Their Numbers Will Grow When The Freshmen Are Sworn In
I don’t understand why so many serious scholars still seem reluctant to come right out and say that the Republican Party is a vehicle for fascism. In a German essay on the topic— What Is Fascism?— the closest Ruth Ben-Ghiat came was to say that “It’s time to accept that the GOP, which was complicit with Trump's Jan. 6 attempted authoritarian takeover, has become a party that furthers Fascist values and practices.”
She wrote that Robert Paxton’s 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism offered “the most comprehensive definition” of fascism that she has found. Remember, Paxton wrote this a dozen years before the political rise of Trump and long before America had ever heard of Marjorie Traitor Greene, Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar or QAnon.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Sound anything like January 6, 2021? “The Jan. 6 coup attempt,” wrote Ben-Ghiat in her essay, “changed Paxton's mind about whether Donald Trump and Trumpism can be called Fascist. That brought Paxton into line with scholars such as Jason Stanley, who deems Fascism ‘a political method’ that can appear anytime, anywhere, if conditions are right. This line of thought risks emptying the term of its historical specificity but is essential for understanding our new authoritarian age and the risks we face in America today.”
When Communism fell in Europe and the Cold War ended, it created the conditions for the rise of a new right. In 1994, Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right government brought Italy’s neo-Fascist party (rebaptized as the National Alliance, or AN) to power for the first time in Europe since 1945. That meant Fascism had to be redefined.
To appeal to a mainstream public, AN head Gianfranco Fini wore business suits, shunned fascist salutes, and made Mussolini into a Churchill-like figure: “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.” Berlusconi helped out by claiming in 2003 that “Mussolini never killed anyone, he sent people into confinement to have vacations,” referring to Fascist prisons on islands like Ponza where torture had been practiced.
Cleansed of its violence, Fascism could now become “post-Fascism,” as Fini called it— just another form of patriotic and conservative politics. This is a line that neo-Fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is now using to whitewash her extremist-filled government.
That’s why we must call Fascism out today where we see it. Knowing its history makes that easier. Tim Snyder makes a convincing case that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is engaged in a genocidal war against Ukraine, can be considered a Fascist, and that we should not "limit our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust."
In fact, Fascism operates differently today, which is why its definition is in flux once more. As in Viktor Orban's Hungary, right-wing one-party states have given way to "electoral autocracies" in which elections continue but threat and detentions, voter suppression, and domestication of the media produce the results the leader needs to stay in office.
Orban’s name for his governance, “illiberal democracy,” is his way of escaping the Fascist label. Yet there are profound continuities between the policies and platforms of leaders like Orban and those of historic Fascists, from personality cults to racist demographic policies designed to protect "White Christian civilization,” to antisemitism and persecution of LGBTQ populations.
As I observed in a recent Lucid essay, Trump has long kept the Fascist flame burning in America. He started his 2016 campaign by retweeting a racist meme from the Nazi outlet The Daily Stormer (the publication of Andrew Anglin, whose Twitter account has just been restored by Elon Musk).
Trump brought Mussolini admirer and far-right operative Steve Bannon into the White House to launch his own “revolution of reaction.” In 2017 his administration gave Holocaust deniers a big gift: a Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that made no mention of Jews.
The GOP politicians who now feign outrage at Trump's association with Nazis such as Nick Fuentes had no problem with his mainstreaming of extremism, perhaps because some of them are extremists themselves (Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene have appeared with Fuentes).
It’s time to accept that the GOP, which was complicit with Trump's Jan. 6 attempted authoritarian takeover, has become a party that furthers Fascist values and practices. That means the hate crimes that have skyrocketed in America since 2016 will likely continue to expand.
However we define Fascism, remembering that its essence is violence is more important than ever.
Whether you are ready or not to admit that the GOP has morphed into a fascist party, it’s impossible to deny that a great many Republican members of Congress are full-on fascists, even if some of them are uneducated and stupid enough— take Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert for example— to even understand what that means. But there are more fascists in Congress than just Boebert and Cawthorn, the former nearly rejected for reelection and the latter turned away by Republican primary voters despite Trump’s plea that they forgive and give him another chance.
The number of outright fascists in the House is about to grow with the addition of newly elected members like Anna Paulina Luna (FL), Ryan Zinke (MT), Eli Crane (AZ), Andy Ogles (TN), and Mike Ezell (MS). And we’ll see what the already infamous George Santos of Long Island decides to act out as. But among the hold-over from the 117th Congress, there are 28 outright, unadulterated fascists— the real thing. Are any of these yours?
Andy Biggs (AZ)
Marjorie Traitor Greene (GA)
Lauren Boebert (CO)
Scott Perry (PA)
Paul Gosar (AZ)
Gym Jordan (OH)
Barry Moore (AL)
Ronnie Jackson (TX)
Dan Bishop (NC)
Matt Gaetz (FL)
Bob Good (VA)
Mike Johnson (LA)
Mary Miller (IL)
Chip Roy (TX)
Matt Rosendale (MT)
Andrew Clyde (GA)
Ben Cline (VA)
Alex Mooney (WV)
Mark Green (TN)
Ralph Norman (SC)
Barry Loudermilk (GA)
Clay Higgins (LA)
Troy Nehls (TX)
Byron Donalds (FL)
Beth Van Duyne (TX)
Michael Cloud (TX)
Claudia Tenney (NY)
Gary Palmer (AL)
