This is brief highlights of a very long detailed historical article. The basic point is Europe has a long history of knowing what fascism is such as under Hitler. But the US may not be recognizing it with Trump, since the US has no historical prospective:.
Financial Times Highlights
If the US was once a beacon of liberty and hope to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (in the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty), does the 2024 election imply that a different, perhaps more authoritarian future lies ahead for everyone?
The analogy of choice these days is fascism, not surprisingly perhaps in an era of strongmen in countries such as India, Russia, Turkey and Hungary.
Moreover, Europe’s interwar drift to the authoritarian right threw up not only fascists such as Hitler and Mussolini but other kinds of dictators too: ex-military men, clerics, professors and even kings. All of them opposed liberal democracy but not all were fascist. Some lasted decades, others only months. What their contemporaries asked was not who fitted some textbook definition of fascism but why democracy was in crisis and whether the institutions they had inherited were capable of withstanding the strain.
To assess what the 2024 US election means requires fewer historical analogies or general observations about fascism, and more attentiveness to the specificities of the American political experience, distinctive in crucial ways that help us understand both why the election this month turned out the way it did, and why this is not necessarily the path that others will follow.
It is telling, for instance, that fascism itself does not seem to have mattered very much to Trump’s voters. Not because they liked the idea but because it did not really register. Some have argued in the election’s aftermath that claiming that Trump is a fascist came across to many people as extreme and implausible, and perhaps damaged the Democrats because they suggested voters did not know what they were voting for. For the election was not generally felt to be a referendum on the events of January 6 2021, despite occasional efforts to present it as such, and if Democratic invocations of fascism in the run-up to voting functioned as a kind of warning, it was one that many Americans ignored. In the end, the health of the constitution turned out to matter less than the pocketbook issues they were really concerned about.
This should not have come as a surprise since most people in the US know little about Europe’s violent mid-century. The one historical event they are likely to recognize is the Holocaust, which they associate not with fascism in general but with Hitler, the Nazis and the mass murder of Jews. Since next to no one seriously expects a repeat under President Trump, the impact on voting patterns was small. And because the Holocaust is frequently presented in terms of extreme antisemitism and not racial prejudice in general, it does not offer most Americans an opening to larger questions of scapegoating, anti-migrant sentiment or political violence.
There is a significant divergence here with Europe. Unlike the US, most European nations have had direct experience in living memory of warfare, coups, juntas or forcible seizures of power that have helped forge a consciousness of the fragility of democracy.
In the US, this kind of historical legacy does not exist. The critical consequence of this divergence in historical experiences and memory is political polarization, perhaps the key difference now between the US and other democracies around the world. Although electorates have swung to the right in many parts of Europe in recent years, and although the centre-left is suffering from fragmentation, Europe has not become divided to the same degree as in America.
In short, historical memories that serve to buttress democracy elsewhere are lacking in the US today, while the forces of polarization are unchecked.
The world’s view of the US will probably have been altered forever in this election.
Decades of international leadership have left it relatively little touched by the wars and conflicts that have raged around the world. Fascism may not be what awaits it, because fascism was a product of European circumstances in a now bygone era of history. But fascism is not the only test and the sooner this is understood, the better we will be able to orient ourselves in the uncharted territory that lies ahead.
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What is Fascism that the US seems headed for under Trump?
Fascism emerged as a political movement in twentieth century Europe when Benito Mussolini founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in Italy in 1919. Germany embraced fascism more than any other country. The Nazi government that ruled under Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1945 was a fascist government.
Financial Times Highlights
If the US was once a beacon of liberty and hope to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (in the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty), does the 2024 election imply that a different, perhaps more authoritarian future lies ahead for everyone?
The analogy of choice these days is fascism, not surprisingly perhaps in an era of strongmen in countries such as India, Russia, Turkey and Hungary.
Moreover, Europe’s interwar drift to the authoritarian right threw up not only fascists such as Hitler and Mussolini but other kinds of dictators too: ex-military men, clerics, professors and even kings. All of them opposed liberal democracy but not all were fascist. Some lasted decades, others only months. What their contemporaries asked was not who fitted some textbook definition of fascism but why democracy was in crisis and whether the institutions they had inherited were capable of withstanding the strain.
To assess what the 2024 US election means requires fewer historical analogies or general observations about fascism, and more attentiveness to the specificities of the American political experience, distinctive in crucial ways that help us understand both why the election this month turned out the way it did, and why this is not necessarily the path that others will follow.
It is telling, for instance, that fascism itself does not seem to have mattered very much to Trump’s voters. Not because they liked the idea but because it did not really register. Some have argued in the election’s aftermath that claiming that Trump is a fascist came across to many people as extreme and implausible, and perhaps damaged the Democrats because they suggested voters did not know what they were voting for. For the election was not generally felt to be a referendum on the events of January 6 2021, despite occasional efforts to present it as such, and if Democratic invocations of fascism in the run-up to voting functioned as a kind of warning, it was one that many Americans ignored. In the end, the health of the constitution turned out to matter less than the pocketbook issues they were really concerned about.
This should not have come as a surprise since most people in the US know little about Europe’s violent mid-century. The one historical event they are likely to recognize is the Holocaust, which they associate not with fascism in general but with Hitler, the Nazis and the mass murder of Jews. Since next to no one seriously expects a repeat under President Trump, the impact on voting patterns was small. And because the Holocaust is frequently presented in terms of extreme antisemitism and not racial prejudice in general, it does not offer most Americans an opening to larger questions of scapegoating, anti-migrant sentiment or political violence.
There is a significant divergence here with Europe. Unlike the US, most European nations have had direct experience in living memory of warfare, coups, juntas or forcible seizures of power that have helped forge a consciousness of the fragility of democracy.
In the US, this kind of historical legacy does not exist. The critical consequence of this divergence in historical experiences and memory is political polarization, perhaps the key difference now between the US and other democracies around the world. Although electorates have swung to the right in many parts of Europe in recent years, and although the centre-left is suffering from fragmentation, Europe has not become divided to the same degree as in America.
In short, historical memories that serve to buttress democracy elsewhere are lacking in the US today, while the forces of polarization are unchecked.
The world’s view of the US will probably have been altered forever in this election.
Decades of international leadership have left it relatively little touched by the wars and conflicts that have raged around the world. Fascism may not be what awaits it, because fascism was a product of European circumstances in a now bygone era of history. But fascism is not the only test and the sooner this is understood, the better we will be able to orient ourselves in the uncharted territory that lies ahead.
==================================
What is Fascism that the US seems headed for under Trump?
Fascism emerged as a political movement in twentieth century Europe when Benito Mussolini founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in Italy in 1919. Germany embraced fascism more than any other country. The Nazi government that ruled under Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1945 was a fascist government.
