Unfortunately, I think the major party nominees, at least for federal office, are going to keep getting more morally grotesque, and the major party platforms are going to keep getting more and more abhorrent from a Catholic perspective barring divine intervention.
I highly doubt I will ever again be able to vote in good conscience for a major nominee for President or US Senator for the rest of my lifetime. Most people seem to be voting “against” the major party nominees they fear the most, and that is a very poor way to run the country.
Sonski/Onak 2024 for me all the way for the Presidency and Vice Presidency, baby! Power to the Pelicans!
I couldn't agree more with this post. In fact, I wrote an entire web novel articulating exactly the points you make, having a teenage boy in a futuristic divided America get drafted by an alt-right militia then imprisoned in a woke re-education camp.
I'd be very interested to hear if you think I got the notes right.
I checked out your profile and found your background super interesting! I wondered if you'd be open to writing a review of my story given your unique perspective. It would mean a lot to have your take highlighted, especially as I work to reach new readers who I think would benefit from a message against political demonization. So far I've gotten several extremely angry reviews by those who are mad that I decided not to rewrite the Handmaid's Tale...
Knowing that this is the sort of thing you would have grown up hearing helps build an understanding of you.
What fascists have to say about themselves, or indeed whatever their personal convictions might be, is of fairly minimal significance to evaluating who or what fascism is. Imagine citing Hannah Arendt and then using Trump's lack of personal animus in an argument for his not being fascist. I realize Banality of Evil is a separate essay, but... no really. From Origin of Totalitarianism, it's pretty clear that totalitarian movements use scapegoats to centralize power, such that a petty narcissist can make the perfect fascist.
It's quite an astonishing feat of rhetoric to characterize those protecting scapegoats of historic (and present) Nazis as the *real* totalitarians, and the people who want to remove the individual liberties of those scapegoats as their victims. But this victim reversal seems to be the standard move of those who support or minimize the harm of fascism.
Highly recommend The Origins of Totalitarianism. Evaluating Trumpism's historical continuity with Nazism survives that text quite well. As for Mussolini, Trump never slept with a copy of his speeches beside his bed. It's Hitler's speeches that Trump kept close, according to divorce proceedings and later his own statements, and he quotes or paraphrases them regularly.
You do understand that "protects certain identity groups from harm" and "totalitarian" are not mutually exclusive character traits, right? Especially considering that you offered no kind of counterpoint to Dr. Heaney's contention regarding whether Democrats are willing to allow any kind of dissent to their ideology.
"Imagine citing Hannah Arendt and then using Trump's lack of personal animus in an argument for his not being fascist."
On the other hand, imagine rebutting a man who's taught Arendt in classrooms for thirty years with an "imagine doing X" statement! This construction isn't an argument, and, indeed, explicitly calls attention to its own lack of argument.
I think this comment blurs the boundaries between fascism and totalitarianism together in a way that OP's text specifically rejects. There is a lot about the American population that seems receptive to a totalitarian, and I (at least) will go a step further and agree that, because the Platonic tyrant and the Arendt's totalitarian leader have a lot of the same traits, the fact that Trump is a tyrant makes it very easy to picture him in the leading role in her book.
However, OP's first point is that, whatever Trumpism is, whether it's totalitarian or not, it isn't *fascism*. Arendt herself, at least in Part III of The Origins of Totalitarianism, carefully maintains just these distinctions between fascism, nazism, communism, and totalitarianism in the broader sense. She seems to recognize the importance of speaking precisely about these different systems.
Now, if your position is that Trump is not merely a tyrant but an actual totalitarian, I don't think that's a crazy argument to make. The Platonic tyrant is enough like Arendt's totalitarian "functionary leader" that you can probably make that case using Arendt. But you do run into difficult passages like this one (on page 325 of my edition), which makes *precisely* the same distinction between tyranny and totalitarianism that OP makes:
> Lack of or ignoring of a party program is by itself not necessarily a sign of totalitarianism. The first to consider programs and platforms as needless scraps of paper and embarrassing promises, inconsistent with the style and impetus of a movement, was Mussolini with his Fascist philosophy of activism and inspiration through the historical moment itself. 39 Mere lust for power combined with contempt for "talkative" articulation of what they intend to do with it is characteristic of all mob leaders, but does not come up to the standards of totalitarianism. The true goal of Fascism was only to seize power and establish the Fascist "elite" as uncontested ruler over the country. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between the rulers and the ruled and achieves a condition in which power and the will to power, as we understand them, play no role, or at best, a secondary role.
When I read this passage, I mentally classify Trump as the "mob leader" rather than the "totalitarian," since Trump and his coterie have only ever (at least to my recall) used, or attempted to use, or longed to use, "external means" of coercion, rather than the universal coerced involvement Arendt writes about in this passage and throughout Part III. Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you are right, but I am not convinced at present.
OP's second point is that the opposition fancies itself a protective force (as you say), but that doesn't make them *not* totalitarians. If they use totalitarian tools in pursuit of that protection, I've got bad news for the protective force. This has obvious historical parallels: as you say, every totalitarian wants to cast the other guy as the totalitarian. In the original communism-vs-nazism showdown, of course, they both were, and it was not a particularly impressive rhetorical feat to point that out. It's not implausible that we would see something similar happen today.
It does seem odd to characterize OP as "supporting or minimizing the harm of fascism" when OP calls Trump a "tyrant" who "fomented a coup d'etat," and who is "soon hated by almost everyone." The allusion to Plato's Republic is not flattering: Plato's tyranny is a doom loop for the citizens of the Republic, who fall further and further into misery and suffering and oppression, and Plato presents no solution. OP is not calling Trump a good guy!
We currently have a man who threw full-on Nazi salutes at the inauguration with access to the federal payment system.
So yes, we should distinguish among fascists, Nazis, and totalitarians, but arguing that the current regime contains none of these takes us away from truth at this point.
How we use the terms fascist, Nazi, and totalitarian depends a lot on whether we let fascists, Nazis, and totalitarians tell us how to use language. I say, let's don't.
1930s Nazis rarely called themselves fascists, and Italian Fascists never called themselves Nazis. (For that matter, Nazis rarely called themselves Nazis.) Meanwhile, opponents of the Nazis called them fascists from the start, as a designation for far-right authoritarian nationalist movements. This has remained the public meaning for most of a century now, and it's clearly the meaning in use for calling Trump a fascist.
Arendt discusses Fascism with a capital F to refer to the historical Italian movement, and she tells us the Nazis went beyond Fascism into totalitarianism. She doesn't refer to Nazis as fascists because she keeps to that big F. An argument that maintains that capital F and tells us of Nazism or Trumpism, "Whew, no Fascists here!" gets to be technically correct and functionally obfuscatory. Lose the capital F, and it's just obfuscation.
Following Arendt, Italian fascism didn't qualify as totalitarianism, but Nazi fascism did. Most communist parties do not qualify as totalitarian, but Stalinist communism did. I've never seen any argument that the German communists whom Hitler had murdered were totalitarians. The Democratic Socialists who opposed him certainly were not. Casting a Democratic party significantly more moderate than Democratic Socialists as totalitarians for protecting people the Nazis murdered... that's truly awful, in a way I don't think is easy for anyone to see of their own dad. I don't know where to begin arguing over a gulf that takes that as acceptable.
Trump is a fascist. His rhetoric and tactics resemble Hitler's much more than Mussolini's. Whether he can or will meet the full criteria for a totalitarian leader is less the question than the extent to which he and his movement deploy recognizable tactics from the Nazi path toward totalitarianism.
> "We currently have a man who threw full-on Nazi salutes"
I must admit, I didn't think anyone paying attention sincerely believed this was a Nazi salute. I don't necessarily endorse Snopes, but I read the Snopes and watched the tape came away convinced this was what Musk claimed: a gesture representing his heart going out to the audience, deliberately misinterpreted by a group that has taken the "the road to fascism is paved with people telling you to stop overreacting" as an excuse to overreact to everything and dismiss anyone suggesting the presence of an overreaction. https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/20/musk-nazi-salute/
> " as a designation for far-right authoritarian nationalist movements. This has remained the public meaning for most of a century now"
I disagree with you there. The common public meaning of "fascist" for most of a century now has been "anyone in power I don't like," although it does often specifically mean, "anyone to the right of Kristen Sinema I don't like".
This was the meaning I largely grew up with as a child of the '90s and '00s. I can't remember how old you are (in fact I'm not sure I've ever learned that information), so I can't remember if you remember what American political discourse was like between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was widely considered "literally Hitler" and so his supporters (including yours truly) therefore must be Nazis. This was intense and ubiquitous. It deflated after Democrats won the 2006 midterms, then was set aside entirely once Pres. Obama's rhetoric of unity became the main message of the party.
However, those four years of Dubya being treated as a Tier-1 Fascist convinced me from a young age that, if we are going to talk about fascism at all, we do actually need to stick to strict technical definitions, because the word as it is used in common parlance is totally useless, conveying no more meaning than generic insults like "bast*rd"
I suppose I won't contest the claim that Trump is a "fascist" in this generic sense... but I also won't care. It just means the speaker dislikes him, which is fine. Indeed, it's correct!
But if our question is *how should we understand and/or respond to Trump*, then it seems probable that it makes a difference whether our script is laid out in Arendt's Origins or in Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic still seems correct to me.
(There's a common rejoinder here that fascism refers only to right-wing authoritarian movements, but this distinction never seems to amount to much, since theorists along these lines always seem to think that right-wingism is inherently authoritarian. Perhaps you don't? I would welcome some thoughts along these lines, explaining why this label means something more than I think it means.)
> Most communist parties do not qualify as totalitarian
Only all the ones that have ever ruled a country? Like, when Arendt writes:
"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
The first thing that jumps to my mind is actually the Great Leap Forward and its massacres of dissidents, or Pol Pot and his massacres of... everybody. This is certainly consistent with Arendt's later discussion of liquidation. Communists have been the world's pre-eminent totalitarians since fascism collapsed so completely after 1945. You can argue -- maybe -- that run-of-the-mill Marxist professors and Soviet apologists at American universities don't support a totalitarian platform, but all the winning communists who come to mind establish precisely this system of internal terror Arendt describes. Stalinism was its apex but hardly exceptional. Lenin's (incredibly violent!) political writing has plenty to say about the political value of domination through ideological terror.
"I've never seen any argument that the German communists whom Hitler had murdered were totalitarians."
That's remarkable; I've never heard any argument that they *weren't.* Ernst Thalmann was (during the rise of Hitler, well before Molotov-Ribbentrop) a close ally of Joseph Stalin, brought the KPD far closer to the Soviet Union and Stalinism, and personally led the split KPD from the SPD with the explicit purpose of bringing a communist Germany into COMINTERN as (eventually, inevitably) a Soviet satellite state during the age of Stalin. His KPD's rampant street violence put right-wingers of all stripes in fear, which in large part led to the rise of Hitler, as I argued in "One Reason To Punch Nazis" six years ago (https://www.jamesjheaney.com/2019/08/06/one-reason-to-punch-nazis-and-two-reasons-not-to/).
The 1930s faced Germans with an awful choice: support the totalitarian Communists, the totalitarian Nazis, or the well-meaning but clearly failing Center (the SPD). Now, I think the only moral vote at the time would have been to back the Hindenburg government. (Unless the SPD was also up to something super-evil, I guess, in which case the moral vote would be to not vote. But I don't think they were? Article 218 of the Weimar Constitution mostly settled my most pressing concern.)
However, one of the keys to understanding the rise of Hitler is recognizing that many people were reacting with *justified* fear due to a terrifying communist threat that the central government was incapable of dealing with -- and which Hitler's street gangs *were* capable of dealing with. It's not excusable, but, in that light, it at least becomes understandable.
...and we may take some comfort from that, because we do not have that situation today, although I think it's true that we have the seeds of it. There are certainly people who voted for Trump (not me) out of a justified fear of what would happen to them, their professions, their families, or their churches under a Harris Administration.
(To be clear, this is not-one sided. There are plenty of people who voted for Harris out of fear, too. This negative polarization to the point of mutual fear is where I see the germ of a parallel with 1930s Germany... although Germans could at least vote for the SPD! We only have the two parties!)
> Casting a Democratic party significantly more moderate than Democratic Socialists as totalitarians for protecting people the Nazis murdered...
That's not what OP did, unless you reinterpret persecution as protection.
The Nazis executed plenty of other people, too, for refusing to submit themselves to the ideology of the State. St. Maximilian Kolbe was one of many Catholics who died in Auschwitz. He would *not* find protection in today's Democratic party; he would be one of their scapegoats. He would find the Republicans much more protective, as would many of the other Catholics put to death in Hitler's camps.
OP's point is simply that this is where totalitarian ideology -- of the Right OR the Left -- leads, and that that ideology, which forces not just tolerance but participation and celebration under threat of punishment, is present in the Democratic Party today.
I'm also not sure it makes a lot of sense to invoke "people the Nazis murdered" on behalf of the Democrats right now. The Nazis' scapegoat par excellence was, of course, the Jews. There are political figures right now who clearly want a genocide of the Jews, sometimes gently masked under anti-Zionism and sometimes more forthright -- but, remarkably Donald Trump is *not* one of them. There are also sincere anti-Zionists who don't *want* to genocide the Jews, but they are a difficult case, because they also don't seem to have any plan for preventing a genocide of the Jews or feel any obligation to develop one, as Aaronson argued (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7845). Very few of these people are on the Right. I'm not sure this makes much of a point, and maybe I should just delete this paragraph, except to drive home that I think describing the Democratic Party of 2025 as "protecting people the Nazis murdered" while branding Trump with the Nazi stamp strikes me as a narrative determined to impose itself on the evidence, brushing a lot under the rug. (I am NOT saying that the Democrats are Nazis or whatabouting away from Trump, who is, I maintain, a Platonic tyrant who should be addressed like a Platonic tyrant.)
> Trump is a fascist.
Again, if you want to just use the definition of "right-winger I don't like," then sure, Trump is a fascist, but I don't think this usage is analytically or rhetorically useful. I won't follow suit, but I won't stop you doing it now that I understand what you mean by it.
It's always been clear that Donald Trump has no ideology other than himself. I'm not so sure that the post-Sexual Revolution Left, represented by Kamala Harris, are fascists, but I admit you make a good case.
This article leaves me curious to understand where Dr. Heaney falls on the liberal-antiliberal spectrum.
In his view, is the ideal philosophy of governance classical liberalism, or is it Catholic integralism? If the latter, could he defend integralism from the same critiques which he has leveled against progressivism in terms that a non-Catholic audience would accept?
My father is bad at the Internet and social media and comments, so I eventually realized he was never going to see this or answer it. So I asked him at dinner.
"Would you say you're a Catholic integralist...?"
"I don't think so. No. No."
"...or a classical liberal?"
"Oh, no, DEFINITELY not!"
I probably should have followed up from there, but there was a lot to talk about at dinner on Thursday after the election.
If you want his son's speculation, I think it would be close to the mark to say that his bedrock political belief is that human law should flow from the natural law, as understood by Aristotle, toward the common good, also as understood by Aristotle.
Great article, Dr. Heaney!
Unfortunately, I think the major party nominees, at least for federal office, are going to keep getting more morally grotesque, and the major party platforms are going to keep getting more and more abhorrent from a Catholic perspective barring divine intervention.
I highly doubt I will ever again be able to vote in good conscience for a major nominee for President or US Senator for the rest of my lifetime. Most people seem to be voting “against” the major party nominees they fear the most, and that is a very poor way to run the country.
Sonski/Onak 2024 for me all the way for the Presidency and Vice Presidency, baby! Power to the Pelicans!
I couldn't agree more with this post. In fact, I wrote an entire web novel articulating exactly the points you make, having a teenage boy in a futuristic divided America get drafted by an alt-right militia then imprisoned in a woke re-education camp.
I'd be very interested to hear if you think I got the notes right.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/94670/red-zone-son/chapter/1821283/chapter-1-you-can-stare-at-the-sky-when-youre
Very cool! I will have to give this a read too!
I checked out your profile and found your background super interesting! I wondered if you'd be open to writing a review of my story given your unique perspective. It would mean a lot to have your take highlighted, especially as I work to reach new readers who I think would benefit from a message against political demonization. So far I've gotten several extremely angry reviews by those who are mad that I decided not to rewrite the Handmaid's Tale...
Knowing that this is the sort of thing you would have grown up hearing helps build an understanding of you.
What fascists have to say about themselves, or indeed whatever their personal convictions might be, is of fairly minimal significance to evaluating who or what fascism is. Imagine citing Hannah Arendt and then using Trump's lack of personal animus in an argument for his not being fascist. I realize Banality of Evil is a separate essay, but... no really. From Origin of Totalitarianism, it's pretty clear that totalitarian movements use scapegoats to centralize power, such that a petty narcissist can make the perfect fascist.
It's quite an astonishing feat of rhetoric to characterize those protecting scapegoats of historic (and present) Nazis as the *real* totalitarians, and the people who want to remove the individual liberties of those scapegoats as their victims. But this victim reversal seems to be the standard move of those who support or minimize the harm of fascism.
Highly recommend The Origins of Totalitarianism. Evaluating Trumpism's historical continuity with Nazism survives that text quite well. As for Mussolini, Trump never slept with a copy of his speeches beside his bed. It's Hitler's speeches that Trump kept close, according to divorce proceedings and later his own statements, and he quotes or paraphrases them regularly.
You do understand that "protects certain identity groups from harm" and "totalitarian" are not mutually exclusive character traits, right? Especially considering that you offered no kind of counterpoint to Dr. Heaney's contention regarding whether Democrats are willing to allow any kind of dissent to their ideology.
"Imagine citing Hannah Arendt and then using Trump's lack of personal animus in an argument for his not being fascist."
On the other hand, imagine rebutting a man who's taught Arendt in classrooms for thirty years with an "imagine doing X" statement! This construction isn't an argument, and, indeed, explicitly calls attention to its own lack of argument.
I think this comment blurs the boundaries between fascism and totalitarianism together in a way that OP's text specifically rejects. There is a lot about the American population that seems receptive to a totalitarian, and I (at least) will go a step further and agree that, because the Platonic tyrant and the Arendt's totalitarian leader have a lot of the same traits, the fact that Trump is a tyrant makes it very easy to picture him in the leading role in her book.
However, OP's first point is that, whatever Trumpism is, whether it's totalitarian or not, it isn't *fascism*. Arendt herself, at least in Part III of The Origins of Totalitarianism, carefully maintains just these distinctions between fascism, nazism, communism, and totalitarianism in the broader sense. She seems to recognize the importance of speaking precisely about these different systems.
Now, if your position is that Trump is not merely a tyrant but an actual totalitarian, I don't think that's a crazy argument to make. The Platonic tyrant is enough like Arendt's totalitarian "functionary leader" that you can probably make that case using Arendt. But you do run into difficult passages like this one (on page 325 of my edition), which makes *precisely* the same distinction between tyranny and totalitarianism that OP makes:
> Lack of or ignoring of a party program is by itself not necessarily a sign of totalitarianism. The first to consider programs and platforms as needless scraps of paper and embarrassing promises, inconsistent with the style and impetus of a movement, was Mussolini with his Fascist philosophy of activism and inspiration through the historical moment itself. 39 Mere lust for power combined with contempt for "talkative" articulation of what they intend to do with it is characteristic of all mob leaders, but does not come up to the standards of totalitarianism. The true goal of Fascism was only to seize power and establish the Fascist "elite" as uncontested ruler over the country. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between the rulers and the ruled and achieves a condition in which power and the will to power, as we understand them, play no role, or at best, a secondary role.
When I read this passage, I mentally classify Trump as the "mob leader" rather than the "totalitarian," since Trump and his coterie have only ever (at least to my recall) used, or attempted to use, or longed to use, "external means" of coercion, rather than the universal coerced involvement Arendt writes about in this passage and throughout Part III. Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you are right, but I am not convinced at present.
OP's second point is that the opposition fancies itself a protective force (as you say), but that doesn't make them *not* totalitarians. If they use totalitarian tools in pursuit of that protection, I've got bad news for the protective force. This has obvious historical parallels: as you say, every totalitarian wants to cast the other guy as the totalitarian. In the original communism-vs-nazism showdown, of course, they both were, and it was not a particularly impressive rhetorical feat to point that out. It's not implausible that we would see something similar happen today.
It does seem odd to characterize OP as "supporting or minimizing the harm of fascism" when OP calls Trump a "tyrant" who "fomented a coup d'etat," and who is "soon hated by almost everyone." The allusion to Plato's Republic is not flattering: Plato's tyranny is a doom loop for the citizens of the Republic, who fall further and further into misery and suffering and oppression, and Plato presents no solution. OP is not calling Trump a good guy!
(Sidebar: The reason I don't believe Trump read Hitler's speeches is because I still don't believe Trump reads *anything* <https://theweek.com/articles/915606/trumps-lethal-aversion-reading>, and have never seen *definitive* proof that he is, in fact, literate <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LFkN7QGp2c>. This does not, of course, mean that he is not dangerous.)
We currently have a man who threw full-on Nazi salutes at the inauguration with access to the federal payment system.
So yes, we should distinguish among fascists, Nazis, and totalitarians, but arguing that the current regime contains none of these takes us away from truth at this point.
How we use the terms fascist, Nazi, and totalitarian depends a lot on whether we let fascists, Nazis, and totalitarians tell us how to use language. I say, let's don't.
1930s Nazis rarely called themselves fascists, and Italian Fascists never called themselves Nazis. (For that matter, Nazis rarely called themselves Nazis.) Meanwhile, opponents of the Nazis called them fascists from the start, as a designation for far-right authoritarian nationalist movements. This has remained the public meaning for most of a century now, and it's clearly the meaning in use for calling Trump a fascist.
Arendt discusses Fascism with a capital F to refer to the historical Italian movement, and she tells us the Nazis went beyond Fascism into totalitarianism. She doesn't refer to Nazis as fascists because she keeps to that big F. An argument that maintains that capital F and tells us of Nazism or Trumpism, "Whew, no Fascists here!" gets to be technically correct and functionally obfuscatory. Lose the capital F, and it's just obfuscation.
Following Arendt, Italian fascism didn't qualify as totalitarianism, but Nazi fascism did. Most communist parties do not qualify as totalitarian, but Stalinist communism did. I've never seen any argument that the German communists whom Hitler had murdered were totalitarians. The Democratic Socialists who opposed him certainly were not. Casting a Democratic party significantly more moderate than Democratic Socialists as totalitarians for protecting people the Nazis murdered... that's truly awful, in a way I don't think is easy for anyone to see of their own dad. I don't know where to begin arguing over a gulf that takes that as acceptable.
Trump is a fascist. His rhetoric and tactics resemble Hitler's much more than Mussolini's. Whether he can or will meet the full criteria for a totalitarian leader is less the question than the extent to which he and his movement deploy recognizable tactics from the Nazi path toward totalitarianism.
> "We currently have a man who threw full-on Nazi salutes"
I must admit, I didn't think anyone paying attention sincerely believed this was a Nazi salute. I don't necessarily endorse Snopes, but I read the Snopes and watched the tape came away convinced this was what Musk claimed: a gesture representing his heart going out to the audience, deliberately misinterpreted by a group that has taken the "the road to fascism is paved with people telling you to stop overreacting" as an excuse to overreact to everything and dismiss anyone suggesting the presence of an overreaction. https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/20/musk-nazi-salute/
> " as a designation for far-right authoritarian nationalist movements. This has remained the public meaning for most of a century now"
I disagree with you there. The common public meaning of "fascist" for most of a century now has been "anyone in power I don't like," although it does often specifically mean, "anyone to the right of Kristen Sinema I don't like".
This was the meaning I largely grew up with as a child of the '90s and '00s. I can't remember how old you are (in fact I'm not sure I've ever learned that information), so I can't remember if you remember what American political discourse was like between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was widely considered "literally Hitler" and so his supporters (including yours truly) therefore must be Nazis. This was intense and ubiquitous. It deflated after Democrats won the 2006 midterms, then was set aside entirely once Pres. Obama's rhetoric of unity became the main message of the party.
However, those four years of Dubya being treated as a Tier-1 Fascist convinced me from a young age that, if we are going to talk about fascism at all, we do actually need to stick to strict technical definitions, because the word as it is used in common parlance is totally useless, conveying no more meaning than generic insults like "bast*rd"
I suppose I won't contest the claim that Trump is a "fascist" in this generic sense... but I also won't care. It just means the speaker dislikes him, which is fine. Indeed, it's correct!
But if our question is *how should we understand and/or respond to Trump*, then it seems probable that it makes a difference whether our script is laid out in Arendt's Origins or in Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic still seems correct to me.
(There's a common rejoinder here that fascism refers only to right-wing authoritarian movements, but this distinction never seems to amount to much, since theorists along these lines always seem to think that right-wingism is inherently authoritarian. Perhaps you don't? I would welcome some thoughts along these lines, explaining why this label means something more than I think it means.)
> Most communist parties do not qualify as totalitarian
Only all the ones that have ever ruled a country? Like, when Arendt writes:
"Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
The first thing that jumps to my mind is actually the Great Leap Forward and its massacres of dissidents, or Pol Pot and his massacres of... everybody. This is certainly consistent with Arendt's later discussion of liquidation. Communists have been the world's pre-eminent totalitarians since fascism collapsed so completely after 1945. You can argue -- maybe -- that run-of-the-mill Marxist professors and Soviet apologists at American universities don't support a totalitarian platform, but all the winning communists who come to mind establish precisely this system of internal terror Arendt describes. Stalinism was its apex but hardly exceptional. Lenin's (incredibly violent!) political writing has plenty to say about the political value of domination through ideological terror.
"I've never seen any argument that the German communists whom Hitler had murdered were totalitarians."
That's remarkable; I've never heard any argument that they *weren't.* Ernst Thalmann was (during the rise of Hitler, well before Molotov-Ribbentrop) a close ally of Joseph Stalin, brought the KPD far closer to the Soviet Union and Stalinism, and personally led the split KPD from the SPD with the explicit purpose of bringing a communist Germany into COMINTERN as (eventually, inevitably) a Soviet satellite state during the age of Stalin. His KPD's rampant street violence put right-wingers of all stripes in fear, which in large part led to the rise of Hitler, as I argued in "One Reason To Punch Nazis" six years ago (https://www.jamesjheaney.com/2019/08/06/one-reason-to-punch-nazis-and-two-reasons-not-to/).
The 1930s faced Germans with an awful choice: support the totalitarian Communists, the totalitarian Nazis, or the well-meaning but clearly failing Center (the SPD). Now, I think the only moral vote at the time would have been to back the Hindenburg government. (Unless the SPD was also up to something super-evil, I guess, in which case the moral vote would be to not vote. But I don't think they were? Article 218 of the Weimar Constitution mostly settled my most pressing concern.)
However, one of the keys to understanding the rise of Hitler is recognizing that many people were reacting with *justified* fear due to a terrifying communist threat that the central government was incapable of dealing with -- and which Hitler's street gangs *were* capable of dealing with. It's not excusable, but, in that light, it at least becomes understandable.
...and we may take some comfort from that, because we do not have that situation today, although I think it's true that we have the seeds of it. There are certainly people who voted for Trump (not me) out of a justified fear of what would happen to them, their professions, their families, or their churches under a Harris Administration.
(To be clear, this is not-one sided. There are plenty of people who voted for Harris out of fear, too. This negative polarization to the point of mutual fear is where I see the germ of a parallel with 1930s Germany... although Germans could at least vote for the SPD! We only have the two parties!)
> Casting a Democratic party significantly more moderate than Democratic Socialists as totalitarians for protecting people the Nazis murdered...
That's not what OP did, unless you reinterpret persecution as protection.
The Nazis executed plenty of other people, too, for refusing to submit themselves to the ideology of the State. St. Maximilian Kolbe was one of many Catholics who died in Auschwitz. He would *not* find protection in today's Democratic party; he would be one of their scapegoats. He would find the Republicans much more protective, as would many of the other Catholics put to death in Hitler's camps.
OP's point is simply that this is where totalitarian ideology -- of the Right OR the Left -- leads, and that that ideology, which forces not just tolerance but participation and celebration under threat of punishment, is present in the Democratic Party today.
I'm also not sure it makes a lot of sense to invoke "people the Nazis murdered" on behalf of the Democrats right now. The Nazis' scapegoat par excellence was, of course, the Jews. There are political figures right now who clearly want a genocide of the Jews, sometimes gently masked under anti-Zionism and sometimes more forthright -- but, remarkably Donald Trump is *not* one of them. There are also sincere anti-Zionists who don't *want* to genocide the Jews, but they are a difficult case, because they also don't seem to have any plan for preventing a genocide of the Jews or feel any obligation to develop one, as Aaronson argued (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7845). Very few of these people are on the Right. I'm not sure this makes much of a point, and maybe I should just delete this paragraph, except to drive home that I think describing the Democratic Party of 2025 as "protecting people the Nazis murdered" while branding Trump with the Nazi stamp strikes me as a narrative determined to impose itself on the evidence, brushing a lot under the rug. (I am NOT saying that the Democrats are Nazis or whatabouting away from Trump, who is, I maintain, a Platonic tyrant who should be addressed like a Platonic tyrant.)
> Trump is a fascist.
Again, if you want to just use the definition of "right-winger I don't like," then sure, Trump is a fascist, but I don't think this usage is analytically or rhetorically useful. I won't follow suit, but I won't stop you doing it now that I understand what you mean by it.
Thank you for this article, Dr. Heaney.
It's always been clear that Donald Trump has no ideology other than himself. I'm not so sure that the post-Sexual Revolution Left, represented by Kamala Harris, are fascists, but I admit you make a good case.
Trump seems more like an evil mobster and cult leader to me than a fascist.
This article leaves me curious to understand where Dr. Heaney falls on the liberal-antiliberal spectrum.
In his view, is the ideal philosophy of governance classical liberalism, or is it Catholic integralism? If the latter, could he defend integralism from the same critiques which he has leveled against progressivism in terms that a non-Catholic audience would accept?
My father is bad at the Internet and social media and comments, so I eventually realized he was never going to see this or answer it. So I asked him at dinner.
"Would you say you're a Catholic integralist...?"
"I don't think so. No. No."
"...or a classical liberal?"
"Oh, no, DEFINITELY not!"
I probably should have followed up from there, but there was a lot to talk about at dinner on Thursday after the election.
If you want his son's speculation, I think it would be close to the mark to say that his bedrock political belief is that human law should flow from the natural law, as understood by Aristotle, toward the common good, also as understood by Aristotle.