[ The president made waves when he referred to the Trump-drunk GOP
as “semi-fascist.” Republicans have earned it—and more.]
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IT MATTERS THAT JOE BIDEN USED THE F-WORD  
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Matt Ford
August 29, 2022
The New Republic
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_ The president made waves when he referred to the Trump-drunk GOP as
“semi-fascist.” Republicans have earned it—and more. _

American fascism: Reading the signs of the times, American fascism:
Reading the signs of the times

 

President Joe Biden has caused a minor stir over the past few days
after he described former President Donald Trump’s political
movement as “semi-fascism
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Though plenty of people have described Trump and Trumpism in similar
terms over the past six years, whether pejoratively or analytically
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it was the first time that Biden or someone of his stature has done
so.

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and
economic security,” Biden told supporters
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a speech in Rockville, Maryland, on August 25. “They’re a threat
to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people.
They embrace—embrace—political violence. They don’t believe in
democracy.” He went on to say that the issue was “not just Trump,
it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say
something—it’s like semi-fascism.”

Biden’s use of the appellation drew some predictable outrage from
the right, though not as much as you might expect for one of the most
damning claims that can be made about someone in Western political
discourse. “[To] effectively call half of America semi-fascist,
because he’s trying to stir up controversy, he’s trying to stir up
this anti-Republican sentiment right before the election, it’s
just—it’s horribly inappropriate,” New Hampshire Governor Chris
Sununu, a Republican, claimed on Sunday
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appearing on CNN’s _State of the Union._ “It’s insulting. And
people should be insulted by it. And he should apologize.”

Apologize for what? Not only was Biden correct, but it would be hard
to find a Democratic leader more sympathetic to the Republican Party
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Joe Biden. His presidential candidacy was premised, in part, on the
idea that he alone could bind the nation’s partisan wounds. He
pledged bipartisanship, praised
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Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and reminisced about his
time working alongside segregationists
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the Senate. Those on the right who would deny the label should
probably reflect on why Biden reached for it in the first place.

Historians and political scientists have drained oceans of ink while
trying to define which political figures and movements were fascist.
In many academic cases, the term is used extremely narrowly. There are
unambiguous examples like Benito Mussolini’s Italy—which literally
had a governing body named the Grand Council of Fascism—and Adolf
Hitler’s Germany. And then there are those dictators that historians
see as straddling the line between fascism and conservative
authoritarianism, including Spain’s Francisco Franco, Portugal’s
Antonio Salazar, and other Europeans who rose to power between the
world wars.

I do not hope to provide a comprehensive scheme for discerning
fascists from nonfascists. Fascism, after all, is not merely a
political program. In more modern language, fascism is also a vibe. It
is ultranationalistic in nature, with adherents fantasizing about the
return to a national idyll that supposedly existed in the hazy recent
past. Responsibility for deviations from that ideal are usually
attributed to ethnic, religious, and sexual minority groups. Upon them
are heaped the blame for the nation’s supposed moral, cultural,
political, and economic decay.

Trump, for his part, inaugurated his presidential campaign in 2015 by
describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and vowing to build a wall to
keep them out. He insisted that a Chicago-born federal judge could not
fairly oversee a lawsuit against him because the judge’s parents
were born in Mexico. He began his presidency by trying to fulfill a
campaign pledge for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim
immigration into the United States. He told four Democratic women
lawmakers of color that they should
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back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from
which they came.” His administration repeatedly sought to deny civil
rights protections to LGBTQ Americans.

If bigotry were the only salient feature of fascism, of course, then
it would be a superfluous term. Historical fascists also argue that
the problems they identify cannot be solved through the usual
political means. Fascists typically regard their country’s
democratic mechanisms as insufficient to the crises and enemies that
they perceive around them. They view parliamentary government as part
of the national decline and therefore regard it as an obstacle to be
overcome rather than as a legitimate means to exercise power. That
power should instead be wielded by a great leader, someone in whom the
state can invest all of its authority to responsibly guide the
national rebirth.

Trump does not believe in American democracy or support its continued
existence. He routinely describes American elections as illegitimate
and corrupt when he loses or thinks he is about to lose them. When
Mitt Romney lost in 2012, he tweeted
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“Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice!
The world is laughing at us.” In 2016, he pledged to jail his
opponent, Hillary Clinton, and led “Lock her up” chants at
rallies. When he lost his reelection bid in 2020, he orchestrated a
two-month campaign to overturn the results by pressuring local
officials and mounting bogus legal challenges. Those efforts
culminated in January 6, 2021, when he incited a mob
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attack Congress and disrupt the counting of electoral votes in a bid
to stay in power illegally.

There are disturbing echoes of January 6 in the histories of fascist
movements. The seminal moment in Mussolini’s was his march on Rome
in 1922, which was orchestrated as an insurrection but instead
ultimately led the Italian regime to peacefully name Mussolini as
prime minister. Other fascist movements tried similar measures with
less success: Adolf Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch the following
year was consciously modeled on Mussolini’s seizure of power, while
the Irish government cracked down
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the Blueshirts’ attempt to march on Dublin in 1936. Those incidents
reflected, among other things, fascism’s willingness not only to
legitimize political violence as a means to an end but also to glorify
its use.

I have written
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Trump and Trumpism’s embrace of political violence, so I will not
repeat myself ad nauseam here. But suffice it to say that it has
always been at the core of Trump’s political ideology. I think often
about a series of tweets
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fired off on one election night. “This election is a total sham and
a travesty. We are not a democracy!” he wrote in one tweet. “We
can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this
travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” he claimed in another.
Trump even called for a “revolution” to stop the perceived
injustice that he saw unfolding before his eyes: Mitt Romney’s loss
to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Biden’s use of “semi-fascism” to describe Trumpism is apt on two
levels. For one, it avoids the nitpicking and incongruities that come
with comparing one political movement to another across time and
space. Like fascist and other semi-fascist leaders before him, Trump
claims to be a champion of the working class while also fiercely
opposing labor unions and what passes for socialism in the American
political landscape. But Trumpism does not have the irredentist
fantasies that formed the molten core of German and Italian fascism.
Trump himself also lacks the coherence and vision to articulate a
genuine policy agenda; his administration was often no different than
it would have been under a President McCain or a President Romney.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, describing Trumpism as
“semi-fascism” fits within Biden’s career-long desire to work
across the aisle with relatively moderate conservatives. Contra
Sununu, he was careful not to describe all Republicans as
semi-fascists, just the “MAGA Republicans” who loyally carry out
Trump’s agenda. That would not extend to Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney
or other perceived apostates from the Trumpist faith. Nor would it
apply to the Republican governors of otherwise blue states like Larry
Hogan in Maryland and Charlie Baker in Massachusetts. If Sununu does
not like the label “semi-fascist,” he should reflect on why an
accurate description of his party’s leader makes him so
uncomfortable.

_[MATT FORD is a staff writer at The New Republic. Matt Ford
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* Fascism
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* Semi-Fascist
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* Donald Trump
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* Trumpism
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* GOP
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* MAGA
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* Republican Party
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* Racist
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* 2022 Elections
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* Jan. 06
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* Capitol coup
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* Insurrection
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* obstruction of justice
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