Trump cannot be a fascist

Spectator

11 hours ago

The global left and their many friends in the media are insisting with increasing hysteria that Donald Trump is imposing fascism on America. Their apocalyptical narrative is as simple as it is false: President Trump has begun the transformation of the USA into a fascist state. But the feverish intensity with which this tall story is told cannot conceal its mendacity.
Trump has not, as fascists do, created blackshirt hit squads to terrorise and torture opponents, nor courts to jail them without just cause. And no rational observer believes his aim is to replace political parties with a one-party cult, or democracy with dictatorship. But above all, perhaps, the story is false because, regardless of what you were taught, and are told, fascism is a far-left, not far-right, phenomenon.
Whatever else he may be, the Donald is not left-wing, unless you count his mission to protect the American working class from the negative aspects of globalisation. But for the left and their intellectual minders in command of the citadels of our culture, only their truth counts.
Yet the 'proof' they offer of Trump's alleged fascism is risible. It includes his highly popular crackdown on illegal immigrants and his recent deployment of troops in Los Angeles after days of often riotous demos against that crackdown.
It even includes his decision to hold a military parade in Washington DC on 14th June to mark the US army's 250th anniversary, and his 79th birthday. This, apparently, was a provocative display of – to use a new left-wing buzz-word – his 'militarisation' of America.
To ram home the point, there were anti-Trump demos across America 'in defence of democracy' to coincide with the parade. As one protester explained to CBS: 'We need to show there are more Americans fighting this fascism than supporting it.'
Progressive intellectuals, meanwhile, queue up to leap on board the Trump's-a-fascist bandwagon.
They include the left-wing playwright, Sir David Hare, who in his Spectator diary earlier this month produced a list of the '16 principal characteristics of fascism', so vague as to be meaningless. And he used the word 'fascism' to lump together Italian fascism and its hybrid German offspring, Nazism, despite one glaring difference between the two: for many years, there was nothing anti-Semitic about Italian fascism until its inventor Benito Mussolini's fatal military alliance with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.
Between 1922 when Mussolini came to power and 1938 when he introduced anti-Semitic laws, fascism did not persecute Italy's 50,000 Jews. Many Italian Jews were fascists, as was Mussolini's main mistress for most of that period, Margherita Sarfatti.
Even afterwards, fascist anti-Semitism, however shameful, was only ever half-hearted. Relatively very few Jews (8,000) were deported from fascist Italy to the Nazi death camps. Indeed, in Italian-occupied south east France, fascist officers and officials saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy France.
So it is not true, as Sir David claims, that if the Nazi genocide can be denied by apologists then 'fascism could be rehabilitated'. For a simple reason: whereas Nazism was intrinsically anti-Semitic, and only the demented can deny its responsibility for the Holocaust, fascism was not necessarily. But this does not rehabilitate it as it was reprehensible. for all sorts of other reasons.
As for Trump, he is not anti-Semitic at all, unlike so many of his left-wing opponents.
As for Trump, he is not anti-Semitic at all, unlike so many of his left-wing opponents
Sir David's 16 characteristics of fascism which include 'attacks' and 'assaults' on the media, cultural institutions, higher education and universities, could just as easily be applied to any dictatorship left or right. They also include 'obsession' with higher birth rates and 'elevation' of the heterosexual family, but these are just as characteristic of Catholicism and communism as they are of fascism. Number 11, 'extreme nationalism', might seem to the untrained eye to be a characteristic of fascism but as George Orwell, a left-wing patriot who despised communists, especially middle-class English ones, pointed out in his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, Soviet Russia was as nationalist as any fascist regime. As for number 15, 'persecution of particular racial groups': which dictatorship isn't guilty of that?
Yet during the often violent recent LA protests, California's Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom called Trump 'a dictator' on X, and announced ominously in a state television address: 'Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.'
Yet most Americans appear to support both Trump's sealing of the southern border which has virtually stopped illegal immigrant arrivals and his tough deportation programme.
More than half (54 per cent) of Americans approve the deportations, according to a CBS/YouGov poll this month. And nearly all (97 per cent), in a poll by Pew Research Centre in March, support the deportation of illegal immigrants who have also committed violent crimes, and 44 per cent even support the deportation of illegal immigrants who arrived during the four years of the Joe Biden Presidency – believed to total a staggering 10 million people.
That a clear majority vote for a political leader, as they did for Trump, and then approve what he is doing, does not entirely absolve him – or them – of being a fascist. But a determination to defend the borders of one's country surely must. To do so is not an act of fascism, as the left wants us to believe, but instead both the common sensical and the patriotic thing to do. Patriotism is the antithesis of fascism, unlike nationalism. Whereas a patriot wants to defend his country, culture and way of life, a nationalist wants to impose them.
But unfortunately for the left, not even nationalism is the exclusive property of the right.
It is ridiculous, as the global left keeps on doing, thanks to its ignorance and dishonesty, to try and brainwash us into thinking that the founder of MAGA, Donald Trump, is a reincarnation – in a red baseball cap, instead of a black fez – of the inventor of fascism, Benito Mussolini.
Fascism was one side of the left-wing revolutionary coin; communism the other.
The cult of woke which – unelected – has taken command of the vital organs of our society and culture is much more reminiscent of fascism than democratically elected Trump who epitomises the spirit of free enterprise.
A quick look at Italian fascism and what it actually was, shows just how ridiculous it is to call Trump a fascist.
Mussolini, the rising star of revolutionary socialism in Italy and editor of its party newspaper Avanti!, founded the fascist movement in 1919 as a left-wing revolutionary alternative to socialism. The first world war had forced him to accept that people are more loyal to country than class. He thus replaced the sacred Marxist creed of international socialism with national socialism which he called fascism.
While the fascists did not abolish private property, they did set up the Corporate State – the so-called Third Way – by which the State jointly managed each major sector of the economy. The fascist class war was not between rich and poor but parasites and producers.
The fascist state dominates the life of the individual both at work and outside
Mussolini desired a totalitarian dictatorship with everything inside the state – nothing outside – not even the minds of the masses.
To make this work, fascism had to become a religious cult complete with a nationwide congregation of the faithful, and led by the Duce, who would be, if not its Messiah, at least its Pope.
Faith was Mussolini's watchword, and his bible was La Psychologie des Foules by Gustave Le Bon rather than Marx's Communist Manifesto. The 20th century would be the era of the crowd, wrote Le Bon, the sub-conscious crowd, irrational and tyrannical but impotent, unless led by a charismatic dictator in whom it had faith.
The 1932 Dottrina del Fascismo, the nearest thing to a fascist manifesto, says: 'The fascist conception of life is a religious one' that aims to create 'a spiritual society'. Fascism 'accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the state.' The state is 'all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist… Thus understood, fascism, is totalitarian.'
In each town, the fascists built the party headquarters in the main piazza, complete with a belltower to summon the faithful, often opposite a real church – and always uneasily. Despite making temporal peace with the Vatican in 1929, fascism remained a rival of the Catholic Church in the battle for control of the minds, if not the souls, of Italians. But the Duce was not Jesus, nor even Pope.
All this made fascism completely different from the Anglo-American, conservative 'bourgeois' right of which Trump is a part. As did its credo that the state is the solution, not the problem, whereas for conservatives the opposite is the case. The fascist state dominates the life of the individual both at work and outside.
In the end, Mussolini helped cause catastrophic damage to Italy and Europe. But throughout the 1920s, and much of the 1930s, fascism was hugely admired across the political divide, even by legendary left-wing icons such as Mahatma Gandhi and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But the communist left and their fellow travellers in the West became desperate to distance themselves from their fascist sibling, especially after the devastation of the second world war, above all caused by the Nazi version of fascism.
Their relentless propaganda successfully branded fascism as the paid creature and agent of capitalism – and thus 'far right'. In reality, it never was.
To the bitter end, Mussolini remained a socialist at heart. He even called the puppet regime the Germans allowed him to run in the north of Italy from 1943-45 the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.
In April 1945, when communist partisans executed him and his mistress Clara Petacci after their capture at Lake Como, those with him included his old friend Nicola Bombacci, a founder of the Italian communist party and once a member of the Soviet Comintern, who had become his closest adviser. Bombacci's last words before a firing squad shot him dead by the lake were: 'Viva Mussolini! Viva il socialismo!'
I'd love to ask Trump's accusers: 'Given the facts, how can you sit there and tell us the Donald is the Duce, let alone the Führer? Surely you on left are a far closer fit, aren't you?'