The comparison was inflammatory, to say the least. Former Massachusetts governor William Weld equated Republican US presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s immigration plan with Kristallnacht, the night of horror in 1938 when rampaging Nazis smashed Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and killed scores of Jews.
If it was a provocative analogy, it was not a lonely one. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the US. More strident opponents have likened Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
To supporters, such comparisons are deeply unfair smear tactics used to tar conservatives and scare voters. For a bipartisan establishment whose foundation has been shaken by Trump’s ascendance, these backers say, it is easier to delegitimize his support than to acknowledge widespread popular anger at the failure of both parties to confront the nation’s challenges.
Illustration: Mountain People
The discussion comes as questions are surfacing around the globe about a revival of fascism, generally defined as a governmental system that asserts complete power and emphasizes aggressive nationalism and often racism. In places such as Russia and Turkey, leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan employ strongman tactics. In Austria, a nationalist candidate came within three-10ths of a percentage point of becoming the first far-right head of state elected in Europe since World War II.
In Hungary, an authoritarian government has clamped down on the media and erected razor-wire fences to keep out migrants and refugees. There are worries that Poland could follow suit. Traditional parties in France, Germany, Greece and elsewhere have been challenged by nationalist movements amid an economic crisis and waves of migrants. In Israel, fascism analogies by a former prime minister and a top general have again inflamed the long-running debate about the occupation of Palestinian territories.
“The crash of 2008 showed how globalization creates losers as well as winners,” European Council on Foreign Relations director Mark Leonard said. “In many countries, middle-class wages are stagnant and politics has become a battle over a shrinking pie. Populists have replaced contests between left and right with a struggle between cosmopolitan elites and angry nativists.”
That dislocation might not lead to a repeat of Europe in the 1930s, but it has fueled a debate about global political trends. There is a tendency at times to try to fit current movements into understandable constructs — some refer to terrorist groups in the Middle East as Islamofascists — but academics say there is a spectrum that includes right-wing nationalism, illiberal democracy and populist autocracy.
“On a world level, the situation that affects many countries is economic stagnation and the arrival of immigrants,” said Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and one of the most prominent experts on fascism. “That’s a one-two punch that democratic governments are having enormous trouble in meeting.”
Trump dismisses the labels used by those such as Weld, a longtime Republican now mounting a quixotic campaign for vice president as a Libertarian.
“I don’t talk about his alcoholism, so why would he talk about my foolishly perceived fascism?” Trump said through a spokeswoman. “There is nobody less of a fascist than Donald Trump.”
Weld, who in the 1990s reportedly appeared in public a few times having had too much to drink, declined to respond: “I’ll let that ride.”
Americans are used to the idea that other nations might be vulnerable to such movements, but while figures such as Father Charles Coughlin, a demagogic radio broadcaster, enjoyed wide followings in the 1930s, neither major party has ever nominated anyone quite like Trump.
“This could be one of those moments that’s quite dangerous and we’ll look back and wonder why we treated it as ho-hum at a time when we could have stopped it,” said Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, known for hawkish internationalism.
Kagan sounded the alarm this month with a Washington Post op-ed article, “This is How Fascism Comes to America,” that gained wide attention.
“I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from conservative Republicans,” he said. “There are a lot of people who agree with this.”
Fascist comparisons are not new in US politics. A Google search of “Barack Obama and Nazi” or “George W. Bush and Nazi” produces many images of the past two US presidents as swastika-waving fascists.
With Trump, such comparisons have gone beyond the fringe and entered mainstream conversation both in the US and abroad.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto criticized Trump’s plans to build a wall on the border and to bar Muslims from entering the US.
“That’s the way Mussolini arrived and the way Hitler arrived,” he said.
Actor George Clooney called Trump “a xenophobic fascist.”
Comedian Louis CK said: “The guy is Hitler.”
Eva Schloss, the 87-year-old stepsister of Anne Frank, said Trump “is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”
It got to the point that his wife, Melania Trump, was prompted to say: “He’s not Hitler.”
Trump has provided plenty of ammunition for critics. He was slow to denounce white supremacist David Duke and talked approvingly of beating up protesters. He has praised Putin and promised to be friends. He would not condemn supporters who launched anti-Semitic blasts at journalists.
At one point, Trump retweeted a Mussolini quote: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”
Asked by Chuck Todd on the NBC program Meet the Press about the retweet, Trump brushed off the quote’s origin.
“I know who said it, but what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?” he said.
“Do you want to be associated with a fascist?” Todd asked.
“No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes and certainly, hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?” Trump said.
Trump’s allies dismiss the criticism as politically motivated and historically suspect.
Former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, who has said he would consider being Trump’s running mate, said in an interview that he was “deeply offended” by what he called “utterly ignorant” comparisons.
“Trump does not have a political structure in the sense that the fascists did,” said Gingrich, a onetime college professor who earned his doctorate in modern European history. “He doesn’t have the sort of ideology that they did. He has nobody who resembles the brownshirts. This is all just garbage.”
Beyond Hitler and Mussolini, fascism can be hard to define. Since World War II, only fringe figures have overtly identified themselves that way. In modern political discourse, the word is used as an epithet. Even Hitler and Mussolini were elastic in their political philosophies as they came to power; Mussolini started out as a leftist.
Paxton said he saw similarities and differences in Trump. His message about a US in decline and his us-against-them pronouncements about immigrants and outsiders echo Europe in the 1930s, Paxton said.
On the other hand, Trump has hardly created uniformed, violent youth groups, he said. In addition, fascists believe in strong state control, not get-government-off-your-back individualism and deregulation.
Others caution against comparisons.
“I read Kagan’s piece, of course,” German Institute for International and Security Affairs director Volker Perthes said in Berlin. “All the phenomena he describes are raising concerns, but I would still not call Trump or his campaign fascist. Maybe with German and European history in mind, we are a bit more cautious than others in using the label ‘fascism.’”
Perthes said real fascism requires two more elements — an outright rejection of democracy and a harsher definition of order.
Jobbik, an ultraright party in Hungary, would fall into this category, he said, but Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate who narrowly lost the Austrian presidential vote, and Trump would not.
Center for European Reform director Charles Grant in London distinguished between far-right nationalist parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and actual fascism.
“Historically, it means the demonization of minorities within a society to the extent that they feel insecure,” he said. “It means encouraging the use of violence against critics. It means a bellicose foreign policy that may lead to war, to excite a nationalist feeling. It takes xenophobia to extremes, and it is contemptuous of a rules-based liberal order.”
The debate about terminology might ignore the seriousness of the conditions that gave rise to Trump and his European counterparts. The New York real-estate developer has tapped into a deep discontent in a country where many feel left behind while Wall Street banks get bailouts, newcomers take jobs, terrorists threaten innocents and China rises economically at the US’ expense.
“It seems to me in developed and semi-developed countries, there is emerging a new kind of politics for which maybe the best taxonomic category would be right-wing populist nationalism,” said Stanley Payne, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are seeing a new kind of phenomenon which is different from what you had” in the 20th century.
Roger Eatwell, a professor at the University of Bath in England, calls it “illiberal democracy,” a form of government that keeps the trappings of democracy without the reality.
“Elections are seen as important to legitimizing regimes,” he said, but instead of imposing one-party rule, as in the past, today’s authoritarians “use a variety of devices to control and/or manipulate the media, intimidate opponents” and so on.
Either way, it has found pockets of support on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst in Moscow, said neo-fascism in liberal societies in the West stems from crisis or dysfunction while in illiberal countries like Russia and Turkey it reflects an attempt to fill the void left by the failure of Western notions to catch on.
The problem is that “the Western political leadership at the moment is too weak to fight the tide,” she said.
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