4

Othering Nationalism

The (Bookend) Revolution of 2016

“We need a political revolution:” The line was a standard in Bernie Sanders’s speeches during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.1

While Bernie may have talked revolution, it was the election’s eventual and improbable winner, Donald Trump, who ushered one in.² Trump, whose perspective was more egotistical than global, was not himself much of a revolutionary. Rather, he was the vehicle for revolution. His election was the second such startling development among the established Western democracies in 2016. That June, in the Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom voted to remove itself from the European Union, of which it had been a member for over forty years. The global dimension of this zeitgeist—a challenge to the international arrangements and Western democratic norms that had been in place since the end of World War II—had been apparent for years. Anti-immigrant parties had been making headway in Western Europe since before the refugee crisis of 2015; since then they had burgeoned and become forces in national parliaments and in the European parliament. Already, such parties had come to power beyond the West, in the former Soviet bloc, in Turkey and India, in the Philippines. But now, shockingly, they had won winner-take-all national elections in the two oldest democracies, in the very citadels of the Western liberal tradition.

In the U.S. election, the most conspicuous of the revolutionary voices was that of Stephen Bannon.³ Bannon served as Trump’s final campaign strategist and senior White House advisor in the first months of the new administration. Recalling the role of Karl Rove, in whose chair he sat in his brief tenure in the administration, Bannon was frequently referred to as Trump’s “brain.”4 Barely a week into the new administration, Bannon outraged the political world by telling the New York Times to shut up.

The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.⁵

What Bannon was talking about was incompatible worldviews. For him, the media, what the British call the “chattering classes,” were stuck in a conventional-wisdom worldview that had been superseded by a new order.⁶ In the conventional view, politics is seen as a closed bipolar game: liberals versus conservatives; Democrats versus Republicans; right versus left. This conventional thinking could even accommodate the extremes on this spectrum, Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialists on the left and the Obama-era Tea Party insurgency on the right. But it could not, Bannon was saying, grasp his insurgency, the Trump insurgency.

For Bannon both the standard bipolar view of the political order, as well as its very protagonists, the Republican and Democratic Parties, were tired, weak, and worn out. They were no match for his vital new movement, the political revolution for which he spoke and which had prevailed in the Trump election. The established political forces’ very resistance to Bannon’s new message diminished the old order and nurtured the new. At his most Hegelian, Bannon wrote in an email to the Washington Post:

What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order, and the more frantic a handful of media elites become, the more powerful that new political order becomes itself.7

Bannon’s telling the Times to shut up bore an eerie and ironic resemblance to an earlier admonition at a time of cultural revolution in the United States. In the words of the 2016 Nobel laureate:

Come writers and critics …

Come senators, congressmen …

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand …

For the times they are a-changin’ [emphasis added]⁸

The F Word

For seventy years after the end of World War II, “fascism” was an epithet. It was a word thrown by one side, right or left, at the other (or sometimes within a side) when argumentation failed, when it ended in frustration and anger. It was to label the opponent with what was, ironically, the calumny both left and right agreed upon to indicate that what the opponent was saying or represented was beyond the pale. It was to tar the other with the most odious word in the collective political vocabulary. In recent years, as political argumentation has mushroomed across the internet, it has become a cliché that sooner or later arguments will likely dead end in someone calling someone else Hitler.⁹

And there was good reason for fascism to be considered the ultimate epithet. The enduring odium of fascism lay in its having been forged in war. By its scale and by its trauma, war is unsurpassed in its capacity to produce lasting images and memories and categories that bedevil the worldviews of individuals and nations. The unprecedented level of death and dislocation in World War II would by itself have been sufficient to condemn the enemy, fascism, in the minds of its adversaries, well after the conflict was over. Unlike World War I, the hostilities and the horrors of the second war in Europe were not confined to the distant front. The Nazis’ early sweep across the face of the continent, according to plan, ensured that the distinction between civilian and combatant would dissolve. Cities quickly became accepted targets for bombardment. Nazi diplomacy and its occupation forces respected no local authority or custom. Occupied countries were administered to serve the interests of the Reich—they were sources of loot and labor. Who was to serve what purpose was determined by rigid racial criteria. Whole populations were uprooted and transported to be used as slave labor.

The operative principle of this regime was terror. Such atrocities were unknown to contemporary European populations. Never mind that similar systems had been imposed on African and Asian peoples by the governments of several of the countries the Nazis conquered. That was imperialism. Its tactics of domination were distant and shielded from its citizens.10 From the point of view of the vast majority of Europeans, what was happening to them was unheard of. But the Nazis went even further than in Africa and Asia. Some populations were selected simply to be exterminated. War’s end would reveal that the familiar means of mass production had been harnessed for the sole purpose of genocide. In short, not only would fascism come to be associated with atrocities previously unseen on the planet; not only would it be associated with having visited unknown brutalities on conquered populations; fascism had also produced the greatest mass mobilization of sadism in history. It had done the unspeakable.

But fascism as purely an epithet ended in 2015 in the United States. And it ended at the level of presidential politics. For the first time since World War II, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign provoked a serious discussion of the threat of fascism in America. Above all, it was Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants that gave rise to this conversation. Scapegoating arguments are simple, if barefaced. In the first place, they require identifying, and exaggerating, the dysfunctions of American life—what Trump would call “carnage” in his inaugural address:

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.11

The second step in scapegoating is vehemently to assign blame for the dysfunctions. This blaming was the political and emotional heart of Trump’s campaign: the scapegoats were the immigrants. They were criminals. They were vermin.¹² To the ears of liberal America, to the ears as well of much of this country’s traditional right, this scapegoating evoked Nazism. It evoked the political movement that came to power scapegoating the Jews. That called them less than human. That, in power, engaged in genocide.

The concern that Trump evoked over fascism spanned both the liberal Democratic world and establishment Republicans. Martin O’Malley twice called Trump a fascist from the stage of the Democratic Party’s primary debates. The last orthodox Republican to stay in the primary race against Trump, Ohio governor John Kasich, ran a campaign ad that aped German Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous admonition (“First they came for the socialists …”) against apathy in the face of the rise of Nazism.13 Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat began considering the question of Trump and fascism as early as December 2015, months before the first votes were cast in the Republican presidential primaries.¹⁴ In the spring of 2016, neoconservative éminence grise Robert Kagan saw in Trump’s campaign “how fascism comes to America.”¹⁵ The Washington Post published a scorecard grading Trump’s fascist “attributes.”¹⁶ Umberto Eco’s 1995 article in which he offered a list of features that are typical of what he called Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism, became an internet sensation, informing dozens and dozens of writers who took up the charge of transforming fascist from a scattershot word of opprobrium in American political discourse to a pressing analytical concern.¹⁷

Since the inauguration, observers’ fears of fascism expanded to include the Trump administration’s wholesale subversion of democratic norms and its affinity with the illiberal, or authoritarian, international zeitgeist. The conservative writer David Frum both anticipated and documented these developments.¹⁸ Historian Timothy Snyder published his alarm, On Tyranny, within a month of the inauguration.¹⁹ Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die mapped the use of fascism’s tactics and strategy on to the world’s current illiberal regimes, including the Trump government in the United States.²⁰ In 2018, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright addressed how democracies move in authoritarian directions in a volume she called Fascism: A Warning.²¹

With their frank white nationalism, the most ideologically extreme of Trump’s supporters, what came to be called the alt-right, radicalized and racialized the sentiment of dispossession they shared with Trump’s populist base. Their infamous Charlottesville chant, “You will not replace us,” was at once a cry of defiance to the multicultural trends of American society and an angry promise to restore the white nationalists’ gauzy-eyed image of an earlier age of white domination, when, in their imaginations, people in this country knew their proper places. Trump’s faint criticism of Charlottesville, his conviction that there were “good people” in the alt-right’s torch-lit march, evoked a notable frisson among those who feared the resurrection of fascist power.

The Donald and the Duce

Fascism is of Italian invention. The pre–March on Rome movement and the post–March on Rome state were the first historical entities to label themselves fascist. The term “fascism” is an anglicization of the Italian fascismo. The adoption of the Italian term was a universal linguistic transformation in the international political vocabulary of the twentieth century. Fascism in Italy was a product of the immediate post–World War I period, founded at a sparsely attended meeting in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan. Three-and-a-half years later, on October 30, 1922, the king of Italy asked the movement’s leader, Benito Mussolini, to form a government after thousands of his supporters had marched on Rome. With Mussolini’s accession, the liberal parliamentary regime that had come into existence in 1860, the product of the Italian Risorgimento, the Italian unification, was doomed. By early 1926, the new regime had consolidated its power to the point where opposition parties were illegal, their leaders for the most part in exile or in prisons; civil liberties, including freedom of the press, suppressed; organized labor crushed; and the process begun of formally merging the organs of government with the structure of the Fascist Party. Justification for the regime’s policies and general brutality was to be found in a mystified vision merging the interests of the nation with Fascism, and in the elevation of the movement’s leader, the Duce, into a figure of nonrational and unquestioned authority.

The most striking parallel between Trump and Mussolini as each was aspiring to power was the ideological goulash that each represented. From the heights of the conservative establishment came the lament that Trump was no conservative.22 Cruz supporters called him a liberal. But liberals were appalled at Trump’s views on everything from tax policy to policing to immigration to civil rights. So too, Mussolini utterly frustrated contemporary stabs at fitting him into established boxes. The very name of his movement stood out from every other contemporary political party—liberals, socialists—in embracing no political principle. His was the ism of the fascio—emphasizing a random collection, originally a handful of straw. The ideology we associate with fascism came later.

Like Mussolini, who had been a radical socialist for many years, Trump made a transit from the left—he is a former Democrat—to the hard right. Each man rose in a political environment conventional wisdom viewed as bipolar. And each conflated the two opposing parties of that bipolarity. Trump managed to attach the intense feeling of betrayal the populists of the Republican right felt toward that party’s establishment to their long-standing resentment toward the Democratic “liberal elite.” He presented himself as the outsider crusading against a single corrupt establishment, the “globalists.” Mussolini used the opposition both conventional poles of Italian politics—liberals and socialists—mounted against Italy’s entering World War I to conflate them as “neutralists” or “defeatists.” As he would write looking back after a decade in power: “Fascism was not given out to the wet nurse of a doctrine elaborated beforehand round a table…. in its first two years it was a movement against all parties.”23

On style points, Trump, as candidate and as president, has given Mussolini a run for his money. Each was dismissed as a clown (pagliacccio!²⁴). Their rallies offered ritualized back-and-forth exchanges between the leader and his supporters.²⁵ Each was famous for exaggerated comic-opera gestures as well as facial contortions. Each introduced a level of vulgarity into political discourse, gutter talk and insults, the likes of which had never been heard before.²⁶ Each had been a notable success in media—Mussolini as a newspaper editor, Trump as a reality TV star. A favored expression in Mussolini’s movement was “Me ne frego,” politely translated as “I don’t give a damn.” The motto of Steve Bannon, who unleashed Trump to be Trump when he came on as the “CEO” of Trump’s campaign, is “Honey badger don’t give a shit.” Mussolini and Trump both disliked shaking hands.²⁷

Significantly, Trump evokes what scholars of fascism call the leadership principle, one of fascism’s most breathtaking departures from democracy’s caucusing, coalition-seeking political culture. Like Hitler, the Führer, Mussolini, the Duce, was regarded as the vessel of the national will, a providential deliverance to the nation. Ann Coulter summarized what his followers have felt about Trump: “Thank God for raising up Donald Trump and giving us a chance to save the country.”²⁸ Trump would meet this adulation with such remarks as “I am the chosen one”; “I am the only one who matters.”

Like Mussolini, who conjured up the glories of the ancient Roman empire, Trump captivates audiences feeling downtrodden by conjuring up a return to a golden age, when America was “great.” “I am your voice,” Trump told his convention audience. As to the state of the country: “I alone can fix it.” One is reminded of a favored slogan of Italian Fascism, one that would be immortalized in framed sayings in classrooms across the country during Mussolini’s twenty years in power: “Mussolini ha sempre ragione.” (Mussolini is always right.)

Like Trump, Mussolini struck his profoundest chord with a class of people suffering from a profound feeling of dispossession. His earliest followers were returning war veterans whose experiences in the trenches of World War I rendered them no longer fit for the traditional village life that awaited them as it had generations of their forbearers.29 The settlement of the war at Versailles, which rejected many of Italy’s war claims, left them also feeling dispossessed of the heroic victory they felt they had earned in battle. Trump’s followers’ strongest sentiment across the board—from the populists to the alt-right—is that of feeling dispossessed of the America they have known. Trump’s candidacy represented a last hope of turning around the direction of a demographically changing country.

La Rivoluzione Mancata

Italian political commentators during the rise of Fascism were dealing with an unknown, an historical novelty. Like current American observers and politicians, they looked for models in contemporary political thinking in seeking to understand the new political permutation that had thrust itself on the country. One such model was what the Italians called la rivoluzione mancata. Translated, it means “the failed revolution” or “the would-be revolution.” As failed revolution, la rivoluzione mancata emerged as an explanation for the shortcomings of the Italian Risorgimento, the 1860–70 unification of the country that among other dysfunctions left a yawning and enduring economic and cultural gap between north and south.³⁰

But it was as would-be revolution that la rivoluzione mancata was invoked by political commentators in 1921 and 1922 who observed the unprecedented tactics, and success, of Mussolini’s Fascist movement. Previously, 1919 and 1920 were the biennio rosso, the “red two years,” in Italy. The biennio rosso saw a remarkable series of workers’ triumphs outside parliament. In the major agricultural zones of Italy, the Po Valley and Apulia, vast numbers of rural day laborers were organized into peasant leagues, establishing a socialist infrastructure that controlled municipal governments and the hiring and wages of farmworkers. In the northern industrial cities labor reached unprecedented power, taking over local administrations and, as in the countryside, transforming the conduct of business, public services, and everyday life and culture. Trade unions won unprecedented contracts in the industrial centers of the north. The Factory Council movement, modeled on Russian soviets, established workers’ control over production. The first national elections after the war returned the Italian Socialist Party as the strongest political party in parliament. Russia had turned into the Soviet Union. Revolution was threatening in Germany. In Italy, the expectation was widespread that the Socialist Party would shortly come to power and that socialist revolution, building on workers’ victories in the factories and in the fields, was imminent.

The tide turned when the April 1920 occupation of the FIAT factory in Turin ended in a lockout and the workers’ capitulation to the company’s intransigence. It was at that point that Fascism found its historical calling. The Fascists would halt the Socialists’ momentum with violence. With truncheons and castor oil, they turned back the accomplishments of the biennio rosso. Fascist squads—its members were known as squadristi or Blackshirts—would wreck offices of Socialists and government administrations the Socialists controlled. These attacks were called spedizioni punitive, punitive expeditions.31 It was a politics of terror, but a terror that was at one with the electoral party; they were part and parcel of the same political organization. The Fascist Party ran candidates at local and national levels, while the squads were unleashed against their political opposition. Fascist leaders, including Mussolini, sat in parliament and spoke openly of a carrot-and-stick policy—insisting they would get their way legally and in line with parliamentary procedure (the carrot) or through violence outside parliament (the stick.)³²

This was something utterly new in a parliamentary regime, in an electoral democracy, and invoking the rivoluzione mancata, the would-be revolution, was an explanation that looked to the biennio rosso for an answer. The Socialists had been making a promise they failed to keep—the would-be socialist revolution. The collapse of the biennio rosso created a political vacuum. Another revolution, a counter-revolution, the fascists, filled the vacuum.

The transition from Obama to Trump follows the would-be rivoluzione mancata model. With the widespread talk of a “transformative” administration on its way, of the coming new New Deal, the Obama government-elect was burdened with great expectations. Time magazine published a cover of Obama as Roosevelt behind the wheel of a 1930s car, smiling a toothy FDR smile, wearing a Rooseveltian hat and glasses with a cigarette in a long holder clamped between his teeth.³³ Equally widespread was the subsequent sense that Obama backed off the revolutionary promise once in office.³⁴ In this view, much is made of Obama’s moderation and his dependence on a veteran economic team bound to the Democrats’ neoliberalism of the Bill Clinton years. Here is a recent opinion piece that is exemplary of this view of Obama:

If he’d been in the mood to press the case, Obama might have found widespread public appetite for the sort of aggressive, interventionist restructuring of the American economy that Franklin D. Roosevelt conjured with the New Deal…. [When] Obama took office … rather than try for a Rooseveltian home run, he bunted: Instead of pushing for an aggressive stimulus to rapidly expand employment and long-term structural reforms in how the economy worked, Obama and his team responded to the recession with a set of smaller emergency measures designed to fix the immediate collapse of financial markets.35

There have been arguments that disappointment in Obama may have played a part in the coming of Donald Trump, a point of view with particular weight among supporters of the energized left wing that began vying for clout in the Democratic Party as it approached the presidential election of 2020.

Incrementalism during the Obama years was small steps to nowhere, ones that far from cementing a new progressive majority actually helped open the door to the populist right.³⁶

Obama’s election created a right-wing populist backlash that was institutionalized in the Tea Party. The idea of the rivoluzione mancata raises the counterfactual question of what direction those populists might have taken if the would-be revolution had materialized. Free-market fundamentalist ideology was held only epidermically by the Tea Party populists. It was relinquished to follow Donald Trump’s nationalism. Might a robust transformative agenda realized under Obama have moved them in a different ideological direction? The meaning of the rivoluzione mancata of 2009–2016 was a fundamental question that confronted the Democratic Party in anticipation of the 2020 election. As Eli Zaretsky noted:

Obama’s articulation of the need for what he called a “new mindset,” not just a new policy, was in good part responsible for his charisma in 2008 (much greater than Trump’s). Obama’s switch from charismatic leader to pragmatic manager once he took office left a void into which Trump stepped eight years later. It is impossible to understand Trump’s historic role without seeing that he is fulfilling, however perversely, the promise of a new beginning that Obama made in 2008.37

Othering Nationalism

All that said, we are not in a moment stalked by a real fascist movement. Fascism’s novel political invention was the marriage of an electoral party with a private militia.³⁸ Without the looming threat of violence that lies at the heart of terrorism, without punitive expeditions, without uniforms or black, brown, or other color shirts, we may have politics that share fascism’s rejection of democratic norms, or even of democracy itself; but we do not have fascism. True, candidate Donald Trump made repeated invitations at his rallies to resort to violence. But this merely produced a few sporadic events. No systematic organized vigilante force, uniformed, shirted, or otherwise, developed around the Trump campaign. Nor did it develop after the inauguration. Fascism’s signature feature—the private militia married to the electoral party—is absent.³⁹

The more accurate historical analogy to the current moment is not the rise of fascism in the wake of World War I. It is instead the rise of a new nationalism, above all in Europe, around the turn of the twentieth century and in the two decades before the war. What arose then was a novel and aggressive nationalism, different from its nationalist predecessors in its thought, appeal, and goals. Earlier nationalisms stemmed from two related motivations. One was a sense of communal destiny, a conviction that atomized states that shared a common language and culture belonged together, represented a higher moral and political unity: a nation. German unification, the 1871 pulling together of dozens of political entities under the leadership of Prussia, is illustrative of this national destiny impulse. On the Italian peninsula, this sense of national destiny was accompanied by the second motivation: to be rid of rule—Austrian, Bourbon—by those not of the nation. This motivation, similar to what would come to animate movements of national liberation in the second half of the twentieth century, had had an earlier and revolutionary expression in the 1823 Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans.

These were inward-looking nationalisms, focused on bringing political and geographical reality in line with a cultural imperative. When the new turn-of-the-century nationalism looked inward, it was with a novel, quarrelsome, and often confrontational attitude: those living inside the nation, but not judged part of the nation—culturally, linguistically or, eventually, racially—came to be seen as injuries to the very feeling of the national community. Tolerance for the presence of “Others” became a perishing value among the new nationalists. Intolerance could be expressed in assertions of superiority or in scapegoating—the “Other” responsible for the dysfunctions of the emerging modern world. Intolerance was finally an expulsive itch—the desire for what would come to be called “ethnic cleansing” a century later. At an extreme, the “Other” could come to be regarded as “the enemy within.” After World War I, most of these nationalist movements became absorbed by their countries’ fascist movements.

Nationalism can be an elusive concept. How, for example, does it differ from patriotism, the feeling of identity and pride in one’s country? Certainly, nationalism is an exaggeration of patriotic feeling. But it is more than that. It is a statement about how the world works. It is a theory of history. Or better, a theory of history with a master concept, an ideological key—the nation. The most radical of the new nationalists at the turn of the twentieth century regarded themselves as revolutionaries. Often—and not without irony—the nationalists would transpose revolutionary socialist thinking into their image of what their revolution would look like.

Marx’s well-known theory of history (and theory of revolution) is driven by a master concept, class. In Marx’s familiar drama, a rising capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, overthrew feudalism. And the bourgeoisie would get its comeuppance at the hands of a rising class that they themselves had spawned, the proletariat. The “motor force” of history is class conflict. As a first approximation, this new nationalism resembled the Marxist theory of history where the concept of class is simply replaced by the concept of nation. And history is the story of struggle for dominance among nations. For example, the Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910, called Italy a “proletarian nation.” Marx’s dialectics remained intact, but “nation” was slipped into the theoretical slot “class” had formerly occupied. With nation as its master concept, the motor force of history was no longer “class struggle” but the rise and fall of nations. For the nationalists, the nation provided the basis for both a theory of revolution and a theory of history. When class struggle morphs into the struggle between nations, revolution in this worldview occurs through war.

The new nationalism swept across borders, taking root largely among young men, often artists, who felt profoundly alienated from the unheroic possibilities they saw on offer in their societies. The new nationalism was vital. It engaged the fierce us/them group emotions—loyalty inwards, aggression outwards—that characterize human relations at simpler sociological levels like the family or the tribe. What was new at the turn of the twentieth century, and has been resurrected in recent years, was attaching these passions to the nation. This experiment of the early 1900s demanded that what had traditionally been feelings directed toward discrete groups, usually no bigger than a city, now moved to something more abstract. A new, and often mystical, symbolism was required to encompass the new object, the nation, within the sphere of human passion, human worship. Yuri Slezkine, a historian who specializes in understanding the place of outgroups in the face of Eastern European nationalism, writes:

The worship of the new state as an old tribe (commonly known as nationalism) became the new opium of the people. Total strangers became kinsmen on the basis of common languages, origins, ancestors, and rituals duly standardized and disseminated for the purpose. The nation was family writ large: ascriptive and blood-bound but stretched well beyond human memory or face recognition, as only a metaphor could be.40

In his exceptional study Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske called this “politics in a new key.” Why? Because in both style and substance the new nationalists acted outside the bounds of what was known across the left-right spectrum in conventional politics—just as Donald Trump has comported himself from day one in his presidential campaign, throughout the Republican and presidential debates, in his rallies, and into his administration, defining an American version of politics in a new key. In Vienna, the left were the Social Democrats; the right were the liberals. Schorske observes:

Though one might reject a socialist’s position, one could argue with him in the same language. To the liberal mind, the Social Democrat was unreasonable, but not irrational.41

In 1994, the English-American historian of modern Europe, Tony Judt, looked at the rise of nationalism in the former Soviet bloc in the wake of the end of the Cold War. What he saw was the beginning of the movements that have now taken center stage across Europe, Asia, and the United States. Judt called the phenomenon “the new old nationalism.” He wrote:

The nature of this nationalism is to seek out the Other inside the body politic. From Estonia to Romania, no sooner are small countries back on the map than their first order of business is to set up language tests to determine who is and is not a “real” Latvian, Ukrainian, etc.⁴²

In Trump’s worldview, that of a familial rather than a corporate businessman, the nationalist theory of history as the struggle among nations remains intact, but the struggle has been transposed to international trade. Now, the key to reversing the fortunes of the American working class lay in renegotiated trade deals. This is the guiding principle of the nationalist America-First ideology in Donald Trump’s politics. The likes of China and Mexico are not trading partners, but economic enemies. Wilbur Ross is Trump’s secretary of commerce. Peter Navarro is the director of the White House National Trade Council Trump initiated, modeled on the National Security Council.⁴³ Together Ross and Navarro wrote the 2016 Trump campaign’s economic plan. In it they challenged their critics as follows:

Those who suggest that Trump trade policies will ignite a trade war ignore the fact that we are already engaged in a trade war.44

In May 2019, in a Washington Post op-ed, Steve Bannon made clear the Manichaean policy implications under this worldview: “We’re in an economic war with China. It’s futile to compromise.”⁴⁵

The Nationalist International

In 2014, a year before Trump announced his run for the presidency, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary and arguably the world’s foremost advocate and practitioner of illiberal democracy—regimes that retain and claim legitimacy through elections, but systematically curtail civil liberties and institutional checks and balances—offered his view that illiberalism was the uniquely viable capitalist path forward after the world financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession. Orbán argued that “the great global race … is underway to create the most competitive state.” In his view countries operating under the rules of international organizations, like the European Union, or ones that tolerate the functioning of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their societies, would not advance themselves in the current version of the struggle among nations that is the motor force of history in the nationalist perspective.

Societies that are built on the state organization principle of liberal democracy will probably be incapable of maintaining their global competitiveness in the upcoming decades and will instead probably be scaled down unless they are capable of change.⁴⁶

Orbán argued that there were “three great changes in the global regime during the 20th century:” one each at the end of the two world wars, 1918 and 1945; and one at the end of the Cold War, 1989. After 1989, the reigning global regime, à la Fukuyama, became liberal democracy. But that changed, according to Orbán, after the global financial crisis of 2008. In his view, though it was more subtle, the aftermath of the financial crisis was of the same world-historical moment as the end of the twentieth-century wars. Liberal democracy was (and is) being overtaken.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto. Their view was that as capitalism had overtaken feudalism, what Europe was then living through was the process of capitalism being overtaken by its dialectical successor. Thus, they began the manifesto with their famous opening sentence: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.”

It is not so much a specter as an oxymoron that is now haunting Europe. And the Americas. And points beyond. That oxymoron is the Nationalist International.

At the international level, too, the current synthesis of ideological nationalism and anti-immigrant populism of which Trumpism is a part differs from twentieth-century fascism. Unlike Communism which developed a Communist International, and unlike Socialism which developed a Socialist International, there was never a viable Fascist International. There are several reasons for this, but one reason, given the nature of identity formation, stands out from the others. Nationalism based purely on the nation-state breeds identities that necessarily come into conflict with similarly defined nationalisms. This is especially true when those nationalisms are bellicose and assert the superiority of one’s own nation.

It is hard, in short, to have comradely relations when one nation calls itself the master race and another the Mediterranean Superman.

But today’s version of populist nationalism has overcome this problem. How? The nationalists in country after country share a Common Other. And through their “othering,” the Nationalist International has forged a Common Identity. This is the crucial difference in identity formation that distinguishes current populist nationalism from the fascist nationalisms of the interwar years of the twentieth century. With a Common Other you get a Common Identity. With a Common Identity you have the makings of a Nationalist International.

The shared Other of the Nationalist International are immigrants and refugees. Almost always dark skinned. Often of different religions. And largely hailing from places like the Middle East and Africa. The USA has an othering specialization in refugees and immigrants from Latin America. The Nationalist International’s political opposition are the “politically correct” multiculturalists and feminists, whom the nationalists often call Cultural Marxists, or the global liberal elite, or simply the globalists, whose power and international organizations—like the European Union—are in the nationalists’ crosshairs.

The shared identity of the Nationalist International, what its various branches see themselves standing for, goes by many names. Sometimes they are the defenders of Western civilization. Or of Western culture.47 Or European civilization. One American alt-right group called itself Identity Europa. In Europe, as well as in the United States, some simply call themselves Identitarians. Or Generation Identity.

In the same vein, branches of the Nationalist International see themselves as the defenders of Christian civilization. Or the defenders of traditional values. These are the movements that breed a special animus for gays and feminists. In Poland, the ruling party, Law and Justice, grounds its populist nationalism in its Catholic culture. At its party’s convention in March 2019, the party’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, declared war on the “gay threat”:

It comes down to, as we know today, sexualization of children from the earliest childhood. We need to fight this. We need to defend the Polish family. We need to defend it furiously because it’s a threat to civilization, not just for Poland but for the entire Europe, for the entire civilization that is based on Christianity.48

At the top of this food chain is Putin’s Russia. More than any other populist leader in Europe, Putin is operating with a geopolitical strategy in mind. He loosely follows the theories of his “brain,” the eccentric political philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is something of a cross between Steve Bannon and Rasputin.⁴⁹ Dugin’s strategy calls for controlling the Eurasian land mass and North Africa, and is based on the 1904 paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” by the British father of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, who called this, the largest landmass on the planet, the “world island.” Mackinder’s most famous pronouncement was:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.⁵⁰

Dugin’s is the thinking behind Putin’s projects like the takeover of Crimea and the war of attrition in eastern Ukraine. The goal here is to expand Russian control as far as possible back into the footprint of the former Soviet Union. The complementary strategy has been to undermine the power and solidarity of Russia’s neighbors to the west.51 As Michael McFaul, Stanford political scientist and, between 2012 and 2014, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, argues, this means subverting the alliances that hold the liberal world together:

The end of the liberal international order … that’s what he’s aiming to do. The breakup of states as you have in the UK, the breakup of alliances and NATO, the breakup of the European Union, those are all things that Putin thinks are in his national interest. Tragically, he had some wins lately.

McFaul sees this vision as inextricably tied to an “ideological affinity” Trump shares with Putin: “[They’re] both kind of a self-styled conservative, self-styled nationalist, anti-multilateralist, kind of ‘nation-state should come first.’”⁵²

At the far end of the Trump coalition, at the white-supremacist alt-right end, Putin is revered. Those who focus on opposing feminism and multiculturalism often call themselves defenders of “tradition.” In 2016, Matthew Heimbach, who then headed the alt-right Traditional Workers Party, called Putin “the leader of the free world,” and “Russia … kind of the axis for nationalists.”⁵³ In the same way that the border between the alt-right and the alt-lite blurs in the USA, as indeed in the Trump coalition itself, what is called traditionalism elides into white nationalism. A report on the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin observed:

He developed an almost religious infatuation with Vladimir Putin, or “Czar Putin I, defender of human civilization,” as Anglin called him. For Anglin, Putin was a great white savior, a “being of immense power.”⁵⁴

Alt-right “founder” Richard Spencer called Russia “the sole white power in the world.”55 America’s most well-known KKK figure, David Duke, viewed Russia as holding the “key to white survival.”⁵⁶ Sam Dickson, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan lawyer who frequently speaks at alt-right gatherings, summarized the view of Putin’s Russia as the improbable lodestar of white nationalists:

I’ve always seen Russia as the guardian at the gate, as the easternmost outpost of our people…. They are our barrier to the Oriental invasion of our homeland and the great protector of Christendom. I admire the Russian people. They are the strongest white people on earth.”⁵⁷

Whiteness is the most virulent category of identity in the Nationalist International. The gulf in toxicity between German Nazism and Italian Fascism derived from Nazism’s definition of the Other, the Jew, in racial terms. For the Nationalist International, whiteness is, in a perverse manner, the logical final category of identity, where the definition of “us” versus the Other becomes essentialized and its most capacious. Focusing on current dark-skinned immigrants and refugees has neutralized older, sometimes ancient, national antagonisms.⁵⁸ It was only in 2018 that Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy changed its name from the Northern League, which had been its name since it was established in 1991 as an alliance of six regionalist parties, the most prominent being the Lombard League. Its entry onto the national stage in the wake of the end of the Cold War had a devastating effect on the Communist Party in the industrial north of Italy, where it lustily ate into its vote. The Other of the Northern League was southern Italians; the Northern League argued for northern Italy to separate as the state of Padania from the south of Italy, which they ruthlessly characterized as a backward country full of thieves and worse. Now—behold populism’s ideological fungibility—as the League, southern Italians are in the League’s fold.59 This follows the pattern in the United States where white immigrants—the Irish, the Italians—have moved over time from despised newcomers to within the white sphere. It is a story exemplified in Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 study, How the Irish Became White.⁶⁰

The sense of solidarity within the Nationalist International is robust. They meet with regularity and appear to love being photographed together. Steve Bannon, whose grasp of contemporary nationalism was key in putting Donald Trump in the White House, has traveled in Europe and Latin America acting as nothing short of an evangelist for the Nationalist International, or what he calls “the Movement.”⁶¹ But above all, these groups are networked. The Nationalist International, like much of contemporary commerce of all kinds, is a creature of the age of the internet and social media.

This has resulted in cross-fertilization of ideas across the Atlantic. The chant in Charlottesville that so chillingly exposed the core of America’s alt-right movement was “You will not replace us.” Replacement theory is an import from right-wing thinkers in France, who began talking about Le Grand Remplacement decades ago and now talk about the French having been “invaded,” suffering “reverse colonization,” or even ethnic “genocide.” In Spain, the Vox party entered Parliament for the first time in April 2019 with the imported-from-America slogan “Make Spain Great Again.”⁶² Meanwhile in countries like Italy, Poland, and Ukraine, there are now activists marching and organizing in the name of whiteness.⁶³ Culturally and politically this was inconceivable in these and other European countries in years past, but white nationalism and white identity are this era’s baleful imports from the USA.

The Fascistogenic Moment and the Bookends of the Industrial Age

At the turn of the twentieth century, the industrial system was restructuring societies wholesale. It was creating the material circumstances we in the advanced societies take for granted: electrification, modern sanitation and medicine, automobiles, airplanes, radio, mass circulation, newspapers, cinema, and much else.

But it did not come easily. Populations were displaced on a massive scale. Life patterns that had been stable for generations were disrupted as factories demanded labor. Cities grew as people migrated from the countryside and struggled to adjust to rigid clock-based schedules. Life was raw in the new urban settings. Emerging cities not only fed the factories’ manpower needs, but also introduced new problems of civil order, novel forms of delinquency, and often ghastly public health problems. Scapegoating seemed to provide an answer to these ills. The very presence of the Other explained lives that were bleak and grim. The new nationalism came into being.

In the 1960s and 1970s writers like Barrington Moore, Nicos Poulantzas, and A.F.K. Organski analyzed the conditions that made societies ripe for successful fascist movements.64 Fundamental to these theories was citing a national economic structure that had a great disparity in terms of modernization. Post–World War I Italy and Germany both had systems of agricultural land holdings (latifondisti and Junkers) largely unchanged since feudalism. This was in contrast to highly developed economic sectors like the automotive sector and aeronautics. These were countries that held within them populations profoundly differing in the very stages of economic development they experienced. One stage was the modern, with its severe growing pains. The other was traditional society, largely rural, which was suffering not simply economically but from a sense of disruption and displacement on a historical scale. In these theories, the co-existence of such mismatched sectors in a single country, sectors manifestly at different stages of economic development, created a fascistogenic potential: the mismatched stages offered the most fertile ground for successful fascist movements.

Structurally, something similar is happening in the twenty-first-century United States and much of the West. Industrial systems that offered livable wages and self-respect have degenerated into rust belts. Manufacturing itself has become robotized. The thriving parts of national economies have migrated to financial and information sectors. In the United States, it is as though the dramatis personae of the modern world that was built between the turn of the twentieth century and the early 1970s have parted company—the largely coastal and metropolitan professional, educated classes have moved on to the post-industrial information economy; the laboring classes have not only not moved on, they have fallen backwards, out of the modern industrial system, with no ready replacement. It is the economic-stage disparity, the fascistogenic formula, the likes of Moore and Poulantzas were talking about.

These eras of mismatched economic stages are the bookends of the industrial age, present at the age’s coming and going. In each case, the age has been characterized politically by the rise of nationalist movements “in a new key”—othering nationalism. At the end of the industrial age, as at its beginning, aggressive nationalist scapegoating has found a fertile audience. In the United States it was Donald Trump who gave voice to the scape-goating: Foreign countries are stealing our jobs. Illegal Mexican immigrants are not only wrecking the labor market or living off the dole, “they’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists.”65 Muslims are infiltrating the country, bringing sharia law and threatening national security. As Americans watched the election returns that gave Trump the presidency, his eked-out margins in the very heart of blue-collar America—Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan (the home of the United Auto Workers, the very symbol of working-class prosperity and advancement!)—we were watching the industrial age come full circle. The conditions that gave rise to aggressive and othering nationalism at the dawn of the industrial age were again revolutionizing a shaky liberal order.

At this point in America and the West, it makes sense to look back and ask what brought about the transition from a fas-cistogenic moment into fascism proper. The answer to this is quite straightforward. What transpired in the passage from the early-twentieth-century blossoming of othering nationalism to the rise of fascism was war. It was a mere four months after the armistice that ended World War I that Fascism was born in the meeting in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro. The March on Rome, Fascism’s coming to power, came three-and-a-half years later—less than the duration of one presidential term in the United States. The nationalist thinking that had engaged the handful of activists before the war schooled the young men by the millions in the trenches. When dissatisfaction and a yawning sense of displacement overtook the boys who returned to civilian life, the enemy was now on the home front and the way to defeat them that came ready to hand was as a militia.

One of Donald Trump’s many occasions for clarification during the campaign was in reference to his remarking “I love war.”66 Commentators have speculated that, like other authoritarians, he might try to cure sagging popularity or divert attention from scandal by going to war.⁶⁷ If Americans’ anxieties about the dangers of fascism are to amount to a real emergency, war is the likely intervening variable to make it happen.