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Coco Das interviews Dr. Anthony DiMaggio, author of the new book, Rising Fascism in America (order from Routledge here). Dr. DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. His research emphasizes the interactions between politics, social movements, the news media, and the American right. He is the author of 9 books, including Political Power in America (2019), Rebellion in America (Routledge 2020) and Unequal America (Routledge 2021). He has been an active participant in social movement politics for the last two decades, and is an avid social commentator. Follow his writings at Counterpunch.org. Dr. DiMaggio previously appeared on episode 27: Our System is Not Equipped to Deal With a Bad Actor Like Trump. Plus voices from the launch of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights on the 49th anniversary of Roe V. Wade January 2: Sunsara Taylor, Lori Sokol, Merle Hoffman and Katea Stitt.
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.
Episode 96
Sunday January 30 2022
Anthony DiMaggio 00:00
There is a movement in America which includes tens of millions of people in the modern Republican Party and Donald Trump, increasingly, that is very neo-fascistic in its politics. The big consequence here is that if we can’t have an open, clear, critical discussion about the problem of rising fascism, then people can’t recognize the severity of threat. If we don’t come to terms with how dangerous this is, then it can just happen and then people don’t realize it until it’s too late. We need to have a mass movement where people recognize in advance the danger and we work to roll it back.
Coco Das 00:48
Welcome to Episode 96 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Coco Das, one of those volunteers, guest-hosting this week’s episode. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country.
Coco Das 01:12
In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing a conversation I had with Anthony DiMaggio, author of the new book Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here. I’ll also be sharing voices from the heroic launch of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights in front of the Supreme Court last Saturday on the 49th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Coco Das 01:34
But first, let’s talk about some developments this past week as it relates to the rising fascist threat and the importance and impact of standing up against it. Fascist book bans are accelerating across the country. According to statistics provided by the American Library Association, calls to ban books have at least quadrupled over the past few months as opposed to previous years. It is becoming increasingly clear that the aims of these book bans, behind the curtain have “protecting” children from so called divisiveness, pornography and discomfort, is to raise a generation of Hitler Youth, erasing and rewriting any history that challenges white Christian, patriarchal supremacy and the myth of American greatness. Taking away any books that help students develop humanist values of compassion and inclusion, or god forbid anything more radical than that, or that train students to think critically and historically.
The fascist politics of these book bans are becoming even more open. In Granbury, Texas over 125 books were pulled from the high school library, carried away in multiple boxes tagged with “Krause’s List.” After the school board voted 7-0 to change district policy, allowing books to be removed prior to a review, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, a seminal work about the Holocaust, which has become a de-facto anti-fascist educational tool for people young and old.
Now, let’s dispense with the triumphalist nonsense that these book bans are good for those books or for society as a whole. Every book that is banned does not go on to sell a million copies. Even if they do, these books are kept out of the hands of a huge segment of the population that would not otherwise have access to these books. Books about the history of slavery or the Holocaust are not just important for Black or Jewish children. They are important for everyone.
What is happening now is that public schools and public libraries are being made to do the bidding of a Christian fascist movement that is hell-bent on seizing power and dominating everyone they hate, with a stranglehold on dissent, arts and critical thought. If that’s not the world you want to live in, we have to get organized now to fight this. Reasonable people are being driven out of these school boards by rabid, violent foot soldiers of this fascist movement. Capitulating to this with delusional fantasies about book sales is unconscionable. Last week, our host Sam Goldman spoke to Katherine Joyce about Hungary and Poland being exemplars for this fascist movement here in the US, with “Fucker” Carlson leading the charge. This week, Carlson released a full-out 21st century Nazi propaganda film called Hungary versus Soros: The Fight for Civilization. I’m not going to dignify this hateful garbage with more details here, but I do urge listeners to go back and listen to Episode 95 of the podcast and vow to follow exemplars of a different kind: the resistance needed to counter this growing fascist threat.
Shout out to Neil Young for pulling his music from Spotify in protest against Joe Rogan’s continuing anti-vax, anti-science, libertarian fascist lunacy, and to Joni Mitchell for following suit. But where are all the others? I echo the novelist Ayelet Waldman’s question on Twitter: Anyone else following Neil Young’s lead? Or is he going to be hanging out making a statement against fascism all by his lonesome. I also want to give a shout out to Revolution Club for going out and challenging anti-maskers demanding their “right” to spread disease at a grocery store in LA. The Revcoms chanted, “You have no right to spread disease! We won’t stand down! We won’t submit. We won’t take your fascist shit!” Amen to that.
Finally, as more states pass murderous woman-hating Texas-style abortion bans and the major pro-choice groups can do nothing but use the millions of dollars they raise, to breathlessly plead with Congress — a Congress that couldn’t manage to pass voting rights legislation — to please-please-pretty-please pass the Women’s Health Protection Act. Instead of that, let’s listen now to the voices of a different kind of movement, one that refuses to submit to those terms and is mobilizing people into the streets to say unequivocally: “We refuse to let the US Supreme Court deny women’s humanity and decimate their rights.”
Sunsara Taylor 07:19
Most people in this country who believe that women are full human beings, not incubators, not baby-making machines, do not know that today is the 49th anniversary of Roe v Wade. Most of them don’t know right now that if we don’t change something drastically, this could be the last year that women have the right to abortion legally. Most of them have no idea the horror, the nightmare this will mean: the deaths, the foreclosed lives, the women taking their own lives, or trapped in abusive relationships, or driven into poverty, the horror and enslavement this means.
Why don’t these people on the pro-choice side know? It’s not because the fascists who are out here in the streets, the women-haters and theocrats have not been clear. It’s not because the fascist judges on the Supreme Court have not been clear. Most of the pro-choice people in this country are not waging the fight right now because the Democratic Party has capitulated in advance and won’t even say the word “abortion.” And let’s be honest. All too many of the so-called pro-choice leaders are capitulating as well. Sure, some of them dress it up and say “we’re trying to pass some pro-active legislation to protect abortion in our local area for after Roe falls.” Or they say “we’re going to teach some women how to induce their own abortions…for after Roe falls.” All of this accepts the unacceptable which is that women will lose the legal right to control their bodies and their lives. That must not be accepted. That is not pro-active. That is capitulation.
Merle Hoffman 09:57
50 years ago — 50 YEARS AGO — I saw the first patient at Choices Women Medical Center, a center I founded. This was in 1971. Abortion had been legal in New York for 3 years, before other states, before Roe v Wade. This woman was married. She had 3 children and she didn’t want to be pregnant. She couldn’t be pregnant. She was terrified because two days before, abortion was a crime, a sin, something terrible. With legalization, she could come with her husband and have a safe procedure. So I talked with her. I was very young and there was no such thing as counseling. It was one woman helping another. I stayed with her throughout her procedure, and I held her hand very tightly. It was her hand, that intimate, personal connection that wedded me to this struggle, that catalyzed my mission and that also brought me here fifty years later.
I understood very deeply that the choice of abortion is a fundamental civil right, and a decision about power and survival. What [the anti’s] don’t understand is that there will always be abortion. Women have laid themselves down in filth through the ages because they understand that it is their power to decide when and whether or not they become mothers.
Lori Sokol
I also represent the LGBT community. I’m a gay woman. There are very few gay women, or the gay community in general, who understand the importance of fighting and defending women’s right to choose. Not only because gay women can of course become pregnant, but we have to understand that first it’s going to be turning back abortion rights, then it’s going to be anti-contraception, then marriage equality in this country, and the rights of people of color. We all need to be in this together. Thank you. Abortion on demand and without apology! RiseUp4AbortionRights.org
Katea Sitt 11:44
I stand here as a Black woman and the mother of a beautiful daughter, as a woman who had an abortion at 16 years old. While it was an agonizing decision, it was the right one at the right time. The trajectory of my life would have changed the moment I gave birth to a child at that age. I joined this fight to ensure that Black girls and teenagers are assured the same access to abortion so that they are not forced to make a decision about something as important as motherhood before they are ready.
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Webster v Reproductive Health Care in 1989, 16 Black women crafted the first statement advocating for equal access to abortion. It was entitled African American Women are for Reproductive Freedom. As a woman who stands with women of all colors, we say NO to that. Not again will Black women, Black girls, teenagers, who have been raped, who have been the victims of incest, who just want to choose to be stable and be able to take care of themselves before they bring a being into the world. Never again will they be forced into that space.
Coco Das 12:16
That was Sunsara Taylor, Lori Sokol, Marle Hoffman and Katea Stitt outside SCOTUS on January 22. We’ll link to the full speeches in our show notes.
Coco Das 12:29
Now here’s my interview with Anthony DiMaggio. I’m happy to be speaking today with Anthony DiMaggio, author of the new book Rising Fascism in America, It Can Happen Here. An associate professor of political science at Lehigh University, DiMaggio’s research emphasizes the interactions between politics, social movements, the news media and the American right. He’s the author of nine books, including Political Power in America, Rebellion in America, and Unequal America. He has been an active participant in social movement politics for the last two decades, and is an avid social commentator, and he has been a previous guest on our podcast. So Anthony DiMaggio, welcome back.
Anthony DiMaggio 13:12
Thank you so much for having me.
Coco Das 13:14
I really appreciated your latest book, Rising Fascism in America, for how directly you go at the arguments that I think are holding a lot of people back from seeing and understanding what was going on over the last five years under Trump, and acting on that understanding. Although we narrowly escaped a second Trump term, which would have further consolidated a very dangerous program in the most powerful country in the world, Trumpism has taken hold and drives one of the two ruling parties in the US, the GOP, and drives that social base as well.
I also thought that your book was instructive in terms of methodology. I really appreciated all the evidence and how you gathered the evidence, especially in the realm of ideas. I thought it was interesting how you surveyed and analyzed who was saying what about what was going on under Trump; how you looked at all the op-eds in The New York Times. Some of those statistics that you found were really shocking and important for people to grasp. For our listeners, I really recommend that you go out and get this book because there’s a lot of substance and we’re just going to be able to hit the tip of the iceberg today. You wrote in the book that fascism is a kind of authoritarianism. Can you talk about what distinguishes it from other kinds of authoritarianism? Why was it important to make that distinction?
Anthony DiMaggio 14:38
Well, first, I just want to say thanks for the vote of confidence. I do appreciate that. It’s nice to know that people are actually reading books in this day and age. I saw a statistic recently where more than half of American adults don’t read at even a sixth grade level. So, we have a real crisis of literacy in the United States. Things like reading books are incredibly important.
Related to your question, this is actually a really important point, because authoritarianism is a term that’s been around for a very long time, but it’s a very general term. What you’re really talking about there, when you look at pretty much all of the scholars that are looking at authoritarianism, is that they all have in common the agreement that this is generally referring to systems and people who believe in the idea that it’s the job of others to obey authority, and that they want to stifle dissent. That could really mean a lot of things. It’s a very, very general thing to say when you say authoritarian. Parents are authoritarian when they tell children that they have to follow rules, especially in the most egregious cases, when you have parents who say you’ll follow these rules, because. But even then, even if you have parents who do a good job of justifying themselves, children don’t necessarily agree always, and they might defy you, and do. This is not a shock to anyone who has children. There is an authoritarian element there of them having to obey rules that are put in place for their benefit. That’s authoritarian, but it could be justified if the rules are good, and if they’re justified to a child. It’s not fascism.
Corporations are authoritarian entities, because they don’t give representation to employees, especially if you don’t have a union and have the ability to vote on a collective bargaining agreement. That’s not by itself, fascism, although it is an oppressive thing. Schools generally don’t recognize the freedom of speech in K through 12, particularly, in minors. Even in colleges, there have been numerous court cases that have curtailed the freedom of speech of students in the name of things like protecting the institutional brand of a university or college. That’s not fascism. Those things are authoritarian, but they’re not fascism. If you look really closely at the historians who studied the classical era of fascism, it’s a very specific thing and a specific list of traits.
What it comes down to is you either have a system or an ideology that people subscribe to, that fits these characteristics, or many of them, or it doesn’t. What I ended up doing in the book, as I go through the history of the classic works, various historians of fascism that study the interwar period between World War I and II in Germany and Italy, people like Mussolini, and Hitler and those institutions, those regimes. I break it down into about seven major categories, if we have time really quickly to lay that out.
Coco Das 17:12
That would be helpful.
Anthony DiMaggio 17:13
It’s important in terms of distinguishing the difference. Not to say that there’s a difference. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism; it’s a specific kind. White supremacy is one of them historically. Para–militarism, which is a fancy way of saying subscribing to vigilante-style violence on the part of citizens to reinforce a regime or a certain type of thinking. Misogyny, and the cult of patriarchal personality. We’re always talking about males here. We talk about these figures, these demagogues that try to roll through the cult of personality. So that’s another important part of it. Another one is eliminationism, which is a fancy way of saying people who believe that they ought to be able to rule over others, either as a dictator, asserting themselves over a population, and particularly people of color.
The idea with eliminationism was very prominent in Nazi Germany against minorities, in this case, the Holocaust and targeting of the Jews, but also against political parties that are separate from, in the case of the Nazis, the Nazi Party. Eliminationism can apply to a lot of things, not just minorities, but contempt for multi-party governing. Eliminationism is a big part of fascism. Militarism, and particularly the idea of some kind of empire that’s reclaiming a past greatness that a country claims to have lost. That’s a big part of fascism. Eugenics and social Darwinism is a huge part of this in terms of ideology that espouses the idea of survival of the fittest. In case people haven’t noticed, Donald Trump talks about this a lot: the idea of good genes, some people have better genes than others. He usually does this in front of all-white audiences in states like Minnesota, for example. He’s got this eugenics bent and other people who support him like Tucker Carlson are very fixated on eugenics and social Darwinism.
Finally, corporatism: the idea that the state can be mobilized in favor of capital and against any progressive liberal or socialist interests. So, what I’m arguing in the book that the vast majority of these seven components, the ideology that drives Trumpism, and the modern Republican Party overlaps with most of these; maybe with the exception of corporatism because we live in a neoliberal society where business interests and interest groups are supposed to be, according to the ideology of neoliberalism, the dominant leader within a free market system. We don’t have a corporatist system like the traditional Nazi regime and Italian fascism, but that’s really the only one of the seven. If you look closely at all these other traits of fascism, there is a movement in America that includes tens of millions of people in the modern Republican Party and Donald Trump, increasingly, and it is very neo-fascistic in its politics.
Coco Das 19:41
Well, thank you for laying that out. I don’t know if you saw the Trump rally over the weekend. There was a moment where it was again very surreal, because he had these people behind him holding signs that said, Blacks for Trump or something like that, but he said if you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine. If you’re white, you don’t get the therapeutics — talking to a mainly white crowd. Could you share your thoughts on what Trump is doing there in that moment? This is one way of putting it. If it’s helpful, what are some of the myths about Trump and fascist politics that get broken down in that moment? Because I really appreciated how you actually went through the different levels of reasons, rationales for people to not use the word fascism with Trump. And you argue against that, really? Well, I was wondering if you could help us apply it to one little micro moment there.
Anthony DiMaggio 20:33
So there’s a couple things going on here. One of them is to simply say that Trump rally and those comments, obviously, are not true. I can even get into the ways in which to evoke denialism. The people say, Oh, well, Donald Trump’s ignorant or stupid and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So he’s too dumb to be a fascist, right? He’s a buffoon or something. Well, okay. There’s some truth to that. Obviously, he doesn’t fit the traditional characteristics of an intellectual, right? Somebody who marshals evidence and empirical reasoning and hypothesis testing to make a case, this is what people think of traditional intelligence. But he has a different type of intelligence. We’re talking about someone who’s very savvy and who knows how to manipulate situations. So, on the one hand, it’s true that what he’s saying is complete nonsense.
There’s this narrative here, but this is part of his savvy, shrewd nature in terms of an alternative sort of intelligence that he is trying to normalize and mainstream — essentially white nationalist talking points. When we hear about people who refer to the great replacement theory, this idea that whites are going to be replaced by people of color. by Mexican immigrants, by Black people, by Jews, by Muslims, that’s what he’s doing here. He’s playing on long standing, reverse racist notions that were originally prominent in conservatism. He’s going much further with this, because with Donald Trump, he’s talking about a Muslim ban; banning people from Muslim countries entirely. He’s talking not just about illegal immigration, or not authorized immigration is his term I would prefer, but immigration in total from places like Mexico and other countries that he refers to as shithole countries.
He’s referring to immigrants as people coming from countries infested with violence and as acting like ruthless animals. This is the kind of language that he uses in his speeches, which is straight out of the Third Reich. You know, this idea that you’re going to treat people of color as animals who are some kind of other exotic foreign threat. With regards to AOC, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, he used this language about how she and the members of the squad needed to go back to the countries they came from that are infested with crime. This is Naziesque language.
So yes, on the one hand, it’s not true, and we should be clear about that. It’s not true that white people get put to the back of the line for the vaccine. If anything, we know that as of mid-2021, there were vaccination sites that were starting to be shut down because of a lack of demand. If we look at some of the most recent data from the Pew Research Center — this is really 2021 here — there’s not really a difference between white, Black, Latinx individuals in terms of their ability to get vaccinated. The numbers are all around the three quarters of adults that say they have been vaccinated. It’s really not an issue of white people not being able to get the vaccine. That’s really not the case at all.
What we know right now is that about a quarter of adults, as of early 2022, are unvaccinated. As of the last data we saw from 2021, this is coming from a YouGov poll, for example, 17% of this quarter of the population says they’re not planning on getting vaccinated. They don’t want to get vaccinated. They’ve made that choice. Only 8% of this quarter of the population say that they didn’t have time to get a vaccine, so, that’s not the main reason. The reasons people are giving are all types of other reasons, the main ones, which are that they think it’s associated with bad side effects, autism or myocarditis, and is not a reason that’s been given, that people say that they don’t have access to a facility. That’s just not even a reason at all that people given these polls are not getting vaccinated. So everything that he’s saying is just completely fabricated with regards to vaccine access.
When he mentioned how white people don’t get therapeutics, that’s also just not accurate. We know that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, they have data on this from right around 2020, they’ve polled Americans and they say that it’s like 8% of whites that don’t have health insurance versus 11% of Black Americans and 20% of Latinx Americans. So, if anything, it’s the opposite of what he’s saying that people of color disproportionately struggle to get access to quality health care, because they don’t have health insurance. So these things are all true and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
For these reasons, people look at Donald Trump and they say: Well, he’s so ignorant, he’s stupid, he’s a buffoon.” It’s important to point out that has never been a qualifying trait of fascism, that it’s some sort of rigorous intellectual prowess. If anything, fascism historically is known for the cults of personality where people suspend intellectualism and that kind of reasoning in favor of deferring to the alleged willpower or smarts or intellect of the fascist leader; “the leader”, as I call Donald Trump in the book. Fascism has historically been premised on contempt for intellectualism, not support for it. This is a big mistake that goes back to the Nazi era. You had journalists who were making this claim that Hitler was too dumb to be taken seriously. These things go hand in hand, the idea that someone could be as vicious as they are ignorant. Those things are not contradictory. In the case of fascism, they go hand in hand together.
Coco Das 25:13
You wrote: “Trump most certainly subscribes to various ideologies.” This is in response to people saying Trump has no ideology; he’s just out for himself. “Trump most certainly subscribes to various ideologies, examining his rhetoric and politics, his policies, particularly regarding immigration and his efforts to virtue signal to and activate far right neo–fascist political actors were clearly white nationalist in orientation. White nationalism is a defining feature of right-wing ideological extremism.”
Your paragraph goes on into more of the ideologies that are apparent in his rhetoric and his actions. But what is the role of the anti-intellectualism? Why is it so important? I thought this was a good encapsulation of the anti-intellectualism that you wrote “marked by pride and willful ignorance, embrace of disinformation and lies, and militant contempt for medical science, critical journalism and evidence-based reasoning.” I think this is something that is really puzzling to people, especially in this day and age where information is readily available, though this information is also readily available, but why is it so tied to this movement? Why are they so dependent on it?
Anthony DiMaggio 26:40
The first thing I should point out is that anti-intellectualism is sort of core to Trumpism. Why is that the case, and why are people so attached to it? The simplest answer is that it’s easy. If someone comes to you peddling a bunch of easy answers, and a way of framing things where they say that you can be seen as a wise person. This is a big part of what’s called populism. I don’t use the term populism by itself. I think, in this case, talking about fascistic populism, if we were going to use the word at all. It’s a very seductive ideology, because it doesn’t require anything of you. It tells people that they’re right, in terms of reinforcing the prejudices that have long driven Trumpism, and they don’t have to worry about all these people who are going to raise inconvenient questions that might undermine what they believe. Because what ends up happening is you convince these individuals as parts of the Trump base, that they know what they’re talking about. They’re the wise ones. All these people who are experts, they are just out-of-touch liberal elitists who are riding around in limousines who are out of touch with the average person.
This is a very dangerous part of the fascistic program, the whole idea of the rise of the patriarchal, cultist personality; the cult of personality. What it is, at its core, is this idea about institutionalizing one-party rule and white nationalism. How do you do that? You have to invalidate other potential power centers that might challenge what it is that you’re trying to do. So, how do you invalidate these potentially competing power centers or sources of authority? You go after them and you make people believe a priori without even having to have evidence that anytime these people’s lips are moving, they’re lying. Whether it’s the media, whether it’s the Democratic Party, organized labor, they’re out for themselves, not to help you medical experts and practitioners during a pandemic, educators, whether it’s K through 12, or higher education and professors, these people are all out to hurt you. They’re out to reinforce the power and affluence of the elites, whatever “the elites” is. This is a term it gets thrown around a lot with Trumpism, ignoring the fact that Donald Trump is the most elite president we’ve had in modern history in terms of his plutocratic background and as a billionaire.
This is something that’s been a factor for a long time. It’s been something on the right, that was building before Trump, he didn’t create this. The idea at its core is about delegitimizing and undermining any source of authority outside of the party and the sycophants of the party and right wing. A good example of this I like to talk about in the book is Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was long skirting the line between reactionary right-wing politics and fascistic politics throughout the 2010s. He fully crossed over into fascism during the 2010s, especially by the rise of Trump’s presidency. He talked on his show about what he called the ‘four corners of deceit,’ in his words, our governments, academia, science, and the media. He’s not talking with the media about right-wing media, because he’s part of that: They’re the only ones that tell you the truth, I’m in the Republican Party. When he says the government, he’s not talking about the Republican Party, he’s talking about Democrats.
Think about this for a second how incredible this is: Science at its core, foundationally, and academia are deceitful. All they do is lie. So anything they say, you know that they’re lying because their lips are moving. You can ignore everything that any of these people say. This is the means through which you consolidate a fascistic government and regime and you put it into place and you delegitimize any sort of competing centers of power. That’s what’s been happening for many years now, and it really intensified with the Trump administration in terms of them not even trying to hide their blatant contempt for anyone outside of the political party and its surrogates in the media.
Coco Das 30:12
Yeah, I think it’s also what makes the movement so impenetrable to reason. It’s very hard to argue rationally with someone who’s fully subscribed to this worldview. I just again, want to highlight how much I appreciated how you looked so specifically at right-wing media and mainstream media and what was going on there and what people were talking. The fact that you could pinpoint the time that Rush Limbaugh crossed over into outright fascist rhetoric, I think is really important. Because a lot of us we don’t have this training, we sort of think things instinctually, and one of the things I’ve learned from working with Refuse Fascism is always interrogating. Is what I’m saying true? Is there evidence for it? That’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m mainly a fiction writer. So I really appreciate learning from other people how they do that.
One thing that has puzzled me about a strain of fascism denial that comes from scholars and pundits in the media, they point to certain things like the one-party state or corporatism. But when Hitler came to power, or even before he came to power, those things were not true in Germany either. I know less about Mussolini, but when Mussolini came to power, those things maybe were not true in Italy either, but they developed over time. One of the things Refuse Fascism said in our calls is that fascism advances in stages. It wouldn’t be correct to say that in 1933 Adolf Hitler wasn’t a fascist because those things were not at play yet. You would hear a lot with the militarism aspect, too. Hitler didn’t invade Poland until much later, but he was still a fascist when he came to power.
Sometimes I would listen to someone like Samuel Moines, who you also mentioned, and I think, have you ever watched a Trump rally? There always seemed to be such a disconnect between what Trump was saying and this very narrowly defined fascism that people were clinging to. Maybe these are two different questions, but I also think there’s different necessity, different freedom. Hitler had a different kind of necessity in 1930s Germany than a fascist leader in 21st century America, the most powerful country in the world has. Of course it’s not going to be an exact correlation.
I guess I want you to respond to what do you think of this idea of looking at the aims of the movement, rather than what is in place, what they’ve achieved? And also, in that context, what is their end goal? And is the end goal an important reason to call this fascism or neofascism? What is your assessment of what this neofascist movement under Trump, What is it aiming for? I just gave you a lot to unpack so you can go at it however you feel fit.
Anthony DiMaggio 33:08
Like you and Refuse Fascism, I make a distinction between systems that are fully consolidated fascistic regimes, which we don’t have yet in the United States, and fascism being seen as a movement and or an ideology. There is clearly fascist ideology that exists the United States, and it’s most strongly articulated in the US media with regards to right-wing media, figures on Fox News, OAN Network, Newsmax, talk radio, and so on. You can have a fascist movement that includes tens of millions of Americans who subscribe to the use of violence for political purposes and believe in white nationalism and the cult of personality around Trump.
By the way, 62% of Trump supporters said during his presidency that there was nothing he could do that would make them not support him. That’s the cult of personality, clearly, in almost two thirds of his supporters. So, the subtitle of the book is It Can Happen Here, which means that we had an election in 2020 where state Republican leaders and state Democratic leaders told Trump, in terms of his big lie and stealing the election, his attempts to pull off an insurrection and a coup. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t happen again, moving forward, because what Trump did was really very simplistic.
It was this idea that if it didn’t work in 2020, and Mike Pence isn’t going to hand you an election through a coup, and the state leaders aren’t going to hand it to you, then find people who will. You just do that next time. You spend the next few years promoting BIG LIE election propaganda that’s totally baseless, and you replace these people at the state level and the local level who certify elections and you find people who will nullify majority votes in swing states. That’s part of the end goal here, is moving toward this idea of a one-party state. Nobody’s going to say that, but that’s realistically what you’re talking about.
If you get to a situation where state leaders are nullifying votes when they go in the “wrong direction,” which means for Democrats, you have informally instituted a de facto dictatorship there, if you have determined that one party cannot win presidential elections anymore, despite the fact that that party — whatever you think of the Democrats, and I don’t think much of them, but they’re not fascists — despite the fact that the Democratic Party has won five out of the last six presidential elections, it’s looking increasingly like, it’s going to be very difficult for the Republican Party to ever consistently win national presidential elections again. They know this, which is why they have moved in this direction of the BIG LIE propaganda, because they know that they can’t win these elections.
The only one they won with a majority vote in terms of the popular vote was 2004. Every other election fr 2000 to 2020, they lost the popular vote. They’re not stupid, they know this, and they’re scared to death, the Republican base, the majority of that base, of what is called this great replacement theory, propaganda from the fascist right. It’s this idea that white people are going be replaced because people of color, including immigrants from Mexico, and from Muslim majority countries, and Black people, and Jews, are going to replace them. This was the rallying cry of 2017 with Charlottesville.
It’s hard for people to process this because when you say the Republican Party is getting taken over by great replacement theory propaganda and rhetoric about white genocide, they don’t use those words. They do this in other ways. Donald Trump talks about Mexico is sending its worst people who are criminals and rapists and drug dealers, and we have to stop immigration from these countries. They’re not using these words, but they’re mainstreaming the concepts. They’re using these concepts without actually using the full-on fascistic terms.
This is dangerous and you can actually see this in the polls. I talk about two polls in the book. One is a University of Virginia poll in 2018, where a majority of Republicans, 51%, agreed “that America must protect and preserve its white European heritage.” That’s interesting if you think about it. This is a majority of Republicans saying that the country’s heritage (“its”, that’s a part of the quote) is white and European. That’s called white nationalism. When you say what it means to be America is protecting “its” white European heritage, you’re echoing a white nationalist talking point. What the pollster did there is they rephrased the term white nationalism and they put it in a fancier way with more words. But it’s the same thing substantively.
We see the same thing with the 2009 Associated Press poll. 51% of Republicans said, “a culture established by the country’s early European immigrants is important to our identity as a nation.” What do you think we’re talking about here? European, early European immigrants, you’re obviously talking about white people. This is a majority of the Republican Party subscribing to this, and you have a president who is talking about cutting off all immigration from Muslim majority countries, from Mexico. He’s using the language of white nationalism without saying that he’s a white nationalist. That’s really the end goal here, when we talk about neo–fascistic movements, is mainstreaming the ideology of fascism and white supremacy that have been around forever, without saying that’s what you’re doing. You can’t say that you’re doing those things. It would be too controversial and too unpopular. So you just normalize the ideology behind all this without saying that’s what you’re doing.
Coco Das 38:07
Well, can you talk a little bit about this base? Not the most violent paramilitary parts of the base, not even maybe the most extreme base that we saw activated in Charlottesville or on January 6, but this voting base, which you said, “US journalists, and academics have popularized the notion that Trump’s base is disproportionately working class and they voted for Trump because of financial insecurities that motivated them to embrace ‘populace challenges’ to the political ‘establishment’.” Why is that wrong? What did you find out about the voting base of Trump?
Anthony DiMaggio 38:46
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. I think this is a really important question. It gets to the heart of some of the content later in the book, particularly talking about the Trump base. There’s virtually no evidence — and I’ve been researching this since Donald Trump came into office. You’re talking about more than half of a decade now. I’m not aware of anyone who’s compiled more data on this than I have. I’m not trying to brag about it, it’s just that when you study something this long, you tend to come up with a lot of data. I talked about this in a previous book ‘Rebellion in America’ and also my previous book, ‘Unequal America’, I revisit the Trump base over and over.
What people will see if they look at rising fascism in America in this book is that it’s sort of a glorified summary of a mountain of data I’ve collected in these previous books and articles I’ve written. What I found basically, when I mentioned a number of things, one of these things is that there’s virtually no evidence that the Trump base is more likely to be financially insecure or to economically struggle compared to anybody else in America. I’ve looked at dozens and dozens of survey metrics on this over a period of years between 2016 and 2020-21. There’s just no evidence of this. It just doesn’t exist. This is part of the romanticism that gets used to sell Trumpism, that these are people with legitimate grievances, who are angry about getting shafted by globalization and who are poor and they’re suffering and they’re desperate, and there’s virtually no evidence of this at all.
As best I can find, that narrative stems primarily from one statistic that white people without college degrees are more likely to support Trump compared to other groups of Americans. If you look at the 2020 election, 67% of Trump’s support within this group, white people without college degrees, 67% of them went to Trump, where only 32% went toward Biden. That’s true, but one of the problems is that if you know anything about class analysis, whether you’re a Marxist or not, whether you’re just a good sociologist, you know that class is about a lot more than just education. Education is one facet of class. Others have to do with occupation and income.
In a capitalistic society, things like income and wealth are the biggest determinant of whether someone’s a have or have not. What you actually end up finding when you look at the Trump base is that they tend to be — pretty much be referred to as — petty bourgeois types. They’re people who are middle to middle upper income. Some of them might be independent business owners. That was definitely a profile with the January 6th insurrectionists. They were disproportionately white collar people and small business owner types.
But actually, in terms of class, if you’re looking at income, it’s not the case that people who are less educated whites and low income are more likely to support Trump. They’re statistically not more likely to support Trump. When I say low education, I mean people without a college degree. When I say low income, I mean people who are lower income, making under $50,000 a year, which is well under the national average. That group, less educated, lower income whites are not statistically more likely to support Trump. He’s got a lot of people who are whites and don’t have a college degree who might be, for lack of a better term, juiced into all types of decent jobs and are, over the years and decades, people who are middle-aged or older who’ve been working these jobs for decades, and they get paid well above the national average.
Something people don’t talk about enough when they look at white people without college degrees, most of them earn over the national median income, which is $65,000. So there’s all types of problems here when people equate class simply with education, and they create these myths of the Donald Trump base as people who are driven by economic insecurity. There’s no evidence of that when you look at the economic metrics in these polls. They say themselves, with regards to things like saving for retirement, ability to afford health care, ability to afford quality education, ability to pay their bills, dealing with things like bankruptcy, they are not statistically more likely to say that they deal with any of these problems.
What I actually end up finding in my research is that the primary driver of Trumpism is right-wing socio-cultural beliefs. Things like people having reactionary views about immigration and wanting to shut down all immigration, people who think that too much has been made of racial inequality in America. They’re tired of hearing about it. People who have negative views of Muslims and Islam, people who have right wing views about abortion, and also all types of other really fascistic beliefs, these are the primary drivers of support for Trumpism and Donald Trump.
When I say fascistic beliefs, there’s some very specific survey items that you can identify in these Pew polls, from the Pew Research Center. Things like people who have contempt for press freedom, who think Donald Trump should be able to shut down media outlets that are critical of his presidency when he was in office. People who say that the President should have been able to ignore Congress and do whatever he wanted, and we don’t have to worry about checks and balances. People who said explicitly that they thought it was a really good thing that we use violence to get what we want for political, social, economic, or religious purposes, and people who liked reactionary foreign policy, particularly building a wall and keeping out immigrants. These beliefs were the primary drivers of Trumpism and continue to be the primary drivers.
When you get into a lot of those fascistic beliefs — the ones I mentioned about contempt for press freedom, contempt for checks and balances, support for use of violence — the more of those beliefs that people subscribe to, the stronger their attachment to Trumpism is, which is a fancy way of saying that as people become more fascistic in their beliefs, their commitment to Trumpism grows and intensifies. These are really the things that are the primary drivers of Trumpism. It’s not the case that economics is insignificant. There are economic beliefs that drive Trumpism, but what we find is that overwhelmingly their right-wing economic beliefs like opposing taxing wealthy people, opposing raising the minimum wage, opposing dealing with inequality in America, those things are there, but they’re lurking in the background. Trumpism, statistically speaking, looking at these polls, is primarily about right-wing socio-cultural beliefs and fascistic beliefs at this point.
Coco Das 44:24
Thank you. I think that was so helpful. It’s so important to pull the lens back and look at the data and look actually scientifically at what this data is telling us. And I really appreciate how you broke that down. There’s so much in the book that we won’t have time to get to in this interview. I want to recommend to people that they buy it and read the book.
Particularly, I wanted to ask you a question about this myth that Trump was non-interventionist and non-militaristic. I don’t think we have time to get into it now, but I just want to recommend to people that you look at the argument in this book, you really lay out in detail why this is not so and what actually did happen. What was the reality of what happened militarily under Trump. I wanted to get to my last question, because we’re coming up on our time. You wrote that there is a real consequence to the fascism denialism in media and in academia. In your view, what is the biggest consequence of not talking about fascism as it relates to the last five years?
Anthony DiMaggio 45:26
Well, it’s an important question. When we talk about reporters who are loath to use the language of fascism, because it’s seen as too controversial, or academics who avoid unpleasant discussions about fascism because they’re worried about students who might disagree and give them bad evaluations, or administrators who might come down on them, the big consequence here is that if we can’t have an open, clear, critical discussion about the problem of rising fascism, then people can’t recognize the severity of threats. That’s a really big danger.
If we can’t have a clear-eyed, sober assessment of what this thing is that we’re dealing with, then we can’t really impress upon people the importance of how to fight it. We have to prioritize this. This is going to require a mass movement of people to defeat an entire political party that has committed itself to a big lie of election fraud, and they are committing themselves and setting the stage right now for a one-party state where Democrats just can’t get elected anymore because states nullify that.
All you need is one state. I don’t think people realize this. All you need is one state in 2024 to nullify a majority vote, for it to create a constitutional crisis in this country. If you have a close election — and we do have close presidential elections, they tend to be within a few million votes — all it takes is a couple of states, one state, a couple of states to nullify a vote for the Electoral College to swing dramatically — let’s say that Donald Trump legitimately won the election because he got a majority of the popular vote and he got a majority Electoral College, that election can still be tarnished to the point where we could be talking about a constitutional crisis.
If even a single state overrules a popular majority and engages in nullification and gives their electoral ballot votes to Donald Trump, because that sets the precedent, if one state is allowed to do that, we don’t know how many states might do it in the future. It would just in general, sully the whole idea that we have a commitment to popular majorities. This is really the stakes here.
If people aren’t paying attention to these things, and overwhelmingly they’re not, then these things happen, for example 2024, then it’s like a Rip Van Winkle effect; people wake up to the fact that they’re not living in a country that is even a nominal democracy anymore, because states don’t want to recognize majority votes. That’s a very dangerous place to be, because I don’t believe that Americans in blue states or swing states are going to tolerate electoral nullification.
What’s most likely to happen — this is just a prediction, it could be wrong, I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future — I don’t think that people are going to tolerate being ruled over by an ogre/dictator, and being made to understand that their vote doesn’t count. So, what we’re really talking about, potentially here, is a country dissolving or deteriorating or collapsing in on itself because of a constitutional crisis, because you have a major party that doesn’t respect the basic rules of electoralism anymore and they want it to become a fascistic, dictatorial nation.
I don’t think that’s going to happen, but you may be talking about multiple nations. This is something that Tim Snyder, the fascism scholar has recently been talking about in his interviews. If we don’t come to terms with how dangerous this is, then it can just happen, and then people don’t realize it until it’s too late. We really need to be more proactive. We need to have a mass movement where people recognize in advance the danger and we work to roll it back. If we’re not going to use blunt terms about what the threat is, then people aren’t gonna understand the severity of the threat.
Coco Das 48:44
Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. And is there anything final that you want to leave us with and tell us how we can get your book and where can we follow your work?
Anthony DiMaggio 48:55
I usually like to recommend people not use Amazon whenever they can. You actually can find my book for people who are interested — and it’s actually a discount — at the Rutledge website. It’s like 30 some dollars, which is quite a bit cheaper than what Amazon charges. So I would recommend people go to Rutledge for that. Now, if you’re not interested in buying a book for 30 some dollars, maybe people don’t have the money, I would recommend going to the Counterpunch website. You can actually look at my Counterpunch author page, and for free, you can pretty much scroll through a number of pages from the last five years. It’s not hard to find, you’ll see in the titles, the word fascism comes up over and over. What you can actually do there is you can read the key talking points for the last five years that I’ve developed in my analysis on fascism and that end up coming into this book. You can find the groundwork that was used to develop this book, and you can read that all there, because basically what this book is doing is bringing together into one piece, the ideas that I’ve been playing around with for the last five years. So I would recommend people going to Counterpunch and looking at my author page if you don’t want to pay for a book. You can certainly read most of the ideas that we’ve been talking about for free at that page.
Coco Das 49:57
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