Trump’s Weakness Is Not At Odds With His Fascism

Contra Corey Robin, fascists are often weak and incompetent. Also dangerous.

Yesterday scholar Corey Robin wrote a self-aggrandizing and much-shared Facebook post in which he insisted (as he often has in the past) that Trump is not a fascist. Robin claims he has been validated in this opinion because other commenters like Jamelle Bouie, Rebecca Solnit, and Ezra Klein have pointed out that Trump is not all powerful, and that he has many weaknesses which can and should be exploited.

If this doesn’t make much sense as an argument…well, yeah. I think it’s worth looking at exactly how and why it doesn’t make sense though. Robin’s failure to understand fascism leads to a failure to understand Trump, and from there to a fairly catastrophic misunderstanding of how to resist fascism in general and Trump in particular. When we conflate fascism with strength and competence, we fundamentally misunderstand the dangers we face from an increasingly violent, and increasingly authoritarian regime.

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Fascism doesn’t mean competence

Robin’s Facebook post is more an airing of grievances than a coherent argument. But to the extent he he has a point, it’s in his first and penultimate overly long sentences:

For eight years, every time I've posted about the weaknesses and cracks and crevices in the Trump operation, every time I've suggested that the left has far more options and tools at his disposal than analogies to Nazi Germany or fascist Italy would suggest, every time I've suggested that those analogies were more confusing than they were revealing, every time I've pointed out the failures and missteps of Trump, every time I've showed that he's not in command of the American polity, every time I pointed out how Trump failed to get something through Congress and was forced to rely on executive powers that could be undone by the next person, every time that I've doubted that Trump 2.0 is so much more ready for prime time than Trump 1.0, every time I've insisted that overstating Trump's power is doing the work of fear that Trump wants and needs done, I've been accused of being an apologist, a minimizer, an enabler, complicitous, or worse….

Now that it's become clear that yelling fascism won't make it— whatever "it" is—go away, now that people realize that a constant state of alarm imposes genuine political costs, people are looking for different kinds of analysis that show all the ways in which the familiar tools of politics are the tools we have to fight with, that a lot of the Trump power performance is just that, performance, that a lot of what we consider democracy still exists, and that we're all going to have to look harder at institutions and actions and cracks and crevices—and less to the courts or revelations about Russia and pee (remember that one?) or to the passing street demonstration.

If you peel away the chest thumping, Robins’ argument boils down to this: Trump is incompetent, often weak, and has many vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Therefore, Trump is not a fascist, and calling him a fascist is dangerous, since it makes him seem more powerful than he is. Consequently (the logic here is a little tenuous) we should avoid protests and investigations of election interference, and instead focus on other things, which Robinsdoes not elucidate, but which supposedly will make Trump collapse without (I guess?) any need to use gauche words like “authoritarian” or “evil.”

There are a whole range of problems here, but the main one is that the definition of fascism is not “a political movement of super-competent evil-doers.”

Fascists do not have to be particularly competent, or particularly strong. Often, fascists are neither competent nor powerful! Neo-Nazi Gerald L.K. Smith was a perennial political loser and crank, widely derided as a joke. Holocaust denier David Irving is most famous for being a losing loser who lost his court case denying he was a Holocaust denier. Smith and Irving are life failures—and fascists. There is no contradiction there, because (again), contra Corey Robins’ confused screed, fascists are not defined by hyper-competence.

The Nazis were also often shockingly incompetent. They virtually had to be, because their worldview was based on lies and false conspiracy theories. Hitler really and truly believed that there was a massive Jewish plot against Germany. As a result, he put tons of resources that could have been used to fight his wars into building massive murder factories. He also did things like force all his Jewish nuclear scientists to emigrate. This undermined Germany’s nuclear program, to put it mildly.

If you were Corey Robin and Facebook existed in 1943, you might have logged on to rant about how the Nazi threat was overblown since Hitler was obviously an incompetent clown. And in some sense, you’d be right; Hitler was an incompetent clown. But incompetent clowns can do a lot of damage. The fact that the Holocaust was in many respects a sign of Hitler’s weakness and foolishness isn’t much comfort to the millions of people who died in it.

Incompetence can kill a lot of people

In fact, fascists often do great harm not despite their incompetence, but because of it. As I noted above, fascism is in many respects built on incompetence, in the sense that it is designed around lies and a fundamental disconnect from reality. Here’s Robert O. Paxton’s classic definition of fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. [italics mine]

As you can see, Paxton’s definition argues that at fascism’s core is “obsessive preoccupation” and that fascism is essentially a “cult”. We do not generally think of obsessive cults as bastions of sober efficiency, for the straightforward reason that they are not bastions of sober efficiency. Cults are belief systems detached from reality; they’re also communities that lack accountability. As a result, cult leaders often make hair-brained decisions based on nonsense, and when they do, there is no one who can get them to reconsider. This is a formula for really shitty decision making.

Or, as philosopher Charles Mills explains, the cult of white supremacy, aka fascism, requires “an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions… producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”

Fascists are constitutionally, by design, unable to understand the real world, which means that they do not understand opposing views, and regularly overreach (as Hitler did repeatedly in dealing with German churches…or for that matter in dealing with the US). Since they don’t listen to feedback, and have no mechanisms of accountability, fascist regimes also tend to be extremely chaotic and confused. They prioritize nonsense, underestimate challenges, and generally fuck up with regularity. Hitler’s regime was catastrophic in a huge range of ways, but it was also very much a catastrophe for Germany, which lost a massive war and was partitioned for decades. This would not generally be thought of as a successful outcome.

As another example, consider Cairo, IL. In America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, Elizabeth Hinton chronicles Cairo’s ugly history; the city’s white population reacted to civil rights efforts during the 60s with massive backlash and accelerating violence.

Cairo’s Black residents, like many Black communities across the country, staged a rebellion in 1967, protesting inequality in jobs and schools and demonstrating against withering, constant police harassment and violence. White residents responded by forming white supremacist vigilante committees, partnering with police. In 1969, white vigilantes stood on a levee overlooking Cairo’s Black neighborhood and shooting at pedestrians and into homes. These attacks continued for years, as did intermittent return fire from residents.

White residents believed that violent suppression of Black people would lead to white empowerment and prosperity; they thought that massive shows of force would suppress resistance. But inevitably, the opposite occurred. The escalating violence just sparked more violence. Potential investors were scared away; the town decayed, and kept decaying. “The decision by local authorities to respond to egalitarian demands by shoring up white supremacy—decisions exacerbated by state and federal inaction—killed the city, in the end,” Hinton writes.

It's important to emphasize that this outcome was completely predictable. If you oppress people, they will resist; if you turn your city into a permanent war zone, it will suffer economically. These are not complicated truths.

But Cairo’s white residents could not learn the obvious lessons, because they were committed to a fascist, white supremacist worldview, in which Black people had no rights, and in which Black resistance to oppression was irrational and pathological. Just as Hitler destroyed Germany because he was an incompetent buffoon, so Cairo’s whites razed their own city in the name of lies and nonsense. And just as Trump is trying to rule by executive order because he doesn’t have the skills to craft democratic legislation, so Cairo’s whites picked up guns because they did not have the smarts or the skills to create a truly democratic polity in an egalitarian, healthy city.

Fascism is weak. That’s part of why it’s dangerous.

Fascism is a dialectical response to the mass politics of the left. It’s a politics of reaction and backlash, picked up by elites with their backs to the wall in a last ditch effort to hold onto power and destroy marginalized groups—workers, Black people, women, LGBT people—who appear to be on the verge of seizing some of the privileges they’ve been denied. Fascists cannot compete in a fair democratic contest; they lack the support and the ideas they’d need to win over the masses. So they resort to lies, and they resort to violence.

It's vital to understand that fascism is a movement of the weak. Fascists claim they are strong and unified, but they are in fact desperate and terrified. They are self-deluded, and their plans are confused and self-defeating. They lack the ability to make reasoned judgments; they cannot retreat, because they cannot admit to themselves when they have overreached. These are vulnerabilities that a determined, intelligent opposition can exploit.

But the weakness of fascists doesn’t mean they aren’t fascists. On the contrary, as I hope I’ve shown, weakness and incompetence are core to fascism. Corey Robin says that we shouldn’t call Trump a Nazi because he’s not strong enough or accomplished enough to be a fascist. But framing fascists as strong and accomplished helps fascists. And convincing yourself that Trump isn’t dangerous because he’s weak and incompetent—convincing yourself that he cannot commit a genocide, for example—is a massive error. In Germany, in Cairo, fascist ignorance and weakness can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

Trump has vulnerabilities we can exploit. But we can’t fight him if we refuse to acknowledge what we’re dealing with, or the real danger he represents. Trump is a fascist. That isn’t reason to despair. It’s reason to fight—with legal means, with protests, and yes, by pointing out Trump’s disgusting alliance with Putin, as well as with any and all other available methods. If Corey Robin can’t see that, he should at the very least stop whining and get out of the way.