The Authoritarian Disposition
Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism
November 15, 2023
In This Feature
The multifaceted crisis of world capitalism has endured for too long for anyone to still be surprised at the fertility of this moment for the far right and its fascist periphery.11. Thanks to Peter Drucker and Adam Hanieh for insightful commentary on an earlier draft of this article. That the fascists haven’t yet moved from side stage to main stage has everything to do with the Left’s inability to mount a plausible anticapitalist exit to the crisis. Our political moment is hardly characterized by existential threats to the ruling class. Nonetheless, the persistence of interlocking crises will continue to inspire a variety of reactionary visions of order, including that of fascism and the far right, both of which are now part of the political landscape in many places.
The world scenario over recent decades has functioned as a sort of ingenious incubator for political reaction and right-wing conspiracy. The 2008 financial crisis ushered in a long period of economic stagnation and instability. The lockdowns and mass death provoked by the Covid–19 pandemic have further destabilized the global order. Nowhere has the anticapitalist left connected to mass movements, nor has it offered a comprehensive worldview that might explain how we got here or provide solutions to the conundrums facing humanity. Two decades of the War on Terror and state-sanctioned Islamophobia have bled into intensifying geopolitical rivalries. Ecological catastrophe haunts the headlines of most morning newspapers. Gone is the liberal triumphalism birthed by the end of the Cold War.
The renewed strength of the far right and fascists poses a very serious and immediate threat to queer and trans communities, Muslims, immigrants, and the Left, all of whom have been on the receiving end of their violent rage. The norms and institutions of representative governance and liberal rights are under increasing pressure from the extreme right. Liberal rule has been destabilized.
The renewal of the far right and fascism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It represents one minority component of a broader array of antidemocratic and reactionary forces seeking to reassert class rule and privilege, to exit the crises of our times on terms set by capital, to bring a specific kind of order to an increasingly unstable world. Bent on dismantling past social, political, and economic gains of workers and the oppressed, this broader constellation of reaction includes the classical liberal project itself.
Today’s liberals can draw on the deep reservoir of violence and exclusion that their classical project has mobilized over the course of most of capitalist history. There is an authoritarian disposition at the core of capitalism, a tendency integral to its very nature as a system of exploitation, oppression, and alienation. Liberalism, military authoritarianism, and fascism are some of the different political forms that this underlying disposition has assumed in specific historical circumstances. Fascism is a restricted and extreme component of this wider phenomenon.
The Liberal Face
Making too sharp a distinction between liberalism and fascism whitewashes liberal and capitalist history and blunts our ability to make sense of contemporary political developments. Violence, after all, has been a constitutive feature of the capitalist and liberal order on a global scale—the dispossession of peasants and indigenous peoples, colonial plunder, slavery, and brutal working conditions that destroy bodies and minds.
The universalist principles of liberty and equality proclaimed by classical liberal doctrine that supposedly inhere in the person were always accompanied in theory and practice by far-reaching exclusions, reinforced through repression if necessary. The liberal regimes that gradually accompanied the development of capitalism were never intended to extend the full rights of citizenship to peasants, laborers, servants, market women, sailors, sex workers, beggars, paupers, the colonized, and propertyless.
Liberty was instead a rallying call for the propertied, for the defense of capital against the residual feudal threat of monarchs and the nobility, whose exercise of political and economic power, based on birthright and custom, stifled the emergence of a new order rooted in the dynamic imperatives of capital accumulation. Liberty was also invoked against threats to the new order from the “many-headed hydra” below—the growing mass of dispossessed in Europe and the colonies, with no psychological or material investment in the novel system of capital, whose labor the property owners nevertheless were dependent on.22. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2012).
In most capitalist countries of what today is called the Global North, full universal suffrage for white men, which typically preceded full suffrage for white women, was not achieved until into the second and third decades of the twentieth century, long after—in the British case, centuries after—the consolidation of capitalism. Representative governments with full suffrage did not actually constitute more than 50 percent of the world until the 2000s, while the most dynamic capitalist economy of the last quarter century has been China, an obvious reminder of the perfect compatibility of capitalism and authoritarian rule.33. Göran Therborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review I–103 (1977): 3–41; Brian S Roper, The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation (London: Pluto, 2013); Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Until their collapse, the so-called Communist countries influenced the number of nondemocratic regimes in the twentieth century, although they were hardly the only countries without representative government in the post-war era.
From its very origin, there has been a clear antidemocratic disposition in the liberal capitalist social order to reinforce forms of class, racial, gendered and colonial rule, the primary counterweight against which has been struggle from below.44. Richard Saull, “The Origins and Persistence of the Far-Right: Capital, Class and the Pathologies of Liberal Politics,” in The Longue Durée of the Far-Right, ed. Saull et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), 31; Roper, The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation.
The Fascist Face
If an authoritarian ethos exerts a gravitational pull on all capitalist societies, fascism represents an acute manifestation of this dynamic. Fascism should not be seen as a radical departure from some ostensibly “normal” capitalism, but as a distinctive, extreme expression of the same militant defense of property, privilege, and racial order that motivated much of liberal history. It would be deeply misleading to reduce racist brutality, vengeful class warfare on the poor, the conquest of foreign territory by force, and the bloody suppression of dissent to fascism. Fascism, as Ishay Landa argues, “was not an outsider to the liberal, ‘open society,’ but in fact an intimate insider to that society, which was not particularly open, either.”55. Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
Fascist violence, Aimé Césaire insists, was foreshadowed by the nightmare of European colonialism.66. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). “To examine the ideology of the British imperialists,” Landa reminds us, “is to find in it many parallels to the basic tenets of fascist and Nazi ideology.”77. Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer. While the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws were shocking in Europe in the 1930s, their introduction becomes less surprising when it is recalled that the “entire club of colonial powers had already envisaged such laws as normal and natural measures to be taken with regard to the non-European world.”88. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), 54. The Nuremberg Laws were also influenced by American race laws (and, to a lesser degree, the race laws of British and British settler colonial states). Nazi jurists studied American miscegenation and Jim Crow laws carefully and adapted them to Germany, in some cases viewing the American laws as too extreme. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Debates in the Reichstag (German parliament) during Germany’s colonial wars in Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century indicate that already under Kaiser Wilhelm concepts such as “racial warfare,” “extermination,” and “subhumanity” were in regular circulation in Germany, later to be exalted in Nazi propaganda and deed.99. Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 65–66. The connection between German colonialism and the German far right is also discussed in Robert Heynen, “The German Revolution and the Radical Right,” in The German Revolution and Political Theory, ed. Gaard Kets and James Muldoon (Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 45–68. If the Nazi violence of the Final Solution was unique in its horror, it was also, as Enzo Traverso argues, a synthesis of various strands of violence in European capitalist history. Pseudoscientific racism, antisemitism, eugenics, colonial massacres, wars of conquest, campaigns of extermination, the impersonal, bureaucratic administration of legal-rational state violence, and the first world war, were common to all European colonial powers and forged the “technological, ideological, and cultural premises for the Final Solution.”1010. Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 151.
It remains necessary to identify what makes fascism fascism in order to clarify the possibility of its re-emergence.
Our emphasis on the continuities between liberal capitalist history and fascism is meant to challenge the mythological treatment of these phenomena as antithetical historical forces, not to diminish the specificity of fascism as an extreme form of authoritarian political power and domination. It remains necessary to identify what makes fascism fascism in order to clarify both its particular historical counterrevolutionary role and character, as well as the possibility of its re-emergence today amidst a wider trend of democratic decline.
On the one hand, there are risks in such an endeavor of rigidly adhering to the historical specificities of the classical inter-war conjuncture of European fascist emergence and consolidation (1922–1939) and, on the other, of stretching its meaning so far as to strain its analytical value. The first risk makes it easy to mistake historically contingent features for essential conditions.1111. For examples of often perceptive analyses that nonetheless fall into this trap, see Achin Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities (London: Verso, 2017); Dylan Riley, “What Is Trump?” New Left Review 114 (2018): 5–31. The second risk makes it difficult to distinguish fascism from other forms of authoritarian rule.1212. For one of the sharper analyses that ultimately falls into the second trap, see Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review, October 27, 2020. From a different theoretical angle, but with a similar methodological limitation, see Richard Seymour, “The Last Thing I’d Ever Do: Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Fascism,” Patreon, May 25, 2018, https://www.patreon.com/posts/last-thing-id-do-19020461.
If fascism as a concept is to retain explanatory coherence and power, its contours cannot be casually redesigned at every historical juncture. It remains necessary to clarify the core constitutive elements of fascism that we would expect to encounter in any new fascist movement, even if their specific manifestations are mediated by the idiosyncrasies of new historical terrain. At the same time, we ought to take seriously Michael Löwy’s and Robert Sayre’s warning against empiricist approaches to contested concepts that tend toward a mere “inventory of features,” fixating on surface appearances, while providing “no overarching theory or explanation of what lies beneath.”1313. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 5.
Following Löwy’s and Sayre’s conceptual methodology, our concept of fascism avoids a vague list of themes or factors; rather, it articulates each element with the others according to a master logic, coming together in a “coherent totality organized around an axis or frame.”1414. Ibid., 18. For such a concept to be coherent it must be able to distinguish between the phenomenon in question and other closely related phenomenon, a coherence that ultimately proves elusive in the case of fascism for Alberto Toscano and Richard Seymour, among many other justified skeptics of mechanical sociological analogies.1515. Ibid., 16. Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism”; Seymour, “The Last Thing I’d Ever Do.”
We argue that fascism is a mass movement rooted in the radicalizing petty bourgeoisie, or middle class, to which the bourgeoisie may appeal in an effort to impose order in the face of a potentially existential crisis. The threat of fascism is co-extensive with capitalism—and not simply one of its stages—because capitalism systematically produces crises that profoundly destabilize the social order and its class relations. The possibility of fascism deepens when such crises reach a civilizational scale and become irresolvable on the terms of capital (that is, the restoration of profitability) either through bourgeois democratic means or less extreme forms of military dictatorship. Historically, a feature of those crises and obstacle to their resolution includes partially weakened but undefeated mass revolutionary forces.
Fascism is a mass movement rooted in the radicalizing petty bourgeoisie.
As long as there is capitalism, then, the fascist threat remains alive. The intensity of the threat obviously has its ebbs and flows, but it never disappears. This is the master logic around which the seven elements of our concept of fascism—a critical reading of classical Marxist theory on the question—are articulated, a concept we intend as sufficiently abstract to be portable across different times and spaces of the industrial capitalist epoch, but nonetheless sufficiently coherent so as to be able to distinguish the phenomenon of fascism from other closely related phenomenon.1616. We agree with Geoff Eley’s methodological point on the necessity of “portability” in any conceptualization of fascism that is to be of continued relevance across different historical periods, even as we disagree with his substantive characterization of the present conjuncture. See Geoff Eley, “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (2021): 1–28.
Classical Marxism
As the definition outlined above would suggest, our preferred point of departure in what follows is a critical return to—but also extension beyond—the classical Marxist theories of fascism, particularly that of Leon Trotsky, as well as Ernest Mandel’s synthetic rendering of Trotsky’s account.1717. In our view, two elements common to most classical Marxist theories of fascism need to be abandoned. The first is the unjustified view that fascism is specific to the kind of inter-imperial rivalry characteristic of the early twentieth century, and the related point that fascism is limited to countries of the imperialist core. The second is the connection of fascism to a “stage” of “monopoly capital,” a theory that was incorrect at the time and is equally without value today. Finally, we also believe that the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy need to be fully integrated into the foundational elements of fascism identified by classical Marxists and synthesized below. We have no space to defend these positions beyond mentioning them, but we intend to do so in an ongoing book project. While we do not have the space here to elaborate more fully on this point, it is worth noting that the classical Marxist theory of fascism articulated by Trotsky dovetails closely in some important ways with many of his Marxist contemporaries, including Clara Zetkin, Antonio Gramsci, August Thalheimer, and Otto Bauer.1818. Clara Zetkin, Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, ed. Mike Taber and John Riddell (Haymarket Books, 2017); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Moscow: International Publishers, 1989); Martin Kitchen, “August Thalheimer’s Theory of Fascism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34, no. 1 (1973): 67–78; August Thalheimer, “On Fascism,” Telos 1979, no. 40 (June 20, 1979): 109–22; Ewa Czerwińska–Schupp, Otto Bauer (1881–1938): Thinker and Politician (Brill, 2016).
First, with regard to context, the rise of fascism requires a severe and sustained crisis of capitalism beyond the mere immediate “conjunctural fluctuations”—one which makes the normal process of capitalist accumulation difficult if not impossible.1919. Ernest Mandel, “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 17. Fascism’s historical role is to radically alter social, political, and economic conditions in order to facilitate a renewal of stable accumulation to the benefit, especially, of big capital. This is the master element whose logic articulates the other elements into a coherent totality.
Second, it is necessary that there be a foreboding sense of civilizational degeneration on the scale that shaped the political zeitgeist from which classical fascism emerged, which serves as an impetus in the radicalization of the petty bourgeoisie. Most pertinent in the inter-war period was the crisis of global imperialism, culminating in the brutality and devastation of the first world war. In that setting, militarism crystallized in the European psyche generally and especially among those who gravitated to fascism.
Germany (and Italy), of course, exited the war a defeated power, its global ambitions at least temporarily thwarted. That experience of defeat was one crucial medium through which the general sense of crisis and civilizational decline was refracted, lending lifeblood to fascist insurgency.2020. Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism. More generally, “the transformations of our mental world” that were engendered by World War I, “included an inurement to violent death and an indifference to human life … Europe had become accustomed to massacre.”2121. Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 90–91. The anxieties and traumas of post-war life, amidst economic volatility, were in turn successfully transformed by fascism into a focused hatred of Communism and revolution.2222. Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (London: Verso, 2017), 184.
A widespread sense of civilizational degeneration, in our view, is a necessary condition for the possibility of fascism, but the abstracted form of civilizational degeneration need not be filled with the same particular mix of ingredients of inter-war European fascism: war, militarism, and imperial crisis, alongside inurement to mass death, profound cultural pessimism, a cult of irrationality, and, eventually, a myth of regenerative violence and the intensification of national chauvinism.
Third, the crisis of capitalist accumulation must develop into a crisis of bourgeois democracy. If electoral democracy has sometimes proved an effective mode of political rule, it is also characterized by the instability inherent to a class society whose metronome is set to the staccato rhythms of capital accumulation. The historical context generative of the rise of fascism was one in which social classes deviated from their traditional political parties and “the immediate situation became delicate and dangerous,” with an acute crisis of authority, “or general crisis of the state.”2323. Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 210.
The fourth element of fascism—the inadequacy of traditional military dictatorship—flows immediately from the third. Traditional forms of police and military repression and dictatorial rule reveal themselves to be inadequate in the face of a strong working class movement or an unreliable military. As a reactionary and militarized mass movement, with a capacity to mobilize supporters in the streets and electorally, fascism offers a solution.
The fifth component has to do with the petty bourgeois composition of fascism’s mass base. While inter-war European fascism drew cross-class support, at its core it was a petty bourgeois movement of small business owners, rural landowners, managers, civil servants, professionals, and military and ex-military members.2424. On the class character the Nazis’ support, see Gary King et al., “Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler,” The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951–96; Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); David Abraham, Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986); Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009); Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Hamilton stresses the protestant character of middle class support for fascism and argues that the upper middle class were more likely to vote for the Nazis than were the lower middle class. The middle class was nested uneasily in the capitalist hierarchy. Looming above, on the one hand, a market-dominating and globally ambitious set of large capitalists was bent on rapidly transforming economic, social, and ecological life in its own image. Below, on the other hand, was a well organized, internationally oriented, and increasingly confident working class influenced by socialism, intent on pressing its own demands on the nation.
The petty bourgeoisie was in an inherently precarious class position, and its social status had been badly upended by the instability following World War I. Ideologically, its worldview had been formed in the fires of late nineteenth and early twentieth century racism, nationalism, empire building, and militarism. In inter-war Germany, the petty bourgeoisie’s “anxiety and thereby its hatred were aroused,” as its state of panic led both to a desire for submission to authority as well as a thirst for domination over those less powerful.2525. Erich Fromm, The Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941), 219.
“These feelings,” according to Erick Fromm:
were used by an entirely different class for a regime which was to work for their own interests. Hitler proved to be such an efficient tool because he combined the characteristics of a resentful, hating, petty bourgeois, with whom the lower middle class could identify themselves emotionally and socially, with those of an opportunist who was ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers.2626. Ibid., 219–20.
More and more, this radicalizing middle class was drawn to a revanchist politics premised on fortifying the nation, martial discipline, and order. Because of its precarious class location within the capitalist hierarchy, the petty bourgeoisie is disposed to conservative politics, including, at times, animosity toward militant and internationalist labor movements. The petty bourgeoisie is also a sufficiently large section of society to constitute the basis of a mass movement. A necessary condition for fascism, then, is the radicalization of this social layer, which tends to happen when its conditions of existence are under threat and “normal” politics are incapable of providing a solution. “At the moment this movement begins physical attacks on the workers, their organizations, and their actions,” Mandel suggests, “a fascist movement is born.”2727. Mandel, “Introduction,” 19.
Sixth, before fascists are able to take power, with support from the bourgeoisie, they must first alter the balance of forces in their favor by inflicting partial setbacks on movements of the exploited and oppressed. We can call this the weakening, short of defeat, of the revolutionary threat from below. Contrary to Nicos Poulantzas’s claim, classical fascist success was premised on such a weakening, but not defeat, of the workers’ movement.2828. Here is Poulantzas’s erroneous claim: “Neither in Germany nor in Italy did the triumph of fascism correspond to a political crisis of equilibrium in any sense of the term. The working class had already been thoroughly defeated by the time fascism came into power, and the bourgeoisie did not have to pay for this defeat with any catastrophic equilibrium. In other words, throughout the rise of fascism, the bourgeoisie remained the principal aspect of the principal contradiction.” Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (London: Verso, 2018), 61.
The revolutionary threat once posed by the proletariat may have dissipated, and any civil war scenario between the classes may have abated, but the organizational capacity of the workers movement to resist the depression of wages and increases in exploitation through normal means persisted. When a wider layer of the middle class, beyond its most radicalized section, oscillates between the leadership of the fascists and that of the workers movement, the failure of the latter to offer an exit from the prolonged crisis settles the matter: “the victory of fascism expresses the inability of the workers’ movement to resolve the structural crisis of capitalism in its own interest.”2929. Mandel, “Introduction,” 20.
Seventh, and finally, there is assimilation into the bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist stability. With its victory, fascism is “to a large extent assimilated into the bourgeois state apparatus” and thus the most extreme, unassimilable elements of the movement, are of necessity liquidated.3030. Ibid., 20. Fascist rule is put to the task of restoring capitalist stability. For Franz Neumann, that end was expressed in fascist labor policy more than anything else: “it is in the control of the labor market that National Socialism is most sharply distinguished from democratic society.”3131. Neumann, Behemoth, 337.
Observing the sharp increase of capitalist profits under the Nazis, Mandel notes that while some capitalists, such as those in the arms industry, benefited more than their compatriots, “there clearly emerges a collective economic interest of the capitalist class.”3232. Mandel, “Introduction,” 16. In short, the fascists in power managed a significant increase in the exploitation of labor and a shift in national income from labor to capital by depressing wages, fixing maximum wage rates in a context of labor shortages, mandating the movement of workers by industry or region, and smashing unions.
Simultaneously, the fascist policies of cartelization, subsidies, and credit facilitated the concentration and centralization of German industry and thus overall improvements in its efficiency. The winner in all of this was not a fraction of German capital but large German capital as a whole, which remained very much under the command of the German bourgeoisie, rather than the state or the fascists.3333. Neumann, Behemoth, 435–36, 613.
A New Fascist Era?
Around the world today there is clearly a growing number of governments with little to no commitment to broad participation in the institutions of representative governance and liberal rights. This is an uneven process, with deep entrenchment of authoritarianism in cases such as China, compared to “soft dictatorships” in cases like Russia, where authoritarianism has sharpened significantly, and liberal rights, freedoms, and elections are constrained to such an extent that they no longer represent any meaningful threat to the status quo.3434. David Mandel, “Understanding Naval’nyi,” The Bullet, February 10, 2021. In much of Europe and North America, there has been a more gradual and varied erosion of liberal democratic norms, but civil rights and representative inclusion have not been as fully repressed.
In the short term, liberal democratic erosion and far right resurgence is traceable to the 2008 global capitalist crisis and the stagnation that followed (with the partial exception of East Asia). The already limited ruling class tolerance for broad political participation and robust rights regimes was tested sharply in the midst of a prolonged capitalist crisis on a scale unparalleled since the 1930s. Persistent problems of profitability and volatility compelled ruling classes to extract an ever greater surplus from labor and to seek out new international markets at all costs. In country after country, this competitive capitalist dynamic meant that social and political expressions that could potentially represent a hindrance to accumulation and the rights of property were subject to state crackdown with new and sustained intensity.
In the medium term, the democratic retrenchment in recent years builds upon the antidemocratic spirit of the neoliberal turn since the preceding crisis of global capitalism in the 1970s, when capital recognized the situation could not be resolved through countercyclical Keynesian solutions or a negotiated settlement with workers and oppressed groups seeking greater equality. As Quinn Slobodian has noted, from its earliest iteration, “the neoliberal project focused on designing institutions … to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy.”3535. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2.
In the United States, the attack on the post-war settlement and its modestly expansive notion of liberal democracy was also inextricably bound up with the longer standing project of white supremacy that has been a “form-giving fire” of capitalist modernity.3636. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Classics, 1993); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1983); Keeanga–Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2016); Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2010); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Violent “counter-insurgency” campaigns against Black-led freedom struggles in the United States and around the world—supported by both Democrats and Republicans—were foundational to the emergence of neoliberalism.3737. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis; Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.
One significant aspect of the post–2008 authoritarian dynamic and liberal democratic retreat is the embryonic resurrection of fascist movements in parts of the world, typically manifesting as relatively small currents within wider spectra of far right politics. Fascists have not captured state power anywhere in the world, and nor are they likely to do so in the immediate future. At the same time, fascist street-based movements and parties are now firmly established in many places. Across Europe, parties with fascist roots have had electoral success. In 2022, for example, the Sweden Democrats became the largest party in the right-wing bloc that formed the government, and in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, of the Brothers of Italy, became the Prime Minister.
The current period is defined by a gray area that loosely separates fascists and a broader far right milieu.
The fascist resurrection in most countries remains in a nascent phase, characterized by political fluidity and ambiguity, adding to the complexity of determining the character and measuring the significance of this or that organization or politician. The current period is defined, in this sense, by a gray area that loosely separates, even as it comingles, fascists and a broader far right milieu of organizations and movements that themselves are positioned to the right of mainstream conservatism, particularly by virtue of their commitment to mobilizing in the street and more aggressive racist, xenophobic, transphobic, and homophobic politics.3838. It is important to remember that, at least during their period of incubation, the Nazis were likewise just one element of a broader far right political scene.
The Tea Party in the US, which grew into a mass movement following the 2008 crisis and the election of Barack Obama, is a good example of the nonfascist, far right contribution to the gray area. Funded by extremely wealthy donors looking for grassroots shock troops to carry out their free market austerity agenda, the Tea Party’s constitutive base was largely middle class (including small business owners, professionals, and ex-military personnel). The anxieties of this materially precarious social layer were channeled into extreme antipathy to the poor, migrants, benefits recipients, African Americans, and the political left.
It became, as David Neiwert argues, “a wholesale conduit for a revival of the Patriot movement and its militias,” whose ideological and organizational influence on the Right would grow even as the Tea Party’s eventually waned.3939. David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017), 243; Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19ff, 45ff. The Peoples’ Party plays this role in Canada.
The class composition of contemporary fascism tracks along a broadly similar pattern to that of the classical period, even if it is not identical to the 1930s.4040. David Renton downplays similarities between the membership of the alt-right today and classical fascism, noting the role of the rural petty bourgeois/landowning class in support of fascism in Germany. David Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 105. While we recognize that the composition of the petty bourgeoisie has obviously changed since the 1930s with the development of capitalism—most clearly in light of the relative decline in social significance of the rural landowning class in general, and particularly in advanced imperial countries—the evidence nonetheless suggests that the contemporary fascist, as well as the broader alt-right, movements continue to exhibit at their core a petty bourgeois or middle class composition. Today, as in its classical period, fascism is a cross-class political phenomenon, including support from wealthy individuals as well as the working class. However, the core of fascism, yesterday and today, is the middle class. In the advanced capitalist countries of the current period, this social layer includes small business owners, middle management, the self-employed, professionals, highly educated and well remunerated IT workers, police, and military and ex-military personnel.
Unsurprisingly, this is precisely the class composition that characterized the participants in the January 6, 2021, Washington, D.C. “Capitol Riot.” Those arrested were more likely to be business owners, professionals, realtors, police, former members of the military, IT specialists, or middle management than working class or unemployed. At the same time, the Washington Post found that many of the arrestees were suffering financial difficulties, including personal or business indebtedness, notices of eviction, foreclosure, and unpaid taxes.4141. Robert A. Pape Ruby Keven, “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists,” The Atlantic, February 2, 2021; Jennifer Valentino–DeVries et al., “Arrested in Capitol Riot: Organized Militants and a Horde of Radicals,” The New York Times, February 4, 2021; Todd C. Frankel, “A Majority of the People Arrested for Capitol Riot Had a History of Financial Trouble,” Washington Post; Neiwert, Alt-America; Jason Wilson, “US Militia Group Draws Members from Military and Police, Website Leak Shows,” The Guardian, March 3, 2021; David Lewis, “We Snuck into Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention,” The Stranger. On the economic background of donors to far right groups after the 2021 Capitol riot see, Jason Wilson, “Proud Boys and Other Far-Right Groups Raise Millions via Christian Funding Site,” The Guardian, April 10, 2021.
All of this is not at all to imply that contemporary fascism is a simple facsimile of its classical predecessor on a smaller scale. For one thing, there are important distinctions between today’s global context and the inter-war period that cultivated fascism in its classical form. “From any empirical description of 1918–22,” Geoff Eley points out, “the differences will quickly emerge: no First World War and its outcomes; no total war; no Bolshevism; no revolutionary insurgency across most of Europe; no ascendant mass trade unionism; no Communist or social democratic parties; no pan-European democratization.”4242. Eley, “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?” 6. The contemporary forms of fascist organization and ideology are shaped by the context from which they arise.
Fascists in the present period draw on and deepen trends already available in the ideological ecology of reaction. Islamophobia is one crucial example. The endless War on Terror and the associated punitive security environment for Muslims in many parts of the world were stoked and justified through the cultivation of antiMuslim hatreds and anxieties. David Renton describes 9–11 as “epochal,” changing “the tone of right-wing politics, from a register of nostalgia into a new language of confident aggression and assumed public approval.” It “offered the chance for blood, iron and sacrifice and … a suitable enemy of monstrous proportions who could be defeated on the battlefield.”4343. Renton, The New Authoritarians, 37.
Buoyed by the antiMuslim hysteria peddled by politicians of all stripes as well as the media, far right movements have sought political gains by conjuring an Islamic threat to the security of the nation, including wild claims about an impending takeover of legal systems by Sharia Law. In Western Europe, for reasons of colonial history, the lineage of a significant proportion of the working classes of such countries as France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK, is tied to Muslim majority countries. This introduces a specific class inflection to anti-Islamic sentiments. This is less true of the US and Canada, where the working classes are racialized in distinct ways. Across the board, antiMuslim ideologies contain within them an important imperial dimension, traceable to the significance of the Middle East—not least oil—to the global economy.4444. Thanks to Adam Hanieh for his insights here.
That contemporary fascist movements remain a minoritarian current on the Right is no reason to ignore their threat. Recall that the fascist project was not born fully formed in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany, for example, before the Nazis became a mass political force, they were only one of several far right political groups with paramilitary wings. The currents that eventually consolidated into the Nazis were initially relatively small, suffered a number of defeats, and were forced repeatedly to reconstitute themselves.
Becoming a mass phenomenon was gradually made possible only in a context of crisis exceeding in breadth and depth anything we have thus far witnessed in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, the Nazis required the support of the German bourgeoisie to consolidate their power. When we take stock of fascist formations in development today, appropriately calibrated historical comparisons are indispensable, but our comparisons ought to begin with the early, formative period of classical fascism’s inter-war developments, rather than the fully formed and victorious articulations that classical fascism eventually assumed. Should the intertwining crises of capitalist accumulation, climate change, and global health enveloping our world worsen, the present situation of minoritarian but growing support for fascism could very well build into wider tolerance, and even enthusiasm, for more radically authoritarian and reactionary politics.
That contemporary fascist movements remain a minoritarian current on the Right is no reason to ignore their threat.
At the same time, we should not exaggerate the fascistic element of the contemporary far right. Tolerance for the level of violence accompanying a full fascist insurgency remains limited. Perhaps more importantly, fascists do not pose the most important threat to fragmented and defensive movements of workers and the oppressed around the globe today. Most fascist parties are not at this point mass parties and cannot maintain their own cohesive, disciplined, street-fighting force with the capacity to dominate the streets. Most American far right militias remain atomized and cannot reasonably be described as a mass, coherent presence. Some European parties with fascistic tendencies have drifted in recent years from core tenets of the far right, as is evident in Italy and Hungary.
For the most part, ruling elites do not yet support fascist movements where they exist. This is unsurprising given the weakness of popular movements and the Left internationally. There is also widespread support among most of the existing security apparatuses for the constitutional authority of ruling classes, rendering fascist movements unnecessary, at least at the moment, for the defense of their interests. Indeed, ruling elites and their organizations tend to see fascists as unhelpful, if not disruptive, to their project.
Capitalists at present prefer to distance themselves from forces of fascism and the far right. The response of leading American capitalist organizations to the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, 2021, is exemplary in this sense. The more imminent danger to liberal democracy remains, for the time being, a broader authoritarian dispensation inherent within liberalism and capitalist societies—expressed today in, among other things, voter suppression, mass incarceration, racist border policies, and weak labor laws—that will continue to grow unevenly as capitalist crisis, worsened by the Covid pandemic and ecological devastation, is unlikely to recede any time soon.4545. On the erosion of liberal democracy, see “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year,” The Economist, February 2, 2021.
The governments of Narendra Modi (India, 2014 to present), Donald Trump (US, 2017–2021), Rodrigo Duterte (the Philippines, 2016–2022), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil, 2019–2022), among others, have frequently been misidentified as fascist, by Marxist and nonMarxist analysts alike.4646. See, for example, Michael D. Yates and John Bellamy Foster, “Trump, Neo-Fascism, and the Covid––19 Pandemic,” MRonline, April 11, 2020; Cornel West, “Cornel West: There Is ‘a Neo-Fascist in the White House,’” Aljazeera, November 29, 2019; Robert Kagan, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Washington Post, May 18, 2016; Ross Douthat, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” The New York Times, December 3, 2015. The effect has been to weaken our ability to accurately identify and respond politically to both the broad erosion of liberal democratic rights and actual fascism. These governments are better situated in that fluid grey area of the wider far right, drawing support from that milieu, but by and large staying within the confines of liberal political institutions, even while pushing the boundaries of “acceptable” politics—Trump’s role in the Capitol Hill riot or Modi’s links to far right paramilitaries and personal connection to an antiMuslim pogrom as Chief Minister of Gujarat are salient examples.
Ruling elites tend to see fascists as unhelpful, if not disruptive, to their project. Capitalists at present prefer to distance themselves.
Unlike fascists, the political strategy of the forces behind these governments centered on elections; none of these governments consolidated power through armed, street-based violence, suspension of the constitution, declaration of emergency powers, or violent repression and annihilation of their oppositions.4747. Trump threatened to have “looters” shot during the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, while Modi has been implicated for supporting the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat. Beyond their particularities, the political agenda of each of these administrations, once elected, did not dramatically depart from the traditional neoliberal policies of tax cuts for the rich, austerity for the poor, law-and-order for people of color, migrants, or Muslims, and free trade for foreign investors. In each case, they accelerated the pace of liberal democratic erosion initiated by their predecessors, but they did not mount any frontal assault.4848. In practice, Trump supported free trade despite his anti-free trade intonations. See Riley, “What Is Trump?”
Conclusion
To sum up, we have attempted to develop four principal theses concerning the global conjuncture of liberal democratic decline and far right resurgence. First, capitalism is inherently predisposed to authoritarianism, and the history of liberalism, military dictatorships, and fascism exhibits different faces of this underlying disposition at different historical moments.
Second, to present liberalism and fascism as antithetical historical forces is to obscure the historical violence of liberalism and capitalism. The task is to attend seriously both to the continuities between liberalism and fascism as well as to the singularities of each.
Third, there is no escaping the need to conceptualize fascism in terms of processes and results. In our view, the phenomenon requires severe and sustained capitalist crisis, civilizational degeneration, a crisis of bourgeois democracy, the inadequacy of traditional military dictatorship, a radicalizing, mass, petty bourgeois movement committed to violence, a weakened but undefeated revolutionary challenge from below to capitalism, and ultimate assimilation into the bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist profitability.
Fourth, and finally, in the contemporary world order we are witnessing the nascent resurgence of fascism as a minority current within a wider far right milieu. Nowhere have fascists captured state power. However, the menace of fascist regeneration should not be minimized, especially as our interpenetrating crises of capitalism, health, ecology, and inter-imperial rivalry tilt toward a real possibility of civilizational degeneration on a scale approximating the first world war and the Great Depression. ×
Notes & References
- Thanks to Peter Drucker and Adam Hanieh for insightful commentary on an earlier draft of this article.
- Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2012).
- Göran Therborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review I–103 (1977): 3–41; Brian S Roper, The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation (London: Pluto, 2013); Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Until their collapse, the so-called Communist countries influenced the number of nondemocratic regimes in the twentieth century, although they were hardly the only countries without representative government in the post-war era.
- Richard Saull, “The Origins and Persistence of the Far-Right: Capital, Class and the Pathologies of Liberal Politics,” in The Longue Durée of the Far-Right, ed. Saull et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), 31; Roper, The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation.
- Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
- Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer.
- Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), 54. The Nuremberg Laws were also influenced by American race laws (and, to a lesser degree, the race laws of British and British settler colonial states). Nazi jurists studied American miscegenation and Jim Crow laws carefully and adapted them to Germany, in some cases viewing the American laws as too extreme. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
- Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 65–66. The connection between German colonialism and the German far right is also discussed in Robert Heynen, “The German Revolution and the Radical Right,” in The German Revolution and Political Theory, ed. Gaard Kets and James Muldoon (Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 45–68.
- Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 151.
- For examples of often perceptive analyses that nonetheless fall into this trap, see Achin Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities (London: Verso, 2017); Dylan Riley, “What Is Trump?” New Left Review 114 (2018): 5–31.
- For one of the sharper analyses that ultimately falls into the second trap, see Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review, October 27, 2020. From a different theoretical angle, but with a similar methodological limitation, see Richard Seymour, “The Last Thing I’d Ever Do: Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Fascism,” Patreon, May 25, 2018, https://www.patreon.com/posts/last-thing-id-do-19020461.
- Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 5.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid., 16. Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism”; Seymour, “The Last Thing I’d Ever Do.”
- We agree with Geoff Eley’s methodological point on the necessity of “portability” in any conceptualization of fascism that is to be of continued relevance across different historical periods, even as we disagree with his substantive characterization of the present conjuncture. See Geoff Eley, “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1 (2021): 1–28.
- In our view, two elements common to most classical Marxist theories of fascism need to be abandoned. The first is the unjustified view that fascism is specific to the kind of inter-imperial rivalry characteristic of the early twentieth century, and the related point that fascism is limited to countries of the imperialist core. The second is the connection of fascism to a “stage” of “monopoly capital,” a theory that was incorrect at the time and is equally without value today. Finally, we also believe that the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy need to be fully integrated into the foundational elements of fascism identified by classical Marxists and synthesized below. We have no space to defend these positions beyond mentioning them, but we intend to do so in an ongoing book project.
- Clara Zetkin, Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, ed. Mike Taber and John Riddell (Haymarket Books, 2017); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Moscow: International Publishers, 1989); Martin Kitchen, “August Thalheimer’s Theory of Fascism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34, no. 1 (1973): 67–78; August Thalheimer, “On Fascism,” Telos 1979, no. 40 (June 20, 1979): 109–22; Ewa Czerwińska–Schupp, Otto Bauer (1881–1938): Thinker and Politician (Brill, 2016).
- Ernest Mandel, “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 17.
- Vanaik, The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism.
- Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 90–91.
- Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (London: Verso, 2017), 184.
- Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 210.
- On the class character the Nazis’ support, see Gary King et al., “Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler,” The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951–96; Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); David Abraham, Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986); Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009); Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Hamilton stresses the protestant character of middle class support for fascism and argues that the upper middle class were more likely to vote for the Nazis than were the lower middle class.
- Erich Fromm, The Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941), 219.
- Ibid., 219–20.
- Mandel, “Introduction,” 19.
- Here is Poulantzas’s erroneous claim: “Neither in Germany nor in Italy did the triumph of fascism correspond to a political crisis of equilibrium in any sense of the term. The working class had already been thoroughly defeated by the time fascism came into power, and the bourgeoisie did not have to pay for this defeat with any catastrophic equilibrium. In other words, throughout the rise of fascism, the bourgeoisie remained the principal aspect of the principal contradiction.” Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (London: Verso, 2018), 61.
- Mandel, “Introduction,” 20.
- Ibid., 20.
- Neumann, Behemoth, 337.
- Mandel, “Introduction,” 16.
- Neumann, Behemoth, 435–36, 613.
- David Mandel, “Understanding Naval’nyi,” The Bullet, February 10, 2021.
- Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2.
- Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Classics, 1993); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1983); Keeanga–Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2016); Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2010); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
- Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis; Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.
- It is important to remember that, at least during their period of incubation, the Nazis were likewise just one element of a broader far right political scene.
- David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017), 243; Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19ff, 45ff.
- David Renton downplays similarities between the membership of the alt-right today and classical fascism, noting the role of the rural petty bourgeois/landowning class in support of fascism in Germany. David Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 105. While we recognize that the composition of the petty bourgeoisie has obviously changed since the 1930s with the development of capitalism—most clearly in light of the relative decline in social significance of the rural landowning class in general, and particularly in advanced imperial countries—the evidence nonetheless suggests that the contemporary fascist, as well as the broader alt-right, movements continue to exhibit at their core a petty bourgeois or middle class composition.
- Robert A. Pape Ruby Keven, “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists,” The Atlantic, February 2, 2021; Jennifer Valentino–DeVries et al., “Arrested in Capitol Riot: Organized Militants and a Horde of Radicals,” The New York Times, February 4, 2021; Todd C. Frankel, “A Majority of the People Arrested for Capitol Riot Had a History of Financial Trouble,” Washington Post; Neiwert, Alt-America; Jason Wilson, “US Militia Group Draws Members from Military and Police, Website Leak Shows,” The Guardian, March 3, 2021; David Lewis, “We Snuck into Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention,” The Stranger. On the economic background of donors to far right groups after the 2021 Capitol riot see, Jason Wilson, “Proud Boys and Other Far-Right Groups Raise Millions via Christian Funding Site,” The Guardian, April 10, 2021.
- Eley, “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?” 6.
- Renton, The New Authoritarians, 37.
- Thanks to Adam Hanieh for his insights here.
- On the erosion of liberal democracy, see “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year,” The Economist, February 2, 2021.
- See, for example, Michael D. Yates and John Bellamy Foster, “Trump, Neo-Fascism, and the Covid––19 Pandemic,” MRonline, April 11, 2020; Cornel West, “Cornel West: There Is ‘a Neo-Fascist in the White House,’” Aljazeera, November 29, 2019; Robert Kagan, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Washington Post, May 18, 2016; Ross Douthat, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” The New York Times, December 3, 2015.
- Trump threatened to have “looters” shot during the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, while Modi has been implicated for supporting the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.
- In practice, Trump supported free trade despite his anti-free trade intonations. See Riley, “What Is Trump?”