To start with a diversion: how can it already be November? 26 more days, and Art will no longer be 80.

Last night, once again, we turned on Jewish Broadcasting Service and watched another panel discussion. This time, the subject was fascism, and the panel members were Professors Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University, Helmut Walser Smith of Vanderbilt, and Federico Finchelstein of the New School of Social Research, each professors of history specializing in fascist regimes. Ben-Ghiat is a specialist in Italian fascism, although her fairly recent book Strong Men is more broad. Smith is a specialist in German fascism, and Finchelstein, originally from Argentina, specializes in Latin American fascism.

Where to start……

The general questions under discussion were, first, the proper definition of fascism, and second – are we moving in that direction today?

One of the panelists said that fascism has four elements – Violence, Racism, Lies, and Dictatorship. Violence not the way other governments look at violence – a means to an end – but violence for the sake of violence itself, showing strength, machismo, and solidarity. Racism, because you need someone to hate in order to bring everyone else together. Lies – not the kind of lies that most politicians tell – but big lies, lies that can change history. And lies that the fascist politicians actually believe to be the truth, or would become the truth under a fascist regime. Dictatorship – the ultimate, and the only way to move history forward and for an indefinite period of time. He stated that these four elements must come together to create a fascist government.

And how does a country become fascist? There can some sort of a coup (military or otherwise), or there can simply be an election. Some fascists may pose as populists, representatives and defenders of the people, and use populism to gain power through a democratic election. But once elected, their true colors show.

European fascism developed after the First World War. The war had torn society apart, turned everything upside down. New countries, new ideas of ethnic or national separatism replacing large, multi-ethnic empires, men returned from the war used to violence, trained in weaponry, uncertainty how to move forward, looking for a new beginning, ready to create a new society from chaos, a society which would avoid more chaos.

Mussolini was the first – and he did something that was totally foreign to prewar European thinking. Mussolini was originally, and for a while remained, a socialist. And Italy was filled with socialists. But socialism was a universalist, cosmopolitan ideology, out of sync with the emphasis on ethnicity which was one of the main points of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. So, Mussolini took socialism and combined it with Wilsonian nationalism, a first. And Italian socialists, in the new post-war world, abandoned universalism and swung over to Mussolini and Italian socialism, which morphed into fascism. Hitler, who came to power later than Mussolini, wasn’t an old style socialist. Yet, following Mussolini, he called his movement National Socialism (Nazi), demonstrating the combination born in Italy. Take one national group, and make it one for all and all for one. Certainly, the “socialism” part never resembled traditional European socialism, just as the “national” part was limited to status at birth, never to a cosmopolitan nationalism.

Each of the panelists thought that the Trump phenomenon was reminiscent of the early twentieth century fascists. But they thought similarly about Netanyahu and a number of other current world leaders, including Berlusconi in Italy, Orban in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil.

It is easy to place Trump into the mainstream of fascism, using the four elements described above. But one of the panelists said that Trump wasn’t really a fascist – yet – but that he was fascist wannabe, and who knows what another term in office would do. (There were some brief references to whether or not the United States was too strong and diverse to really become a fascist country, or whether – on the other hand – democracy here was weak enough that it would be possible.)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat was the most outspoken of the three panelists. In addition to the above, she talked about how fascist leaders tend to think that they will be the leader forever, or that they are starting a forever movement. That they all have a degree of charisma. That often they are crooks and need to take power to keep themselves out of jail – the lawless controlling the laws, is the way she put it. She talked about Trump and Netanyahu as two contemparies in this position, and mentioned several others. She talked about how fascism in many places started as decentralized, localized movements – local militias, groups taking over individual communities or states, etc. She talked about Steve Bannon’s political approach of starting locally and moving upward as being emblematic of this. She talked about how fascist leaders need to portray the enemies of the leader as representing pure evil, enemies of the people. Dissent cannot be tolerated.

She also said that she thought that the United States might be considered to be in particular danger because we weren’t a parliamentary country, where a number of parties create a coalition to help ensure that a fascist party’s influence would be limited (I wondered if this were true). She thought that because we had only two parties, and because one of those parties was no longer a democratic party, our situation was subject to rapid change if an election went the wrong way and we would find that we lacked sufficient protection within the government. On the other hand, Finchelstein said the opposite – he thought that because we were such a politically divided country, even a fascist-wannabe president could not succeed in exerting sufficient control to turn the country against democracy in the long run. But he thought that charismatic fascist leaders do become very popular. For example, he believes that in Germany, if you had had an election at virtually any time before 1941, Hitler would have easily won that election.

So……is Donald Trump, or others in the MAGA movement, fascist wannabes? Trump is 78 years old, so he can’t see himself in control for long (or can he?), but are there others ready to fly the MAGA flag and lead another “thousand year Reich”?

What is clear is that we all must be careful. Very careful.

(It was hard to select a topic for today – what about the absolute danger of our new House Speaker? what about Israeli overreach and the influence on American antisemitism? Or its influence on the 2024 elections? Many topics. Including: Was Chicken Little right, and did she just not speak out at the right time?)