficult to fight fascism. Robin authored a viral post that claimed that Trump was not a threat to free speech. That is not just wrong, but dangerous. It is analysis that directly and frighteningly helps Trump consolidate power and undermines the ability of journalists and critics to build solidarity around and awareness of the real dangers they face right now.

It is past time to cut out this vacillating, quisling bullshit. Trump is a fascist; he is trying, to the best of his ability, to install a fascist regime. He may not succeed. But misleading people about the nature of the threat, as Robin is doing, only makes it more likely that he will.