A Conversation with Dr. Robert O. Paxton
Authoritarian Nationalism
This week, a new expanded edition of My Fabulous Fascist Summer Vacation will be published. One of the highlights of my overland jaunt through Europe in 2024 was this discussion of Americans fascist with the widely regarded Dr. Paxton. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be unlocking interviews from the book as the United States continues to normalize authoritarian and fascist political ideas and practices.
From My Fabulous Fascist Summer Vacation:
When online lodging choices come in a confusing wave of reviews, locations, features and room prices, a dependable chain can be a safe bet. I reserve an Ibis near the Lisboa Oriente transit station. After a morning walk through the city, I have a call scheduled with the preeminent American expert on fascism, Dr. Robert O. Paxton. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Columbia University, specializing in the social and political history of modern Europe, with a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and a Rhodes Scholar M.A. from Oxford University, prolific and often quoted, I feared he might be uninterested in talking to a complete stranger on a subject he had addressed some thousands of times. But he quickly consented and set a call for mid-morning New York time, allowing me to get settled, work on appointments, adjust to jet lag, and do one last review of the highlights I made in his Anatomy of Fascism.
C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb once told me of an important interview he scored as a young radio reporter. When he went to replay it, there was… nothing. Since then, I record, when possible, with three devices. Murphy’s Law got nothing on me. A Saramonic Bluetooth-enabled dual mic setup feeds to my iPhone, recording on an app with an easy share to my transcriber. My iPad is my backup. And I record in QuickTime on my MacBook Air. On the fly, I use only the Saramonic, which has been a reliable solution. Outside of cables and chargers, and Otter and iCloud accounts, that is my entire technical infrastructure.
Paxton answers the phone in cheerful and friendly form and, after a short exchange of pleasantries, I ask what interested him in writing and teaching about fascism over the years.
BG: I know you’ve answered this in print at length, but what is fascism? And has that understanding or sense or relevance of what it is evolved for you in recent years?
RP: I struggled in my book to come up with a pithy, short definition. And failed. I think it’s very hard to encapsulate in a few words, but fascism is a kind of authoritarian nationalism, that is distinct from the old conservative forms like dictatorship, in that it wants mass support, it wants an enthusiastic crowd. And so that’s what was new about it. We’d had all sorts of forms of dictatorship and conservative authoritarianism who wanted to keep the crowd silent. But fascism wanted to generate enthusiasm. And I think that’s the core of it, it’s authoritarian nationalism, with an enthusiastic mass base.
BG: In a compendium of articles about fascism, you wrote a piece indicating you’ve changed your mind and now believe Donald Trump is a fascist.
RP: Trump is hard to pin down because the only thing that seems to motivate him is greed for money and surrounding himself with personal admiration. And so it’s a very private, kind of personal set of attributes. But the force of it politically is very close to fascism. I didn’t want to call him a fascist for a while. The differences is the classical fascists, particularly Mussolini and Hitler, subjected businessmen to national needs. And they had four-year plans or five-year plans and rearmament projects that were not the first choice of capitalists though they were delighted to have it when socialism frightened them enough. Now in Trump’s case it’s just pure personal satisfaction. It’s a very individual thing for him to get the adulation of crowds and to be able to collect rent money while he’s President. Dismissing scornfully the tradition of putting his assets into a blind trust while he’s President. It’s that personalized, self-aggrandizement. It’s hard to fit into any kind of political category, it’s just plain old greed and thirst for adulation.
I think it’s very hard to encapsulate in a few words, but fascism is a kind of authoritarian nationalism, with an enthusiastic mass base.
BG: When you published Anatomy of Fascism, the Washington Post praised you for thoughtfully mapping out the descent of a civilized people, first the Italians, then the Germans, into a primal state, a state of being ruled by mythology, symbol, and emotion. How do you think the American people, the supposed beacons of liberal democracy and higher education, science, and technology, descended into a primal state ruled by mythology, symbol and motion in this adoration of Donald Trump?
RP: First of all, they didn’t all do that when Trump was elected president. He was chosen by the Electoral College, which is a very old and inaccurate reflection, an 18th-century device to keep the ordinary people from expressing their will too clearly. And he did not win the popular vote. So you’re talking about 40 percent of Americans, maybe 45 or even 49 percent of Americans. But there are a great many other people who are sort of horrified by him. But it’s difficult for them to mobilize their opposition because of the Electoral College. I think we desperately, most urgently need a constitutional amendment providing for the direct election of the president. We’re the only wealthy, powerful country in the world that has this 18th-century indirect election of president, it’s grotesque. So Trump never had the support of everybody. Indeed he never had a popular majority.
BG: Do you think there’s always been a fascist or authoritarian underbelly to American political culture?
RP: Yeah, I do. I think that every country does, in different ways because each national instance is unique. But the United States has always had those elements. In the South, there was the existence of slavery and all the mental contortions that went into justifying or even praising it. So there’s a big chunk of the country right there. I mean, it was the Alien and Sedition Acts right back in the beginning of our country. When the country is under pressure and under threat, there are people who think that you have to crack down on dissent. So those viruses or drivers are there right from the beginning and affect some regions more than others.
BG: You describe in Anatomy of Fascism the extreme conditions that motivated Italians and Germans to embrace fascism, the economic and political phenomena from World War One. What are the corollary events now, justified or not, that are driving this kind of fresh appetite of Trump supporters for the things that he’s advocating?
RP: I don’t see them, objectively; we have close to full employment, the stock market is bubbling away upwards. But there’s the realm of perception. There’s this baffling phenomenon, life is relatively good for Americans, we haven’t been defeated in a war like Germany, we haven’t been undergoing a Great Depression, like the world in 1929. Objectively, things look pretty good and yet everybody’s mood is sour. There’s a lot of journalistic comment about that, and no one quite knows what to make of it. I find it frankly baffling; the objective conditions would not seem to sponsor that kind of desperate craving for some kind of authority.
The United States has always had those elements.
In the South, there was the existence of slavery,
and all the mental contortions that went into justifying or even praising it.
BG: One of the problems with thinking about fascism is that we’ve seen all the Holocaust movies and we’ve seen Il Duce speaking to throngs from a Roman balcony and we think that’s fascism, and we look around and we don’t see quite the same thing here. What do you think would be a 2025 American version of fascism?
RP: I think that Trump’s rallies are a very powerful visual representation. And they’re not so different from the Italian and German mass rallies of Hitler and Mussolini. There’s absorption of the individuals into an excited mass. It must be a very exhilarating thing, if you’re not repelled by it, to be in that crowd and swept up by the excitement. It must be a very visceral kind of frenzy. And those rallies are his stock in trade. And I guess that would be the visual symbol of his electoral power.
BG: Is it simply his need for gratification? Or do you think there is a strategy, mapping the way that the rallies are affecting public opinion?
RP: I’ve been assuming that it’s his show. And I think that there’s a kind of feedback loop, it works, he gets all sorts of gratification out of the response of the crowd, so he goes out and does it again.
I think that Trump’s rallies are a very powerful visual representation. And they’re not so different from the Italian and German mass rallies of Hitler and Mussolini. There’s absorption of the individuals into an excited mass.
BG: A few days ago the Supreme Court ruled that presidents in certain circumstances have immunity from criminal prosecution. Does that concern you? And where does something like that end up if Trump is reelected?
RP: I think it’s extremely dangerous if he’s president. Last time he was a rather lazy president, went out and played golf. And he promised to do a lot of things that he never quite got around to and that might happen again. But this time he sounds a little more serious. I think it’s a very, very bad decision and is going to do a lot of harm.
BG: What do you think good patriotic Americans should be doing now to avoid a fascist future?
RP: The first thing to do is to elect a Democrat in November. The most important thing for Americans to do is to vote and vote against Trump. If he’s not elected, he’ll say it’s a phony election. The poll workers who are both Democrats and Republicans keep defending what they do. I think the electoral process is fairly clean in this country. He hasn’t won any law cases about the last election. I think what he would do when elected, he could this time be a little more assiduous.
BG: There was one passage in Anatomy of Fascism where you write, ‘deeper preconditions of fascism lay in the late 19th century revolt against the dominant liberal faith in individual liberty, reason, natural human harmony, and progress’. That was well before 1914. Do you see something similar happening now, that civil institutions taken for granted are now boring to people, that people are revolting against them and want something different?
RP: Maybe so. There’s one body of thought that makes race an important motivator here. There has been, in fact, some important progress made in race relations in the United States. There are black people now in all professions, in all walks of life, and many of them are doing well. And it’s aroused a backlash. There are people who believe that white males are being discriminated against. I think you can have a lot of trouble proving that in any empirical way. But the sense is that the former way with which white males eased into leadership positions has been altered, it’s not quite as automatic as it was. I think that’s emotionally upsetting to a lot of people. People who are turned down for law school or don’t get a job and see a black or brown person getting those positions. And so there is I think an emotional groundswell that runs counter to the general feeling a generation ago that these things were going to happen. And that these things were progressive, and we should support them. And now there are people who claim that they’re paying the price and are not getting ahead and not getting the job or not getting into law school because of affirmative action. I think there is a kind of mood shift there.
The first thing to do is to elect a Democrat in November. The most important thing for Americans to do is to vote and vote against Trump.
If he’s not elected, he’ll say it’s a phony election.
And there’s another rhythm, which is the American position after World War Two. For temporary and factitious reasons, we were number one, and it wasn’t because we were better, it was because everybody else had been knocked out. And now everybody else has come back. And we’re finding the global environment more competitive than it used to be. But I do think that there is a lot of insecurity out there among people who feel threatened. I thought of it as a race thing first, but it’s obviously a gender thing also. And I think that maybe explains this strange misfit between objective prosperity and this subjective fear and discontent that we are seeing.
BG: Any final thoughts about where the country might be going?
RP: The next election is perhaps the most important one in American history. I think it’s a real fork in the road. And even if a Democrat is elected president, it doesn’t mean we’re out in the clear because these people, the other side, is going to say it’s fake and there could well be violence after it.