On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump had an aggressive, engaging presence and a knack for showmanship. His 2016 election campaign appealed directly to white working-class fears about race, crime, campus protests, and Washington politicians whom he claimed had enabled them all. His supporters claimed they loved him because he “told it like it is” in a simple, straightforward manner. However, others contend his campaign was built on racism, anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and truth distortion, evoking comparisons between interwar Europe and the present.

Defining Fascism

In February 2016, German news magazine Der Spiegel called Trump “the world's most dangerous man” and leader of a “hate-filled authoritarian movement” who “inflames tensions against ethnic minorities ... while ignoring democratic conventions.” In The Spectator, Britain’s leading right-wing opinion magazine, Christopher Buckley casually called the New York property tycoon the “Mussolini of Fifth Avenue,” and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who teaches Italian history at New York University, explained in The Atlantic how Trump borrows from Benito Mussolini, from his bombastic pronouncements to his humiliation of opponents and outsiders. But should we even go there?

When you call somebody a fascist, you can mean any number of things. Often, it means no more than “somebody I don’t like.” In 1944, Orwell penned:

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

Its glib usage makes it an all-purpose epithet, usable by anyone against everyone.

Conceived in Italy during World War I, fascism came to power with the ex-journalist and war veteran Benito Mussolini in 1922. Since the 1950s, historians and political scientists have studied the Italian and German versions and come up with a pretty solid agreement on what it is, both as a political ideology and as a political movement, factoring in all the things its progenitors said as they ascended to power.

Fascism has several names. “Corporate statism” is one. In Europe, they call it “dirigisme.” Whatever name you choose to call it, it means, approximately, combining the power of the state with the power of corporations. At its mildest, it is intrusive regulation of business. At its most toxic, it is concentration camps.

In 1995, Umberto Eco, the late Italian intellectual giant and novelist most famous for The Name of the Rose, wrote a guide describing the primary features of fascism. As a child, Eco was a loyalist of Mussolini, an experience that made him quick to detect the markers of fascism later in life when he became a revered public intellectual and political voice.

Eco noted that fascism looks different in each incarnation, morphing with time and leadership, as “it would be difficult for [it] to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances.” It is a movement without “quintessence.” Instead, it is a sort of “fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions,” he wrote.

According to Eco, the fourteen defining aspects of fascism are: the cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, the cult of action for action’s sake, opposition to analytical criticism wherein disagreement is treason, exploitation of the natural fear of difference, appeal to a frustrated middle class, obsession with plot, followers feeling humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies, pacifism as trafficking with the enemy, popular elitism, hero worship, transfer of will to power into sexual matters, selective populism, and the use of Newspeak.

At its heart, fascism is about inserting demagoguery, violence, and contempt for the rule of law into popular politics. Hitler rose to power through demagoguery, showmanship, and nativist appeals to the masses. Fascism promised people deliverance from politics; it was not just a different type of politics, but anti-politics.

Trump and his campaign's constantly evolving views—often championed as a way for Trump to use unpredictability to cut better deals for the nation—make it difficult to glean a political agenda, or even a set of clear core policy views, ahead of his presidency. In the speech of Mussolini, Putin, Trump, and Berlusconi, Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes a pattern: they are at once transparent about their intentions and masters of innuendo.

Harvard historian Andrew Gordon thinks there are “overlaps” in “the contexts that in the past are understood to have generated fascism or support for it and in the context of the U.S. today.” Michael Ebner, an expert on Mussolini’s Italy at Syracuse University, writes, “Trump has tapped into some impulses or segments of American society that resemble fascist impulses and constituencies...”

Victimhood and Violence

However, there are three lesser-known tenets of fascism that Trump exhibits: his valorization of victims, his obsession with fitness, and his legitimization of violence as a form of political action.

On August 31, 2016, Trump paraded the victims of violence committed by undocumented immigrants on stage. This valorization of victimhood, in addition to a scapegoating of “the Other,” is a staple of fascism. Anyone familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South or 1930s Germany and the centuries of antisemitism that preceded it will recognize that the celebration of victims has often been used to sustain fear, resentment, and oppression.

The fascists in Germany, Italy, and Spain all promoted traditional gender roles. Women were encouraged to stay home and bear healthy white children for the good of the nation while their heroic men went off to work and fight wars. Abortion was forbidden unless fetuses had hereditary defects. This ties into fascist notions of racial hygiene, physical fitness, and purity. Fascists everywhere disparaged the mentally and physically ill. They defined themselves against supposedly effete elites and were alarmed by the relatively liberal social norms of the 1920s. Under the Third Reich, notions of racial hygiene were taken to appalling extremes.

This obsession with fitness—personal as well as national—and intolerance of deviant behavior comes from a Social Darwinism that also informs fascists’ views on political action. For fascists, violence is a legitimate form of political action and, more than anything, this is what sets fascism apart from other ideologies. Fascists see life as a constant struggle. Accommodation and compromise are hallmarks of the weak, and weakness must be purged from the community, the nation, and the race. The goal of politics is not peace and quiet; it is to win, ideally by vanquishing one’s opponent.

Trump has said he would order soldiers to kill the families of terrorists, which is not only illegal under American law but also a war crime under international law. Former military commanders, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, have said the armed forces would refuse to carry out such an order. Trump disagreed. “They’re not going to refuse me,” he said. “Believe me.” This hearkens to what the Nazis called the Führerprinzip: the leader is above the law and must at all times be obeyed.

Important Differences

Like Mussolini, Trump plays to the crowd with angry, nationalistic proclamations. But unlike Mussolini, it is not at all clear how much he actually believes, to what extent he wants to implement it, or whether he would be willing to do so in the face of political opposition. Mussolini was dedicated to advancing a fascistic program, whereas Trump may simply be employing fascist-like rhetoric to gain popularity.

There are also important differences. Historically, fascist regimes systematically denounced aggressive individualism. In contrast, Trump and the alt-right movement embrace it. Trump, Republicans generally, and a great swath of American society have celebrated individualism to an extreme degree. Trump’s political vision has largely involved lifting regulatory burdens from business.

America today does not possess the vulnerabilities that characterized Europe during the rise of fascist regimes. By many measures, the United States has the strongest economy in the world and remains the strongest military power without any close rival. According to Robert Paxton, a leading authority on fascism, the trends are not necessarily downward unless one was offended by the presence of a Black president in the White House.

According to some scholars, Trump does not fit the definition of a fascist because he does not clearly aim to establish a one-party state. Nevertheless, he has created a one-man-led political movement that does not map neatly onto traditional U.S. party structures or behave in traditional ways, which, historically, is how fascism began.

The Limits of the Analogy

Rather than explaining the present, historical analogies often distort it, sometimes with devastating consequences. The overuse or misuse of a historical analogy can also make policymakers more hesitant to act, with equally disastrous consequences.

So, is it fair to call Trump a fascist? He certainly meets many of the criteria. But he does not appear to have any coherent commitment to fascist theories of governance. Are some of the people at Trump’s rallies displaying disturbing fascistic proclivities? And is Trump, through his racist and nationalistic bombast, attracting people with fascistic inclinations? Absolutely. But as ugly as this reality may be, it is not necessarily the same thing as Trump himself being a fascist.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we will have to wait and see. Giovanni Gentile, minister of public instruction in Mussolini’s first cabinet, pointed out a key characteristic of Mussolini’s policymaking in an article for Foreign Affairs published in January 1928:

“The real views of the Duce are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same time.”

In other words, it is Mussolini’s deeds that must be judged, not his words or posturing.

German historian Detlev Peukert offered an eloquent summary of the civic and ethical obligations that everyone owes—not just in times of crisis, but always:

“The values we should assert [in response to fascism] are easily stated but hard to practise: reverence for life, pleasure in diversity and contrariety, respect for what is alien, tolerance for what is unpalatable, scepticism about the feasibility and desirability of chiliastic schemes for a global new order, openness towards others and a willingness to learn even from those who call into question one’s own principles of social virtue.”