Pun Salad

Vice President Kamala Harris said that she believes that Donald Trump “is a fascist” after his longest-serving chief of staff said the former president praised Adolf Hitler while in office and put personal loyalty above the Constitution.

Harris seized on comments by former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, about his former boss in interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic published Tuesday warning that the Republican nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that Trump, while in office, suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”

There is no political concept in modern history more confused than fascism. Note I didn’t say confusing. Lots of people are wholly unconfused by fascism; they just can’t define it very well. But they’re sure they know it when they see it. 

Definitions and explanations are littered across thousands of books and articles. There are so many definitions—never mind theories—of fascism strewn across the intellectual landscape that it calls to mind one of my favorite quotes from Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man for much of the New Deal. “To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” he wrote, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, base-ball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” 

But that doesn’t even capture it. A better image might be that of a landfill, where the discarded detritus of countless lives and businesses end up in the same place. All you can say about the huge pile of random objects—from soiled diapers to outdated computers—is that they all exist as the product of human action during a specific time. Some of the items have more utility than others, but there is no unifying theme to the mass other than the ones people choose to impose upon it. In Liberal Fascism, after listing a tiny fraction of the various definitions, I wrote:

It’s an academic version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: The more closely you study the subject, the less clearly defined it becomes. The historian R. A. H. Robinson wrote 20 years ago, “Although enormous amounts of research time and mental energy have been put into the study of it … fascism has remained the great conundrum for students of the twentieth century.” Meanwhile, the authors of the Dictionnaire historique des fascismes et du nazisme flatly assert, “No universally accepted definition of the fascist phenomenon exists, no consensus, however slight, as to its range, its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterize it.” Stanley G. Payne, considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism, wrote in 1995, “At the end of the twentieth century fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms.” There are even serious scholars who argue that Nazism wasn’t fascist, that fascism doesn’t exist at all, or that it is primarily a secular religion (this is my own view). “Put simply,” writes Gilbert Allardyce, “we have agreed to use the word without agreeing on how to define it.”

Fascism, much like communism, is a whole system based on lies. The political scientists don’t call them lies. They use words like “theory” or “ideology.” But the theories and ideologies are wrong because they describe reality wrong. If you’re convinced that bears are repelled by the smell of Cheeto dust, when you put that theory to the test, the story will end with a bear eating an abnormally orange dude screaming, “This makes no sense! It’s like the bears didn’t even read my book!” 

Fascism is a system of lies for other reasons. Fascist (and, again, communist) leaders organize and mobilize people around lies. They make up stories about how some group is an existential enemy, and therefore we must crush them before they crush us. They lie about how the economy works, about their own brilliance and mastery. And the lies often work. There are still fewer Jews in the world than there were when Hitler came to power because his lies about Jews led to the deaths of so many of them. 

As I wrote in my book, The Case for Nationalism, 20th-century fascists hated parliamentary democracy. They believed in an all-consuming state and had contempt for bourgeois life. Fundamentally, fascism celebrated violence in a nihilistic rejection of rationality and elevation of military struggle.

As for Hitler, he believed in an existential fight between the species, a conflict that the German race would wage in a war of annihilation against inferior peoples.

Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election, but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.