Fascism, Trumpism, & American Freedom
Trump's return to the White House must make Americans re-examine the meaning of freedom.
In August of 2015, I wrote “Ok, This Trump Thing Isn’t Funny Anymore” for The Daily Beast, and this was one of the first mainstream American news articles that compared then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to fascism.
My story went viral with people commending me for being bold enough to compare Trump to fascists. Yet over the last decade, it has remained abundantly clear to me that American society did not grasp the full message of my article. As President-elect Trump prepares to start his second term in the White House, we have all become keenly aware that any semblance of humor that could have resided within a Trump candidacy in 2015 has long since evaporated.
When I wrote the piece, Trump had only been a presidential candidate for two months, and most Americans were still laughing at his descent down the golden escalator that launched his campaign in June. The idea of this tacky, faux-billionaire being an American fascist or the president seemed absurd to most people, and the political establishment assumed that he would disappear and return to selling steaks by 2016. Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush and son of President George H. W. Bush, was the firm favorite to win the Republican nomination. Oh, how the times have changed.
Despite most Americans perceiving Trump to be a joke, I found his rhetoric to be incredibly alarming; especially the vitriol he spewed at immigrants, Latinos–Mexicans in particular–, and people of color, and the violence he encouraged amongst his supporters. All of his rhetoric echoed fascism to me, but much of America dismissed the significance of his words because they believed that he would disappear. There was this misguided belief that the “inherent goodness” of America and the American people would solve our Trump problem. We did not understand that Trump is an inevitable outcome of our society rather than a flaw that would be easily and naturally fixed.
Fascism, it should be noted, is far more than hate speech. Fascism is also the violent actions that come after the speech. Trump had only been a candidate for two months and his supporters had not yet engaged in violence. For many people, labeling him as a fascist seemed premature. There needed to be violence for the label to stick. In August of 2015, two Trump supporters beat up a Latino man and told him that he should get deported. After this attack, my editors commissioned my story, but it was made abundantly clear to me that I could only compare Trump to fascists and not explicitly call him one.
My writing compared Trump to fascism, but the story’s main point explored why American society was not alarmed by any of this. Trump could say fascist things, but not be a fascist. His supporters could engage in fascist violence, and now we could compare him to fascism but not label him as one. Fascism was always described as a foreign, European problem. Fascism was something that could potentially arrive in America, but that arrival would always be tomorrow and never today. Instead, Trump’s violent rhetoric would be labeled as patriotism or some mild, catch-all term that celebrated whiteness and American values.
Over the next ten years, the United States continued to miss the point of my story and assumed that associating Trump with fascism would be enough to sound the alarm and prevent his ascent to the White House. This month it has become abundantly clear that a majority of American voters do not care that Trump is a fascist, and I believe I know why.
My theory at the time, which has remained unchanged, was that Americans did not recoil at Trump’s fascism because his American iteration of fascism is in keeping with terror-filled American norms that our society aspires to both justify and ignore. Trump’s rhetoric echoed the dog whistles of President Richard Nixon, the violence and racism of segregationists and the Jim Crow South, the terror and political maneuvering of the Redeemers and former confederates who opposed Reconstruction, and the normalization of oppression by the pro-slavery Americans of the antebellum South.
These are the overtly racist eras of America’s past that we know have decisively shaped the culture and functioning of this nation. And remarkably, we also have been indoctrinated to ignore, justify, and normalize the terror and racism that fueled this thinking - to pretend it does not exist even though it clearly does. Trump spoke and still speaks this abhorrent language, and American society has long decided that this language is okay.
Trump’s words were familiar, but because American society did not have a word for adequately labeling and defining this threat, we were reluctant to use a word coined by the opponents of Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. Most significantly, we did not want to believe that the threat posed by Trump came from within our American identity. It was more comfortable for Americans to treat this threat as an anomaly or aberration that could be dismissed or ignored.
When you cannot name the threat before you, it will become almost impossible to defeat it because you do not fully understand the threat. The American public is waking up to this reality following the results of the presidential election. The problem that our society faces is bigger than fascism and the normalized terror of American life. The problem resides in how we understand the meaning of freedom, and for a democracy that celebrates freedom, this problem challenges the foundation of our entire society.
In 2015, I first posed this question and in 2021 with the publication of my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I continued with this question and proposed more answers. This piece is a continuation of this decade-long process.
America’s Violent Freedom From
In my piece for The Reconstructionist titled “How Juneteenth Redefines Freedom,” I introduced my theory regarding the distinction between freedom from and freedom with, and articulated how many American conflicts derive from our reliance on a freedom from.
When Americans think about freedom we almost always think about having a freedom from something. When the American colonists gained their independence from the British, they won a freedom from the British and now they were free to live away from British terror and taxation without representation. There is nothing problematic about winning a hard-fought freedom from an oppressor, but a problem arises when your society is incapable of progressing beyond a freedom from the Other. What must come next is the creation of a freedom with other people.
When you have a freedom with, you understand that your freedom needs to be used in a way that sustains and nurtures the people, environment, and community that you are expressing your freedom with or within. A freedom with is not about being able to freely express yourself in any way that you please because you are free from your oppressors. This is a reckless, irresponsible, and immature expression of freedom and this is how many people express their freedom from. A freedom from will result in people expressing their freedoms in ways that pull them apart from the people they need to be with.
A freedom from is the freedom that you can get when you have been liberated from an oppressor, and a freedom with is the responsible application of that freedom so that you and others can live sustainable and nurturing lives. When a free society does not cultivate a freedom with, it is inevitable that their dependence on a freedom from will result in violence and the erasure of freedoms.
This regression into violence occurs because the irresponsibility of freedom from will result in catastrophic accidents and violence as the society’s irresponsible citizens make preventable mistakes as an expression of their freedoms. When their expressed freedoms create chaos and discord, the people will not want to blame themselves or their freedoms. Instead they will blame a group of people they consider to be the Other. They will not want to believe that freedom has caused chaos, so now they must blame the chaos on another group. These people will then claim that their problems will be solved so long as they are free from the Other.
Black people were forcefully brought to this nation so that they could be the perpetual Other, so it should surprise no one that Black Americans, and other Americans of color and immigrants, are normally blamed for America’s problems.
The United States’ reliance on a freedom from is how Trump’s demonizing of women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and people of color, as well as his celebration of violence are often described as both an expression of freedom and a means for preserving freedom. A freedom from needs a group that it can blame for its problems and violence preserves the division that sustains and creates the Other.
According to a freedom from, people will obtain freedom when they have been liberated from the Other, but the irresponsibility of a freedom from means that it will always need to create an Other that it can blame for the calamitous outcomes of its irresponsibility.
White America has almost always embraced a freedom from and this is why Trump’s rhetoric resonates not just with many white Americans, but also with many of the immigrant groups that he demonizes. These immigrants came to America for American freedom. They came here to get our freedom from, so when Trump and the Republican Party demonize new arrivals to America, immigrants will just convince themselves that they are not the Other and that Republicans are talking about another Other.
The distinction between a freedom from and a freedom with is vital to Reconstructionism because Reconstruction from 1865-1877 was the first time that the United States attempted to mature beyond the irresponsibility of a freedom from and to a freedom with. Our national agenda was no longer an iteration of freedom from Black people and instead became a freedom with Black people. And America’s freedom with included taking responsibility for the chaos and injustice caused by a freedom from and providing Black Americans with the rights and government services they needed to live as equal and free Americans with white Americans.
Civil rights, racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights in America, all derive from Reconstruction and all of this is an extension of a freedom with. But America’s freedom with is always undermined and negated by America’s historical freedom from mentality. Trump and the Republican Party attack DEI, affirmative action, and abortion rights because these policies are an extension of a freedom with and conservatives perceive them as an attack on their irresponsible freedom from.
When Trump and his supporters lose their freedom from they believe that freedom has disappeared, when in fact, true freedom is actually beginning.
Freedom From and Fascism
To understand fascism and why many Americans seem unfazed by fascism, you must first understand freedom from.
Fascism thrives through the cultivation and oppression of an Other. Mussolini and his National Fascist Party first targeted their political opposition and turned them into the Other. Freedom would arrive through suppressing their opposition, and through this oppression he made Italy a one-party state and transitioned from being the Prime Minister into a dictator. The transition from democracy to dictatorship was an expression of freedom from.
Mussolini’s foreign policy was based on the doctrine of Spazio vitale meaning “living space,” and they aspired to colonize parts of Africa so that Italians could live there, but they did not want to live equally alongside Libyans. They wanted Libyans to be the Other within their own land, and Italians could freely live in Libya and free from Libyans.
Likewise, Hitler’s ascent in Germany and the rise of the Nazi Party follows the same trajectory as Mussolini. It was a political movement professing a freedom from something or someone, and it had a foreign policy based on German people living outside of Germany but free from the indigenous people of the lands they attacked. Hitler’s foreign policy was called Lebensraum, which also means “living space,” and Germany attempted to colonize parts of Africa and all of Eastern Europe.
And in both Italy and Germany, Mussolini and Hitler used the United States’ example of Manifest Destiny as a justification for Spazio vitale and Lebensraum. The United States’ embrace of Manifest Destiny is arguably best depicted in the 1872 painting “American Progress” by John Gast. The painting depicts an angelic-looking white woman leading American colonizers westward as indigenous peoples are pushed out of the frame and off of their land. American colonizers moved westward because they needed more “living space” and they also celebrated a freedom from indigenous peoples.
The domestic and foreign policy agendas of Mussolini and Hitler champion a freedom from, so the comparisons to Trump are logical, but I believe that the histories of these nations helps explain why fascism remains a foreign concept for Americans.
In the mid-1800s, around the same time as Reconstruction in the United States, Italy and Germany engaged in massive political and social unification projects that would eventually create the nations of Italy and Germany. Prior to these movements, Italian and German people shared the same cultures and languages, but lived under the control of various kingdoms, principalities, and duchies. Italy’s Risorgimento and Germany’s Deutsche Einigung were movements driven by Italians and Germans not only wanting to be free from authoritarian monarchies, but to be free with fellow Italians and Germans.
By the 1930s, when Mussolini and Hitler rose to power, these nations were still trying to maintain their freedom with and the regression into a freedom from was both alarmingly easy and a betrayal of their shared freedom. Fascism and Nazism turned segments of the collective into the Other to fuel their freedom from. German Jews are the most obvious example of a group of Europeans who were suddenly transformed into the Other so that the Nazis could express their freedom from.
Fascism and Nazism destroy freedom in the name of preserving freedom, but the only way to adequately understand this fact is to know that they destroy a freedom with in order to preserve a freedom from.
Fascism in Europe feels more traumatic and alarming than America’s freedom from because in Europe, Europeans get arbitrarily transformed into the Other but the United States has always had a designated Other and we have never had a prolonged commitment towards creating and maintaining a freedom with.
Americans are comfortable with and not alarmed by fascism and Trump’s rhetoric because our freedom from fuels and creates fascism. The United States has championed our freedom from since our inception and our normalization of the terror and racism it creates has made our society disinterested in acknowledging and naming the destruction it causes. Our embrace of our freedom from makes Americans believe that they never need to be responsible for the terror and trauma that our society has caused, and these freedom from Americans also shun the responsibility that comes with a freedom with.
To combat the rise, return, and abiding presence of America’s unnamed iteration of fascism we need to better understand the meaning of our freedoms and commit ourselves to finally building a society committed to preserving a freedom with and not a freedom from.
@Barrett, is the distinction between selecting 'freedom with' over 'freedom from' analogous to selecting collective well-being over individualism?