Is the USA a Fascist State?

BRAD EVANS: Despite those who argue that mainstream fascism has been consigned to the pages of history, you continue to insist upon the need for a more urgent and considered appreciation of the term. This seems altogether more prescient given what’s happening in the United States today. With this in mind, I’d like to begin by asking you what exactly do you understand the term “fascism” to mean? And do you think it’s useful to speak about fascism in the 21st century?

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Fascism as it unfolded in the 1920s and 1930s is a political system that depends on dictatorship, on a one-party state led by a charismatic leader. It is a system of state-organized violence that preaches xenophobic nationalism, racism, class unity rather than class conflict, anti-feminism, and imperialism.

Mussolini, its creator, had been a socialist, and the original fascist movement he founded in 1919 took some elements from socialism: the idea of revolution as a lever of historical change, for example. Yet the idea, parroted by the right-wingers from Jair Bolsonaro to Dinesh D’Souza today that fascism was a left-wing movement is absurd. Leftists were the fascists’ earliest and most consistent targets.

I leave the term fascist for these interwar movements, because to say that fascism is back today paradoxically lulls many people, who associate fascism with a regime that allows no opposition parties or press, to say, “Well, you see? We don’t have that here. There’s nothing to worry about.”

That doesn’t mean that fascist tactics have not endured, from personality cults to the designation of state enemies, to myriad other things. In August 2016, to warn about just such recurrences, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the similarities between Trump and Mussolini.

But today, authoritarianism works differently: it keeps a veneer of democracy, allowing (and then rigging) elections; it keeps a pocket of opposition; it may not use much physical violence, opting for threat and legal harassment, as Viktor Orbán does in Hungary. I call this “new authoritarianism,” others call it “electoral authoritarianism,” or, Orbán’s own self-serving term, “illiberal democracy.” We are still searching for a language to describe what is unfolding.

BE : Like many people, I have been horrified watching what’s been happening in the United States over the past few months as it moved from pandemic to an intense period of racial unrest. When describing these conditions, Cornel West even went as far as to call Trump a “neo-fascist.” What has most concerned you over the past few months?

RBG : The widespread police repression happening now is the outcome of deep-seated racial hatred, long encouraged by the GOP and extremist tendencies with footholds in police and other security forces. It took a president like Trump, who encouraged those racist and extremist ideas from the moment he appeared on the political scene, to make these rogue actors feel they were legitimated by the White House and the Department of Justice — a powerful thing indeed. When Trump and Attorney General William Barr say that Antifa will be defined as a terrorist group, it’s a threat with no legal standing, since Antifa is not an organization. But it’s an important message to the police, National Guard, military, and other constituencies, telling them that they should feel confident that they can treat protestors as though they were terrorists — i.e., with maximum force.

Without a doubt, these attitudes have their roots in fascism. I would say that Trump’s administration has fascist elements, but I prefer the more capacious term authoritarianism, which encompasses both fascism and right-wing regimes like Augusto Pinochet’s, which used the military for domestic repression.

BE : Mindful of these important distinctions, how then do contemporary authoritarian regimes differ in terms of their violence when compared to fascism in the 20th century?

RBG : Fascism was the political expression of a view of violence as the lever of social change and history that came out of World War I. Fascism gave violence an absolute as well as instrumental value; it was an end in itself. Once in power, fascist rulers like Mussolini and Hitler used propaganda to convince their people to view violence differently, giving a patriotic and moral value to acts of persecution that protected the nation from its internal and external enemies.

Today’s rulers use violence differently: outside of communist regimes like North Korea, the leaders I call the new authoritarians, like Putin, tend to avoid mass killing of their own populations outside of war. Putin uses targeted violence, like poisonings and murders, some staged as accidents, of high-level critics, while Erdoğan favors mass detention for state enemies labeled as terrorists. Torture is still practiced by both. If you factor in gun violence and police killings of people of color, the United States is of course a far more violent country in the absolute. No other country that is not counted as a “failed state” has 400 million guns in private hands, or so many militias.

BE : When we personally met a few years ago, you brought to my attention the silhouette image of Trump entering into the Republican Party convention in 2016, which you noted was symbolic for so many reasons. How do you think about that image today?

RBG : I’m glad you brought up that image, which filled me with dread. It was all so clear: the menacing opaque figure dominating the scene; the smoke blowing around him, referencing his stardom; and the message that he would not only not be showing us his tax returns but if elected would create a government founded on the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, and the presence of threat.

Trump is a visual creature. Everything he does is about optics and spectacle, based on his background as a marketer and television producer and star. Even the idiosyncratic style of his tweeting, with its capital letters, is designed to focus the eye on the slogans he wants you to remember.

Then there is the constant barrage of photos of crowds of white males operating the government. This is a kind of psychological warfare he wages every day and an undoing, through images as well as policy, of the Obama years. Like other authoritarian leaders, Trump’s aim is to make things easier for financial, environmental, and sexual predators — to make it easier to harm women, for example, and erase them from existence. It is not widely known that in 2018 his government partly decriminalized domestic violence, making certain kinds of psychological and physical abuse no longer a crime. The removal of women from the photographic record of the administration links to this. More recently, the military occupation of the District of Columbia generated photographs meant to fill us with terror — like the hard-to-identify brutes who lined the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Flooding the public sphere with unidentified heavily armed men was an effective operation of psychological warfare of the kind Trump is expert at.

BE : A central concern throughout much of your work is the importance of memory in the face of historical denial. I am also reminded at this point of Henry A. Giroux’s notion of the violence of organized forgetting. Why would you insist that the study of history is particularly important today? And how can we mobilize it to counter the effacement of not simply truth but decades of critical awareness and more humane insight?

RBG : History is essential today on several levels. First, we’re living through a period of assault on the truth, on evidence-based inquiry, and the histories that respect that. Second, authoritarian states and their ideologues and trolls are organized to rewrite history to fit their needs. To return to the claim the fascism is left-wing, the agenda here is to cleanse the right of violence so the right can more easily commit violence again.

In my research for my book Strongmen, which looks a century of authoritarian regimes, a commonality of fascist regimes, Pinochet’s Chile, Gaddafi’s Libya, and now Putin’s Russia is the aggressive rewriting of history. Mentioning the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is banned today in Russia. In America, there is the assault on the concept of civil rights: the term now is attached to the rights of white Christians to practice their faith and to right-wingers to be able to express themselves freely on campuses and elsewhere. It’s not just the forgetting of violence in play, but the invalidation of the idea that such violence was a crime. The focus is, again, to legitimate new violence in the present.

BE : When I engage in my own teachings on both fascism and authoritarianism from the past, I am invariably drawn to the harrowing testimonies of Primo Levi along with Alain Resnais’s devastating film Night and Fog. While these two historical documents alone should be compulsory reading and viewing for anybody trying to make sense of the human condition, I am also mindful that if we simply begin with mass genocide and concentration camps then we are in danger of overlooking the subtleties of oppression, which can be woven into the prejudicial fabric of the everyday. In terms of developing a viable critique, how might we better connect grand ideologies with everyday forms of intimidation and subjugation?

RBG : Your question circles back to the first one and to why I don’t label today’s developments as a return of fascism. Authoritarianism can be thought of as a process of colonization — of civil society, of minds and bodies and values and culture — and it happens over time, as well as with the grand repressive moments like after the Reichstag fire or Kristallnacht.

Living in a democracy under attack, I set out to track the small changes, which I do through my op-eds and interviews, to keep our attention on the changes around us happening every day. What Trump, Bolsonaro, etc., want is for us to be silent, out of fear. Instead, we’ve seen a flowering of protest, even under conditions of a pandemic, and a multifaceted program of legal, judicial, and other pushback in the United States and electoral strategies that, as with the 2018 midterm elections, brought a new political class into power.

I am a big fan of initiatives that keep such resistance in front of our eyes, like Robin Bell’s light projections on the facade of the Trump International Hotel and elsewhere. These are the images of a counternarrative that we must persist in recording. I have tried in my book to write the history of the present, in a way, based on my knowledge of the past.

BE : To conclude, I want to bring this directly back to the question of violence. It is often argued that violence was absolutely necessary to defeat authoritarian regimes and nonviolence would have been completely ineffective when confronting the likes of Hitler. But what does this mean for how we counter authoritarianism today, which some maintain still requires a violent response to a violence that is uncompromising?

RBG : Research on the history of authoritarian rule shows that nonviolent protest is far more effective (Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth’s work on this is excellent) in building support for the end of a regime. In Pinochet’s Chile, communist strategies of violence backfired, costing the Party support. At the end of the 1980s, the socialists and center parties came together to have nonviolent mass demonstrations that proved important in the campaign for a return to democracy. In many cases, my personal view is that violence plays into the government’s desire to show that there are “extremists” out there, justifying power grabs and states of emergency. This is the case, I feel, in Trump’s America, where the right has been lumping together Nancy Pelosi and Antifa as “the radical left” for some time, just waiting for an excuse to shut everyone up. This is not to say that armed resistance was not necessary in the context of World War II, for example, but outside of the context of civil war or international conflict it is risky.

Histories of Violence: America Is Not a Fascist State — It’s an Authoritarian One : Brad Evans interviews Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Los Angeles Review of Books , July 20, 2020.

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there's a poster which identifies "The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism."

Here are the criteria:

1.Powerful and continuing nationalism

2.Disdain for human rights

3.Identification of enemies as a unifying cause

4.Rampant sexism

5.Controlled mass media

6.Obsession with national security

7.Religion and government intertwined

8.Corporate power protected

9.Labor power suppressed

10. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts

11.Obsession with crime and punishment

12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

This in too many ways is America in the Age of Trump.

Trump and his regime are engaged in a white supremacist counterrevolution against the civil rights movement, in which the human rights of nonwhite people are being revoked. This includes a recent effort to circumvent the Constitution by deeming that undocumented immigrants (overwhelmingly Black and brown people) should be erased from the population for purposes of congressional representation.

Trump and his regime are criminalizing dissent. He has gone so far as to explicitly state that people who disagree with him are akin to Nazis and should be imprisoned or worse.

Trump and his regime have no respect for the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or democratic norms and principles more generally. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not respect the outcome of the 2020 election if he does not win.

Trump and his regime have unleashed a secret federal police force to gas, shoot, beat and illegally detain nonviolent protesters in Portland, Oregon, and potentially elsewhere.

In a predictable escalation, Trump — through Attorney General William Barr — has ordered that the regime's thugs be deployed to other Democrat-led cities to enforce "law and order." It is entirely plausible that Trump's secret police will also be used to help him steal the presidential election.

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced that the forces under his command may  "proactively" arrest people for crimes they have not yet committed. Such dystopian logic mixes George Orwell's "1984" with Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report."

TrumpWorld also reflects the horrible surrealism of the film and novel "Children of Men" turned into a lived experience for America and the world. Writing at the New Statesman, Gavin Jacobson observes:

The way the film extrapolates from the here and now is the reason the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher thought "Children of Men" was unique. Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher understood the film as a true depiction of what he called "'capitalist realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."

"Children of Men" does not take place at the end of the world, which has already happened, but within its chilling coda, where, as Fisher writes, "internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist". There is no desire to create alternate ways of living, or to make the end of times less awful. ...

The idea that we're out of time is what makes "Children of Men" both a mirror and augur of the world, and the world to come. At the end of history, cut off from its past and pessimistic about the future, and facing slow death under rising tides, humanity has resigned itself to a somnambulant life. It is a life of finitude, routine and conformity; one without vision, spontaneity or surprise, where we no longer seek to live larger lives or even strive for our continued existence. We have become Nietzsche's "last men".

Facing the onslaught of neo-fascism, the American people remain stuck in a state of denial, learned helplessness and fear. Donald Trump and his movement have American democracy and civil society in a chokehold.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of "Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945" and "Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema" and other books.

Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic. Ben-Ghiat's new book is "Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present," to be published in November.

In this conversation she warns that Trump's threats of violence against the American people — including against leading Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — are very real. Ben-Ghiat also explains that the American news media normalized Donald Trump because most journalists are unable to admit that the United States is a failing democracy.

Ben-Ghiat details how the American people (and America's political elites) remain in denial about the realities of neo-fascism and autocracy, because to admit the truth would mean confronting the fact that they must take action against such forces — and have not done so.

You can also listen to my conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on my podcast "The Truth Report" or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Chauncey  Devega : The mainstream news media is finally using the words "fascism" and "authoritarianism" to describe Donald Trump and his regime. I have been using such language since Trump's campaign in 2015. You and other historians, political scientists, philosophers, mental health experts and others have also been sounding the alarm about Donald Trump and what he represents. We were largely ignored and branded as being hysterical. How does it feel to see the proper language finally being used to describe Trump and the threat he represents?

Ruth Ben-Giat :

I'm divided. I'm disgusted with how bad things have become in this country. I remember the first time I saw the word "authoritarian" on a chyron for CNN. It was actually because Sen. Cory Booker, who's been very smart about this crisis, was speaking and he used the word. CNN finally displayed the word on the screen, and I thought to myself, "Oh my God, the efforts of many of us are finally getting into the system."

Historians and others have been trying to engage in civic education, to help the public and journalists understand that yes, it can happen here. Ultimately, to see CNN and other major media outlets finally use the word "authoritarianism" to describe Donald Trump and this administration means that things are really bad in America right now.

CD : Unfortunately, those voices in the mainstream American news media who are finally describing the Trump regime in those terms then fail to engage in a substantive discussion of the implications.

RBG : I think it's difficult for people to digest what that would mean, for a few reasons. One is that we are still operating with an old-fashioned idea of what authoritarian countries are like. That is one of the reasons I use the word "fascistic" as opposed to "fascism" to describe Donald Trump. When we use the word "fascism" most people think of an instant shutdown of democracy and brown shirts and other political thugs in the streets.

Many people will also rebut the claim that Trump is fascist by using superficial examples such as "There's still a free press. People can still speak out." The reality is that today's authoritarianism works differently than it did in previous incarnations. Today's version of fascism does not need one-party states, for example. In discussing Trump and fascism, it is more effective to talk about how it operates at present.

CD : What would the narrative be if the American media were covering the events which are taking place under Donald Trump, but in another country?

RBG : What is going on corresponds to what I call the authoritarian playbook. Donald Trump is not interested in governing the United States.  He's in office to enrich himself off public office, help his cronies and build his personality cult. Again, people are anchored to an old-fashioned understanding of what the presidency should be in a democratic country. It is very hard for the public to make the leap to how Trump is a fundamental break from American tradition.  

Now, if we start explaining how America is in fact in an authoritarian situation with Donald Trump and his administration, then another question arises. One of the reasons so many people are scared is that to admit the truth about Trump and authoritarianism then means they have to do something about it. Many people do not want to take that leap.

Yes, there are protesters in the streets. But the American business elite also must make that leap by accepting the reality of the situation. History teaches us that it is conservatives who support authoritarians and their rise to power. The American business elites are going to have to change how they think. They are going to have to speak out against American authoritarianism and Trumpism. American business elites have to make a decision about where they stand relative to Trump and authoritarianism.

The American people are going to need to make decisions about where they stand as well. It is easier to not make a decision. It is easier to just flip the channel, shift the topic, and pretend Trump and American authoritarianism are not really happening.

 CD ; There is this cadre of establishment journalists, analysts and other members of the chattering class whom I describe as "hope peddlers." They are always trying to spin some happy story about a return to normalcy. They are also many of the same people who are stenographers of current events but not really speaking truth to power. We see this with much of the horse-race journalism regarding the 2020 election. They are operating from the wrong playbook for understanding authoritarianism and a failing democracy. One obvious example is the widespread assumption that there will even be a real election on Nov. 3.

RBG : Americans have no experience with authoritarianism and a failing democracy. America has never been invaded by a foreign power and occupied. Americans have never had a dictatorship. Of course, there is the obvious exception of black Americans and their experience with Jim Crow, slavery and oppression. But as a national lived experience for most Americans, the country has not experienced a dictatorship or anything like it.

White Americans are now discovering what people of color have long known, that we do not have a real democracy in this country. Many Americans are finding it very difficult to wake up from the stories they learned in school about this being the freest nation in the world and a successful democracy.

CD : At what point is it to late to save a democracy that is falling into authoritarianism?

RBG :

Historically, when there are people who have signed on to their roles within an authoritarian fascistic state it is very hard to dislodge such people. They cling to the status quo of the corrupt leader for dear life. This happens because of cronyism and corruption. Everyone involved with the regime is made complicit.

Of course, this is what happened in Putin's Russia and other authoritarian states. The system is one of mutual complicity. That means not wanting to rock the boat because the whole system could come tumbling down. For example, if you think about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and how the public was waiting for them to start the impeachment against Donald Trump, there was a clear sense that they did not want to cause fundamental disruption. Why? Because the American political class is intertwined.

There was a sense earlier on with Trump that nobody wanted to rock the boat. I do think we as a country are in a different place now, given all that has happened with the Trump administration.

But the whole situation in America right now is still too upsetting and too uncertain for most people. The country's elites and the people in their circle know they could lose their privileges. They will potentially lose their careers. They'll have to make compromises. The hope-peddling which involves just staying the course is much more appealing. That is the reason why Nancy Pelosi recently said, "No, we're not going to impeach Barr. We're going to let the people speak through the election." That is the mentality of the country's political elites and a fear of rocking the boat too much.

CD : Trump is very obvious. There is no subtlety in his threats of violence against the Democrats and his other "enemies," which include any Americans who dare to disagree with him and his movement. Why is still there so much denial of this reality by the American people and political leaders?

RBG : Sometimes people simple do not know what to do. They feel powerless. They can become numb because Trump and his agents are flooding the zone with waste, as Steve Bannon said of his right-wing takeover strategy. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to react to any one single crisis.

The huge danger is that it is quite probable that Donald Trump will be elected again. Trump will in fact try to put Barack Obama on trial. Trump is obsessed with him. Trump's obsession is not unlike that of other right-wing authoritarians with their predecessors.

Donald Trump is not kidding when he says he considers Barack Obama to be a traitor and wants to undo everything that Obama has done, to literally try to cancel Obama. Donald Trump is not kidding when he says he wants to put Obama in prison. It is important to take Trump's threats seriously.

CD :

How do you locate Trump's threats of violence — and the actual violence by his street thugs and other enforcers — relative to other examples in history?

RBG : This is why it's important to have an up-to-date sense of how authoritarianism evolves. If we keep using the fascism of the Holocaust and World War II violence as the standard of judgment, then Donald Trump and leaders such as Hungary's Viktor Orbán and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan are always going to look good. For example, mass detention rather than mass killing is the way that many authoritarians today operate.

The conditions in some of Trump's detention centers for migrants, refugees and other undocumented people have been labeled by outside observers as constituting torture. Many things that are happening right now in America under Trump resemble the security techniques that America used on other countries. One of the ironies of the Trump era is that all of that American military might that supported right-wing authoritarians abroad for decades is coming home to roost.

CD  : How did you interpret the rapid series of events with Trump's response to the George Floyd protests, his retreat to the White House bunker, the military's de facto refusal to follow Trump's orders for martial law, and the attacks he ordered on protesters?

RBG :

It is a compressed cycle of many things that happen when authoritarians start to fall from power. There is the fleeing into the bunker and the protests — which are not only about Trump, they're about entrenched institutional racism. The protests continue because the American people know that there is an actual white supremacist in the White House. With the fleeing into the bunker there is also the retaliation, the barrage against the public from the leader. That is Trump's order to use the military against the protesters in Washington.

There is also another dimension to this cycle, elite defections. Members of the government start to speak out. There are people who finally decide that the leader has gone too far. 

There was a hint of this with Gen. James Mattis speaking out against Trump's use of the military in the United States against the American people and his threats of martial law. Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, publicly said, "I was wrong. I shouldn't have been used for this photo-op."

Trump's photo-op, where he tried to look strong by walking to the church across the street from the White House after the attack on the protesters, was also right out of the authoritarian playbook. These events are very revealing as to how far Trump will go to stay in power — and the potential dissent and resistance from the highest levels of the United States military as well.

CD : What is the role of death, masculinity and violence in a fascistic and/or authoritarian regime?

RBG :

These leaders, including Trump, genuinely do not care if you live or die. They could not care less. You are just a tool to be used so they can stay in power and enrich themselves. That's the premise. That is why they lead people into losing wars. They repress them. They do things that some people consider self-destructive — but in fact there is no greater power for the egocentric, narcissistic authoritarian than having people sacrifice themselves for him.

An example of this was Donald Trump daring people to go to his Tulsa rally with no masks on in the middle of a pandemic. This has not been stressed enough in terms of the public's understanding of Donald Trump. Trump engages in male domination games with everyone. Trump even did it to Mike Pence when he announced that Pence would be his running mate in 2016.

What greater ego rush for Donald Trump than to have his supporters risk their lives for the joy of listening to him speak in person? Donald Trump will gladly send the American people to their deaths — his own supporters included — because they are just tools for him. Traditional understandings of what it means to be president in a democracy do not account for this. The public does not want to comprehend the behavior of Donald Trump.

CD : Why are so many people willing to die for Donald Trump? For that matter, why are so many of his supporters willing to kill for him?

RBG :

They are a death cult. During World War II, Germans killed themselves for Hitler. Trump shows how such things can happen even in a nominal democracy. The self-destruction for the leader makes it even more scary because it is voluntary. So many Republicans, Lindsey Graham for example, have prostituted themselves to Donald Trump. Of course such people have their own agendas and actually believe that they are using Donald Trump and not the other way around. No one is holding a death sentence over these people who have prostituted themselves to Donald Trump. It is not like one of the other authoritarian regimes where supporting the leader was and is a literal matter of life and death. Trump just fires people. In other countries a person who the leader was done with would be put in prison or killed.

If Putin is displeased with somebody, he finds a way to put them in prison, or sometimes poison them. The stakes in the United States with Trump are so much lower at present. What is going to happen to someone who stands up and does the right thing? They might not have as great of a career. They might not be asked to sit on boards of directors. They'll lose out on some money. They might be shunned at their church. But overall, it is not a life and death situation. It is a very sad situation that more people from Trump's administration and the United States government do not speak out. It is a spectacle of the cravenness of humanity that we are all seeing in the Trump era.

CD : Let us assume that there is a presidential election in November and that Trump is defeated by Joe Biden. What happens next?

RBG :

Authoritarian leaders do not experience defeat like other types of people. They are not normal people who would just give up the office and step down. Defeat is a form of psychological annihilation for a leader like Donald Trump. For men like Trump, authoritarians, their sense of self-worth is completely determined by adulation and having the power to bully people. It makes leaders such as Donald Trump feel good.

If authoritarian leaders feel that power is being taken away from them, they get very angry. They will do desperate things to prove to themselves that they are still loved. I would expect him to energize right-wing gun fanatics to create civil unrest because he wants to show the American people — his supporters — that without him being president the country will truly descend into anarchy. I would be very surprised that if Trump lost on Election Day to Joe Biden, he doesn't do horrible things. It is the only way that he can show himself, in his own fantasy world, that he truly is the savior of the country.

CD : What advice would you give to the American people about the next few months and how to prepare for what may happen with Trump and the election?

RBG : All of our tweeting and all the things we do digitally do not mean anything if the American people cannot vote. Volunteer to help register voters. Help people make sure they are on the eligible voter lists. If there is an overwhelming Biden victory on Election Day, it becomes much harder for Donald Trump to successfully find a way to stay in office.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Trump and the bitter American truth: "We do not have a real democracy"

By Chaucey Devega.  Salon , July 23, 2020.

Is America becoming a 21st-century-style authoritarian state? The impeachment hearings of the last weeks would seem to provide an easy answer: no. The very fact that such an inquiry can be held, and broadcast on national television, is a sign that our democracy is working and that our institutions are holding.

Yet the impeachment hearings also showed how degraded our political culture has become and how much progress President Donald Trump has made in implementing the authoritarian playbook that he began to write for America during his campaign.

First, the hearings revealed just how much Trump's cult of personality has tied subordinates to him, and how much of his playbook operates on keeping them in thrall to his singular threat: show loyalty, no matter what I say or do, or else.

A healthy democracy is founded on tolerance of differences of opinion, but is grounded in a shared body of norms. Autocratic governments, in contrast, need to change our opinion about what violates norms and constitutes crime and corruption.

Trump and the GOP, in de facto partnership with Fox News, are creating an alternate reality for followers in which facts are what the President needs them to be. This is a hallmark of authoritarianism.

Impeachment hearing testimony by the US Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and others has implicated the President in directing what appears to amount to extortion of Ukraine to investigate his political opponents. The GOP has fallen into step defending Trump, however, seeming to espouse the principle that the President can do just about anything without consequence.

In such a climate, the very idea that "rule of law should prevail," as former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, said in her opening statement, becomes partisan and negatively associated in some Trump supporters' minds.

Indeed, when Ambassador Yovanovitch displayed unwillingness to trample democratic and diplomatic norms, Trump ousted her, and told Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, "She's going to go through some things," according to the transcript of their July 25 phone call.

Second, such thuggishness brings us to another key point of these impeachment hearings: Trump's authoritarian playbook is, in part, Vladimir Putin's authoritarian playbook, and it aims not just at making people believe in alternate truths, but at "eroding our basic ability to distinguish truth at all," as foreign policy consultant Molly McKew warned in 2017.

Russia expert and former National Security Council member Fiona Hill's testimony sounded the alarm on just this point. She told the committee and the nation that America is "being torn apart" by the erosion of a shared idea of truth.

Hill told members of Congress that she refuses "to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative," referring to the efforts of Russian security services (and Trump associates, like his lawyer Rudy Giuliani) to label Ukraine as the source of interference in the 2016 election.

In her 2012 book, "Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin," written with Russia specialist Clifford G. Gaddy, Hill examines Putin's success in spreading distrust among political elites (the divide-and-rule strategy many autocrats use) and in bonding them to him through illegal activity by creating a system of "mutually assured incrimination to ensure loyalty."

In other words, the more crooks the system creates, the safer the chief conspirator, who can use blackmail or other exposure techniques against them -- as well as the threat of violence -- becomes.

This is a dark world, and it's one the impeachment inquiry shows is fast descending on American politics, as the testimony and experience of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, in particular, suggests.

The son of a father who fled Ukraine to escape the brutalities of the USSR, Vindman started his appearance by recognizing that "my simple act of appearing here today ... would not be tolerated in many places around the world," and that in Russia "offering public testimony involving the President" would cost him his life. He continued with words directed to his father: "Do not worry, I will be fine telling the truth."

That day, the Army had to consider relocating his family because of the death threats he received. Trump has not issued any statement condemning the threats.

Putin has had 20 years to develop a system of rule founded on corruption and the suppression of democracy. With the GOP's complicity, Trump could be just getting started.

In impeachment hearings, lessons on the erosion of American democracy.  Opinion by Ruth Ben-Ghiat.  CNN , November 22, 2019

How suited President Donald Trump and his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán, seemed as they sat together in the White House this week, their heavy bodies and craggy faces projecting a brutalist power. Their expensive dark suits and the elegant surroundings did nothing to hide their streetfighter natures and their air of self-satisfaction at their accomplishments.

No wonder Trump told Orbán, in parting, “it’s like we’re twins”, bringing out the emotional politicking that’s served him so well to build a fanatically loyal base of supporters in America.

Although Orbán was the first European leader to back Trump during the 2016 US election, their in-person encounter kicked off what is likely to be the perfect transactional friendship – the only kind of friendship strongman rulers understand. Each has something the other needs and admires.

For Orbán, legitimation by America boosts his quest to be seen as Europe’s leader of “illiberal democracy,” a deceptive term he often uses to describe Hungary under his rule that masks how his strong-arming of the press and the judiciary has all but destroyed many basic democratic liberties there. In the 2019 Freedom House report Hungary now ranks as “partly free.”

More immediately, Orbán and his proxies want American benediction for their master plan: to become leaders in the European parliament, through a new rightwing coalition shaping up with Matteo Salvini of Italy’s League and the Austrian far-right Freedom party. Such as grouping would be the realisation of that “axis of the willing” on immigration policy that Austria’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, called for in 2018 – not the most subtle nod to a former rightwing alliance among three Nazi collaborationist powers.

For Trump, whose mission is to bring the US into alignment with the global right, and to bring home authoritarian-style rule, Orbán can be a valuable ally, and his capture of government and the media an inspiration. The president “would love to have the [political] situation Orbán has”, said one long-time Trump crony and current US ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein. Nothing for Trump can equal the strategic value of Russia’s assistance, electoral and otherwise, but Orbán could be a better partner for him in Europe than Putin, whose state propaganda has for years targeted the US as the enemy, and mocks him as a “clown” on primetime television.

Certainly, the two men are ideologically aligned, and Trump’s comment at the White House meeting that Orbán was doing “a tremendous job in so many different ways” could be referring to his success at capturing the judiciary. Hungary now has a parallel court system that has cemented executive control over judges on matters of electoral law, corruption, and the right to protest, all areas of great personal interest to Trump.

Trump, a man given to obsessing about his perceived enemies, can also probably relate to Orbán’s antisemitic crusade against George Soros, having himself retweeted and repeated rightwing “anti-globalist” propaganda. And, like Orbán, he may have found nothing wrong with the director of Hungary’s Holocaust museum, Mária Schmidt, praising Miklós Horthy, who backed the Nazis from the start and collaborated in the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944.

Nor can Orbán’s decimation and domestication of the media have escaped Trump’s attention. Every trick in the new authoritarian playbook has been used in Hungary to engineer a situation where, by the 2018 elections, “opposition views could not even reach significant portions of the electorate,” as Dr Gábor Polyák of Mérték Media Monitor has asserted. Trump can only dream about replicating the truly spectacular 2018 mass genuflection by Hungarian media luminaries who “donated” almost 500 media properties to a government-allied foundation.

Not surprisingly, Trump gave Orbán special praise for his handling of immigration issues, which involves penning up immigrants in camps. Racial politics and the protection of the white Christian heritage of their countries is one of the master narratives fuelling the right on both sides of the Atlantic. Orbán’s minister of human resources from 2012 to 2018, Zoltán Balog, was a fan of “benevolent separatism” for Romani, including separate schools; and Trump advisers such as Kris Kobach have already suggested eventually setting up “processing towns” to hold immigrants for extended periods.

The secret to Orbán’s success, says a Hungarian former senior official, is his ability to “see what the public wants to hear, and to say that, first to get into power, and then to stay there.” A similar pragmatism marks Trump, who has joked about having an extended term as president and has little incentive to leave office. In this, too, he is Orbán’s “twin.”

Trump’s twinship with Orbán shows ‘illiberal democracy’ has a home in the US. By Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

The Guardian, May 16, 2019. 

Scarcely a week into Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure as president of Brazil, protections for the environment and indigenous and LGBTQ populations have been removed, and both the neoliberal economic policies closely associated in Latin America with the thirteen-year Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the language of Brazil’s military junta, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, have resurfaced. “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism, and political correctness,” Bolsonaro told his inaugural crowd, pleasing Brazil’s elites and the stock market. His call for surgical violence—Brazil’s “whole body needs amputating” was the memorable phrase—left others fearful of a return to “disappeared” bodies and torture cells.

Threat is a fundamental tool of the 21st-century authoritarians on the rise: Dominating is much easier if you’ve prepared people to be afraid of you when you take office. Bolsonaro used it to sell himself as the only candidate capable of tackling Brazil’s soaring violence problem, which included a record murder rate in 2017. “A good criminal is a dead criminal,” he said last fall, earning comparisons to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who has made good on his own campaign promises to carry out extrajudicial killings of those involved in his country’s drug trade.

Yet Bolsonaro has also preventively criminalized all leftists and other political opponents, promising to send such “red outlaws” to prison or into exile. “It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history,” he said in October, raising the possibility that he might aspire to be even harsher than the former junta, which he believes didn’t kill enough people. Years of documented Bolsonaro hate speech against gays and blacks suggest other potential targets, although even if he gets a ruling majority in parliament, “cleansing” an enormous country with a multiracial and ethnically complex population would be a Herculean task.

The slew of executive order legislation following Bolsonaro’s inauguration has hewed closely to the authoritarian playbook, designed to further intimidate the population, cement Bolsonaro’s profile as a “get things done” disrupter from outside the political establishment, and, most importantly, reassure the conservative elites who have always backed such leaders that they will profit handsomely with him in office. The summary removal of indigenous peoples from protection by the Human Rights Ministry (which may go the way of the newly suppressed Labor Ministry) supplements the planned merger of the Environmental and Agricultural Ministries, which will put indigenous lands up for grabs by logging and other agribusiness interests, helped by the highway Bolsonaro envisions building through the Amazon rainforest.

During the Pinochet regime, University of Chicago and Harvard-educated neoliberal economists propping up the dictatorship through spending cuts and  privatization were known as “Chicago Boys.” The day following the inauguration, Bolsonaro had his very own Chicago Boy sworn in as Economy Minister: Paulo Guedes, a Milton Friedman-influenced neoliberal who taught economics in Chile during the Pinochet era. Joaquim Levy, the new head of the Brazilian Development Bank, and Roberto Castello Branco, the new chief executive of the oil and natural gas company Petrobras, are also Chicago economics alumni. The Brazilian economy, long stagnant, definitely needs reforms. But, as of yet, Bolsonarans seem untroubled by the fact that neoliberal successes in Chile capitalized on the “advantages” of authoritarian oppression—bans on unions and strikes and the absence of a political opposition.

Bolsonaro’s savvy appointment of popular corruption fighter Sergio Moro to lead an expanded Ministry of Justice continues an election persona that for many voters seemed to promise “a deep change in the political establishment,” as Rodrigo Craveiro, a journalist with Brazilian daily Correio Braziliense, wrote to me by email. Yet Bolsonaro would be the unusual authoritarian if he eradicated corruption; he’ll more likely use the moral high ground of anti-corruption to neutralize his political enemies and purge the bureaucracy, the better to populate it with loyalists. Certainly, Bolsonaro has benefited from the corruption scandals that have rocked the traditional political class—widely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who might have defeated Bolsonaro had he not been barred from seeking election in 2018, is now serving a twelve-year jail sentence, while his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016. Moro, the ex-judge who jailed da Silva, and who is crucial for this first phase, may find himself cast aside later.

Bolsonaro, a career politician, used his military background as a paratrooper to separate himself from the corrupt reputations of other career politicians, playing on the idea that the military is nonpartisan, since serving officers are forbidden from making political statements. One-third of his cabinet positions have gone to military officers; a retired general, Hamilton Mourão, is his vice president. It seems the post-dictatorship wariness of having the military play an active role in politics has waned—an increasing number of Brazilians want “law and order” government regardless of the consequences.

“Bolsonaro is as much an apparition from Brazil’s past as a harbinger of its future,” historian Kenneth Serbin wrote at Foreign Affairs the day of the inauguration: Only a “politics of forgetting” about the violence of the military dictatorship has made his ascent possible. I’d go further: Bolsonaro advances a new phase of remembrance that rehabilitates the people and causes of that terrible time. During the 2016 congressional proceedings leading to Rousseff’s impeachment, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote against her to her torturer—Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, de facto chief of army intelligence services, which ordered Rousseff, then a leftist guerrilla, tortured for three weeks in 1970 (she was then a political prisoner for two years). Sympathizers like Bolsonaro publicly honor those who subjected Brazilians to torture methods such as “the barbecue,” where victims were tied to a metal rack and given electric shocks on and inside their bodies.

Bolsonaro may be called the “Trump of the Tropics” for his impolitic and often incoherent remarks, his skill with social media, and hodge-podge coalition of Evangelical Christians, military toughs, and business elites. But the precedent of military rule in Brazil makes him more dangerous than his United States counterpart. In 1999, Bolsonaro declared that if he ever became president he’d immediately launch a coup and declare himself dictator. Twenty years later, he’s in power. Time will tell what kind of strongman he will be.

Jair Bolsonaro Is Not the New Trump. He’s Worse. By Ruth Ben-Ghiat. The New Republic, January 8, 2019. 

Fascism has been back in the news with Donald Trump’s candidacy for the American presidency. His populist claim to speak for the white everyman, along with his menacing leadership style, have brought forth comparisons among this “homegrown authoritarian,” as President Barack Obama has called Trump, and foreign strongmen.

 Trump is not a Fascist. He does not aim to establish a one-party state. Yet he has created a one-man-led political movement that does not map onto traditional U.S. party structures or behave in traditional ways. This is how Fascism began as well.

 A century before Trump, Benito Mussolini burst onto the Italian political scene, confounding the country’s political establishment with his unorthodox doctrine and tactics and his outsized personality. Mussolini’s rise offers lessons for understanding the Trump phenomenon—and why he was able to disarm much of the American political class.

 Many Italians did not know what to make of Mussolini when the former Socialist founded Fascism as an “anti-party” on the heels of World War I. His was an outsider movement, born from the conviction that the establishment parties—along with the political systems they represented, liberalism and socialism—were broken or posed a grave threat to Italy.

 A mercurial hothead, Mussolini reveled in his role as a political disrupter. His crisis-mongering platforms contained a confusing blend of socialist and nationalist tenets, trafficking in contradiction and paradox, the better to challenge traditional ideas about politics. “Does Fascism aim at restoring the State, or subverting it? Is it order or disorder?” he taunted Italians in print six months before he took over as prime minister.

 His grassroots followers spoke more directly, terrorizing Italy’s hinterland as a prelude to claiming control. Taking Mussolini’s incendiary rhetoric to heart, his blackshirts beat and executed thousands of political opponents—including priests—at rallies and on trains, in shops, schools, and taverns. Everyday violence primed the country for an exceptional outcome: In 1922, Mussolini staged a march on Rome and demanded the post of prime minister from the terrified king.

 Italians learned in the 1920s what Americans are learning in 2016: Charismatic authoritarians seeking political office cannot be understood through the framework of traditional politics. They lack interest in, and patience for, established protocols. They often trust few outside of their own families, or those they already control, making collaboration and relationship building difficult. They work from a different playbook, and so must those who intend to confront them.

 The authoritarian playbook is defined by the particular relationship such individuals have with their followers. It’s an attachment based on submission to the authority of one individual who stands above the party, even in a regime. Mussolini, a journalist by training, used the media brilliantly to cultivate a direct bond with Italians that confounded political parties and other authority structures and lasted for 18 years.

 Trump also cultivates a personalized bond with voters, treating loyalty to the Republican Party almost as an afterthought. It’s why he emphasizes the emotional content of his events—he “feels the love,” or fends off “the haters.” Early on, he introduced a campaign ritual more common in dictatorships than democracies: an oath pledging support to his person, complete with a straight-armed salute. Securing this personal bond is a necessary condition for the success of future authoritarian actions, since it allows the leader to claim, as does Trump, that he embodies the voice and will of the people.

 Mussolini’s rise to power also exemplifies another authoritarian trait America has seen during this campaign: The charismatic leader who tests the limits of what the public, press, and political class will tolerate. This exploration begins early and is accomplished through controversial actions and threatening or humiliating remarks toward groups or individuals. It’s designed to gauge the collective appetite and permission for verbal and physical violence and the use of extralegal methods in policing and other realms. The way elites and the press respond to each example of boundary-pushing sets the tone for the leader’s future behavior—and that of his followers.

 Mussolini’s testing of Italians through violence showed the weakness of the ruling political establishment. A blend of fear, opportunism, and desire to defeat Italy’s powerful left led many liberals to support Mussolini. Most disliked him but thought he could be mainstreamed or placated once given some power. After he became prime minister, the violence did not abate. Yet key liberal voices such as the philosopher Benedetto Croce and former Prime Minister Antonio Salandra continued to endorse him.

 Finally, the Fascists went too far. In June 1924, they assassinated the popular Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti for accusing them of electoral fraud. Mussolini, denounced by the opposition press as responsible, faced the biggest crisis of his political life. By December, many liberal holdouts had turned against him.

 They had waited too long to withdraw their support. On January 3, 1925, Mussolini announced the end of democracy in Italy. “I alone assume political, moral, and historical responsibility for all that has happened.” Mussolini told Parliament. “If Fascism has been a criminal association, then I am the chief of that criminal association...”

 Violent language and acts had defined Fascism since its inception. Yet this shocking speech ruined the comforting fable many Italians told themselves: that Mussolini was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and he would embrace reform rather than revolution once in power. After January 3 and the spate of repression that followed, it was difficult to disassociate the statesman from the squadrist, as Italian elites had tried for years to do.

 For over a year now, Trump has been subjecting Americans and American democracy to analogous tests. Actions many see as irrational make chilling sense when considered under this framework: the many racist tweets or retweets, which his campaign then declares a mistake. His early declaration that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose any supporters. His extended humiliation of powerful politicians such as Paul Ryan and John McCain. His attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the American electoral process. His intimation that “the Second-Amendment people” might be able to solve the potential problem of Hillary Clinton appointing judges, presumably by shooting her. This last remark is a sign that Trump feels emboldened in his quest to see how much Americans and the GOP will let him get away with—and when, if ever, they will say “enough.”

 Authoritarians usually communicate their intentions clearly. Mussolini certainly did. Trump has been frank about his agenda and the groups he’ll target if he’s elected. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored,” Trump said in accepting the Republican presidential nomination. It’s not necessary to label Trump a Fascist to discern the dangers of such rhetoric. There’s no need to see a trajectory to dictatorship to recognize that Trump is testing American decency and the strength of U.S. democracy. The history of Mussolini’s rise coincides with the fall of what had been Italy’s version of a Grand Old Party: the liberal factions that had ruled Italy from Unification onward. They never recovered from their acquiescence to the Duce. Of the many lessons the GOP can take from its experience with Trump so far, this might be the most valuable.

 An American Authoritarian. By Ruth Ben-Ghiat. The Atlantic, August 10, 2016.