Robert Paxton on fascism and Trump
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This is a very interesting portrait of Robert Paxton, the great historian of mid-century European politics (His books on Vichy France and the anatomy of fascism are both classics.).
When Trump became president, Paxton didn’t participate in the initial online debates about whether Trump himself was a fascist, or whether Trumpism was a fascist movement, which are two questions that are subtly different from each other, although they’re routinely treated as one and the same. As perhaps the leading English language historian of fascism, Paxton has been understandably hesitant to see the term tossed around so loosely, as it so often has in the post-war era, to mean something like “a political figure or movement I hate.” The ultimate expression of this was Jonah Goldberg’s much-mocked conclusion that the DNC Democrats of the 1990s were fascists. Obviously such a definition robs the term of all possible meaning beyond a term of abuse. (For all the legitimate reasons to loathe Reaganism, claims that Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes were fascists were almost equally absurd.)
All that changed on January 6, 2021. Paxton watched the insurrection at the Capitol with horrified fascination:
Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”
When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
BTW it’s unfortunate that someone of Paxton’s generation (he’s 92) may not have realized that Newsweek is now a shell of its former self: Such an op-ed should have been on the front page of the Times or the Post, assuming the Sulzbergers or Jeff Bezos would allow such a thing, which is increasingly looking like that elusive can opener, but still . . .
The central argument and insight of The Anatomy of Fascism is that fascism is not at all primarily a distinct ideology, in the way that liberalism and conservatism and communism and socialism and (somewhat more controversially) Nazism are distinct ideologies, with relatively coherent central doctrines of various sorts.
“It seems doubtful,” Paxton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1994, “that some common intellectual position can be the defining character of movements that valued action above thought, the instincts of the blood above reason, duty to the community above intellectual freedom, and national particularism above any kind of universal value. Is fascism an ‘ism’ at all?” Fascism, he argued, was propelled more by feelings than ideas.
Paxton’s view has a good deal in common with Umberto Eco’s, who preferred to speak of “fascisms” rather than fascism in the singular, given the inherent eclecticism of fascist movements in different times and places.
“I found it bizarre how every time someone set out to publish a book or write an article about fascism, they began with the program,” Paxton told me when we met again, at Le Monde, a French bistro near the Columbia campus. “The program was usually transactional,” he said over our very French lunch of omelets and frites. “It was there to try to gain followers at a certain period. But it certainly didn’t determine what they did.”
This seems relevant to our current interests.
“Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples,” he wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” In contrast to other “isms,” “the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”
And here we reach what I believe is a key insight from Paxton about the relationship between Trump and Trumpism, meaning the popular movement that made Trump, to at least the extent that Trump himself made that movement.
Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”
Because Trumpism is very much a cult of personality among other things, it’s very easy to lose sight of the extent to which, to borrow terms from historical debates about the Holocaust, a structural rather than an intentionalist interpretation of the Trump era may be warranted: An interpretation in which to a significant extent it is Trumpism that has made Trump, rather than vice versa.
This of course is a rephrasing of the cause versus symptom debate about Trump’s relation to the mass movement he currently more or less controls, but which certainly predates him, and to an unknown extent will certainly survive him.
In any event, Paxton’s views on these matters ought to be treated with the greatest interest and respect, given his immense learning and lifetime he has dedicated to putting that learning to both both intellectual and practical use (His book on Vichy France, which is also discussed at length in the piece, revolutionized understandings of collaboration in France during the war, and is another volume that may soon reward the closest attention in our own present circumstances).