Why Do Portions of the Left Fall for Fascism?

It’s because fascists deliberately set out to co-opt the left.

Donald Trump regularly attacks “Marxist” influence in institutions from the military to higher education. He’s also launched personal, scurrilous, racist attacks on left lawmakers like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is a right-wing authoritarian, and right-wing authoritarians tend to be very bad news for the left.

Given that, you would think that the left would be unified in opposition to Trump. Right?

Unfortunately, that is not exactly right.

Yes, for the most part, progressives and leftists are horrified at the thought of a Trump presidency. But there have also been unsettling Trump-accommodationist gestures from a range of left figures.

Cenk Uygur, co-creator of the progressive media network The Young Turks, declared post-election, that he was “more optimistic now than I was before the election,” and added, “MAGA is not my mortal enemy (and neither is the extreme left). My mortal enemy is the establishment. And they have been defeated.” Democratic legislator Ro Khanna, generally considered a progressive voice in the House, said he was eager to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency to “slash waste.” Left wing leader, Senator Bernie Sanders, praised conspiracy theorist, pro polio partisan and Trump’s HHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming that Kennedy was “exactly correct” in his criticism of big food conglomerates—and wouldn’t say whether he’d vote for Kennedy.

Uygur, Khanna, Sanders, and other more openly Trump curious figures like Glenn Greenwald don’t necessarily all have the same motives. Uygur is positioning himself to rake in anti establishment dollars from a potential right wing fanbase; Khanna represents a tech heavy district and kissing up to Musk is a good way to appeal to his donors. And you could of course argue about whether this person (Matt Taibbi?) or that person is really a leftist.

But the main question remains; Trump has made it clear he will target, and wants to harm, people on the left. Why don’t people on the broad left respond with consistent, uniform opposition?

In part, the incentives here are the same as the incentives which lead people on the center or right to lick Trump’s orange shoes; Trump has power, and there’s always an incentive to propitiate those with power. (See billionaires rushing to donate to Trump’s inauguration.)

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Mass politics in service of the right

But fascists also specifically try to coopt the left by adopting progressive anti-establishment energy and antiestablishment critique.

This is very much a deliberate tactic. Robert O. Paxton, the most influential contemporary analyst of fascism, argues that fascism was “a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics”—which is to say, it was a dialectical response to communism and socialism, which built their legitimacy on an appeal to the masses. Alexander Reid Ross, in his book Against the Fascist Creep, elaborates on this point:

fascism creeps [into left spaces] in two ways: (1) it draws left-wing notions of solidarity and liberation into ultranationalist, right-wing ideology; and (2), at least in its early stages, fascists often utilize “broad front” strategies, proposing a mass-based, nationalist platform to gain access to mainstream political audiences and key administrative positions.

As one example, the term “Nazi” is a shortened form for “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Because the Nazis had “socialist” in their name, right wing bad faith buttheads will sometimes argue that Hitler was left wing.

But as Britannica editor Michael Ray explains, this is nonsense. Hitler hated the left, which he thought was a Jewish conspiracy. But he also envied the left’s ability to mobilize mass enthusiasm. So he allowed Otto and Gregor Strasser “to grow the party by tying Hitler’s racist nationalism to socialist rhetoric that appealed to the suffering lower middle classes.”

The use of this rhetoric was a strategic deception; ie, a lie. But it was a useful lie, which helped Hitler make inroads with working people—or with people who liked the idea of appealing to working people.

Trump lies in order to appeal to the left

Like Hitler, Trump very deliberately uses populist rhetoric to try to appeal to people on the left and to generally legitimize himself. For example, he’s positioned himself as anti-war by criticizing old guard Republicans like George W. Bush (even though Trump himself initially supported the Iraq war,) and by criticizing US aid to Ukraine (but not the Russian invasion that started the war, because Trump approves of fascist imperial invasions.)

During his presidency, Trump gleefully escalated the drone war, pardoned war criminals, assassinated an Iranian general, and seized Syrian oil deposits. He’s also said that for his second term he wants to invade Mexico. But his vague antiwar bluster has fooled leftists like Christian Parenti—or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that some leftists are eager to fool themselves, because they think that an anti-establishment red-brown alliance will serve their goals. Either way, Trump (and/or his advisors) very deliberately lies about his anti war commitments in order to get people like Christian Parenti and Glenn Greenwald to legitimize him.

Similarly, Trump positions himself as a scourge of elites and an opponent of the establishment, even though he’s a real estate heir and reality tv star backed by tech billionaires. You’d think astute political commenters would see through this nonsensical charade. And yet, again, Cenk Uygur fell for the pretense with flatulent credulity. So did Bernie Sanders, who was eager to show he is down with RFK’s boilerplate anti corporate rhetoric, even though the “establishment” that RFK loathes includes the regulatory regime which very reasonably pasteurizes milk and puts fluoride in water. It’s like the words “the establishment is bad” just short-circuits (some) leftist brains, leaving them unable to push back against even transparent fascist lies.

Of course, the issue isn’t really a failure of intelligence. The problem for politicians on the left is that fascists deliberately adopt and repurpose left talking points, arguments, and calls to solidarity. Particularly for leftists who feel alienated from the establishment or from mainstream politics, hearing those talking points uttered by a major political figure can seem exciting. It can feel like an opportunity which they can’t pass up.

The left, after all, does not want to be outflanked; just as fascists look at left power with envy, so the left can sometimes wish they had the electoral oomph, and fanatic enthusiasm, of MAGA. Brownshirts think, “we can co-opt this left energy for ourselves.” And like a mirror image, the left thinks, “we can co-opt this fascist energy for ourselves.”

This never works for the left though. That’s because the left actually believes in things and has a real material program it wants to pass. In contrast, fascists have no commitment to truth or to any real program but hate and death. That makes it a lot easier for fascists to lie, and a lot easier for them to just jettison (and often murder) left “allies” when it’s convenient.

Fascism was designed to steal left energy and it’s good at it; in contrast, left efforts to steal fascist power are cobbled together and mostly subverted before they begin. A left without antifascism is a left that is useless, and worse than useless.

It's not a horseshoe

Liberals and centrists like to argue that the appeal of fascism to (some) leftists is a sign that the far left and the far right are parallel movements, linked by extremism and violence.

But viewing red brown crossover as a kind of inevitable or formal congruence is misleading and I think dangerous. To the extent that some on the left are fooled into making common cause with fascists, it’s because fascists deliberately work to fool them. And if fascists can lie and fool (some on the) left, then they can fool others, too.

Trump doesn’t just lie to appeal to the left. He lies about how tariffs work. He lies about being a Christian. He lies about his commitment to the rule of law. He lies about immigrant crime; he lies about trans health care. And on and on. Deliberately lying in order to get people on your side is a consistent, and successful, fascist tactic.

Fascist falsehoods tend to disarm people of all ideological stripes, since the public sphere in a democracy is built on the extension of at least minimal good faith to one’s interlocutors. People want to believe that fascists are reasonable and can be bargained with, and/or they think that they will gain some advantage by arguing that fascists are reasonable and can be bargained with.

Fascists know this and take advantage of it. But the truth is that there is no truth in fascists; there is only lust for power, corruption, and violence. No one should be apologizing for fascists, or cosigning them, or trying to find common ground—least of all a left which fascists are determined to destroy.