Never having lived under a dictatorship, Americans have difficulty recognizing Donald Trump’s fascism, although some polling suggests that the argument is gaining traction. But his perversion of democracy is recognizable to students of dictatorships because it follows a script that fascists use to manipulate democracy and destroy it.
Most Adolf Hitler analogies are rightly suspect since der Führer was sui generis, akin to monsters like Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin, but in a league of his own. However, in one crucial respect, a Trump-Hitler analogy is not hyperbolic or overwrought. Each man’s rise was accommodated by traditional conservatives who loathed him but ultimately decided to work with him and harness the fanatical energy of his supporters to hold on to power.
Germany felt at the mercy of a hostile world after its defeat in World War I. In response, the ragtag Nazis positioned themselves as nationalists and anti-globalists and, at first, sought power through a coup d’etat, the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 that led to Hitler’s imprisonment, where he wrote Mein Kampf and realized that his party could only successfully pursue power through the ballot box, albeit with an assist from thus like the SA, or Brownshirts. Less than 10 years later, he was the nation’s leader, a position he would never have secured without Germany’s conservative elites.
Most of those at the pinnacle of German society before World War I felt stifled under the Weimar Republic, the democracy established following the country’s defeat, especially its military commanders and business leaders. They had thrived under the Kaiser but were infuriated by an elected parliament that would not support the military budgets that generals and admirals deemed essential and the cultural flowering of the era—Berthold Brecht, jazz, Dada, and more.
The conservative elites knew that the German electorate would never agree to an agenda of military spending and economic deregulation, so they turned to authoritarianism. The total war mobilization of World War I had taught them that even an authoritarian government needs substantial popular support, if only from a sizeable minority. Street brawling or dimwitted coup attempts alone could never win such support. But Hitler’s movement—crude and radical, and at least rhetorically willing to put the socialist in national socialism—had what was needed. It was nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-communist, and pro-military. It offered a means of ascent, if not restoration, for the conservative establishment.
Hitler needed the establishment to open the doors to power. The establishment needed Hitler for mass support.
Old-school conservatives were confident they could control the upstart Hitler in any coalition government. “We have hired him,” said Franz von Papen, the aristocratic former cavalry officer installed as Vice Chancellor to keep an eye on the little Austrian after the country’s octogenarian president, Paul von Hindenburg, blessed a Hitler-led coalition government in 1933. “Within six weeks we will have pushed him so far into a corner he will squeak.”
Papen had been a minor figure in politics until he was maneuvered into the chancellorship for a brief time in 1932, a back-bench member of the Prussian state parliament for Germany’s Catholic Center Party and an owner of the Center’s leading newspaper, Germania. As a military attaché in the United States during World War I, he had arranged more-or-less incompetent sabotage attempts and gotten himself declared kicked out of the country persona non grata. Back home, Von Papen played the most extensive role in the conservative establishment’s courting of Hitler. Despite his essential role in Hitler’s becoming chancellor, Von Papen’s aristocratic confidence and spending much of the war in diplomatic posts carried him to an acquittal by the international tribunal at Nuremberg and a shortened sentence by a post-war German court. Until his peaceful death in 1969, the Prussian nobleman insisted that he had not been central to Hitler’s rise.
In 1933, Von Papen’s complacency about a Hitler government was widely shared. When the blustery failed artist was placed in office, right and left alike expected Hitler’s tenure to be short. The German Communist Party (KPD) came up with a slogan: “After Hitler, Our Turn.” A radical left Berlin carpenter named Max Fürst—who was also Jewish—thought that whatever Hitler did, his administration couldn’t possibly be worse than Papen’s. Fürst would survive Hitler and the concentration camp at Oranienburg, north of Berlin.
Just like the German elite, America’s establishment at first opposed Trump as he sought the White House in 2016 and then came to embrace him, watching him exploit social resentments and then sit back while those resentments fed what would become MAGA.
And like the Germans, we have prominent, tone-setting figures who are blithely complacent about the clear and present danger posed by Trump.
In a recent interview with NPR, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn said that he did not see it as his paper’s “proper role” to be “a full-throated supporter of the view” that “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our society.” “A lot of people around the country hear things from Donald Trump that they like,” Kahn explained, and “he speaks for some of the frustrations and grievances in American life. And we feel we need to reflect those as well because we need to provide a full, fair, and complete picture of the country and its voters.”
We have historical terms for people who have been fair and balanced about fascism. None of them are flattering.
Fascists and other authoritarians, the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out, dupe their followers with the myth that strongman rule is more efficient than democracy and better for economic growth and national unity. But this is always a lie since its cronies, absence of the rule of law, and transparency might be able to deliver up wartime armaments, but it’s barren soil for the freedom that peacetime prosperity requires. Their regimes devour those who ushered them to power in the first place. By 1945, Germany’s graveyards were full of military heroes and titans of industry who thought Hitler could make Germany great again.
The incompetence of authoritarianism should make no one complacent about its rise. There is another historical lesson, however, which should make today’s advocates of democracy and pluralism both hopeful and determined.
Fascism is a backlash against democratization, pluralism, and cultural progress.
Its vicious intensity is a tribute to democracy’s strength.
A broad coalition could have easily stopped Hitler. A cordon sanitaire, a refusal to bring him into any government, would have prevented Hitler from becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then, within a matter of months, becoming a dictator. A few years later, such a “Popular Front” was successful in France. In Great Britain, political extremists,” both right and left, were frozen out of power by a similar coalition, the “National Government,” which reached from Labour to Conservatives and held office from 1931 to 1940.
There are signs that this is happening now in the United States. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “The Squad” have resisted the third-party temptation and are enthusiastically on board with the Kamala Harris campaign, as are many conservatives, most notably Liz Cheney, the former House Republican Conference chair.
But ominous signs remain of our establishment’s willingness to court a radical. Somewhat overlooked in the flap over the Washington Post non-endorsement was that Donald Trump met with executives of Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, the same day it leaked that the post would not endorse a presidential candidate. Like American political conservatism, much of American business seems to be in thrall with Donald Trump, unlike in 2016 or 2020. See his growing support in the tech and financial sectors. Whatever happens in next week’s election, there will be very few “traditional” Republicans in Congress and certainly none in a restored Trump administration. Without a constitutional conservative party unwilling to succumb to authoritarian impulses, the outlook for American democracy will remain cloudy.
