This is fascism

You’ll know a fascist by his deeds

Identifying fascism today requires more than literal comparisons with Nazi Germany. Today’s fascist won’t spew hateful anti-Jewish rhetoric in every speech, while he can still behave like a full-on fascist. You’ll know a fascist, Paxton tells us, by what he does.

Point out this behavior early and you’ll of course be met with skepticism, because the consequences are only fully apparent once it’s almost too late.

That’s because fascism unfolds step by step: from the airing of grievances to far right populism to clearcut fascism, where political practices perish as an autocratic, fascist regime takes root.

Established elites play a key role here, Paxton posits. By ignoring warning signs and treating fascists like regular political players, they inadvertently help them gain power. Those from conventional right-wing parties, for instance, are often prepared to work with up-and-coming fascist politicians, because they see common ground, ideologically, but mostly because they sense in them an even stronger dislike of the Left.

Deciding to join forces isn’t that strange. Fascist leaders come to power through elections, after all—seemingly out of nowhere at times, and always with the support of voters who’ve turned away from traditional right-wing candidates. The people have spoken, and that’s something no democrat (little d) can ignore.

But that’s a miscalculation. And a catastrophic one, says Paxton. Fascists use the rules of democracy to win at their own game. That game doesn’t end in a four-year presidential term; it only ends with absolute power.

History—from Hitler to Mussolini—shows how that plays out. Time and again, extremism gets downplayed and right-wing conservative politicians are shut out, become complicit, or are made to serve the fascist agenda. The left-wing opposition gets wiped out next. Finally, the institutions underpinning democracy implode.

Then the fascist regime is a fact.

“The big joke on democracy is that it hands its mortal enemies the means of its own destruction,” the later-infamous Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in 1928, long before Hitler seized power in Germany.

Warnings always come too early

Fascism eats away at democracy from the inside. It starts with talk, not tanks. With elections, not a coup. And it takes hold thanks to people who think things won’t move quickly. Don’t let it get to you, they say. And don’t feed the trolls.

This puts fascism experts in an impossible position: issue a timely warning, and you’re seen as alarmist. But once the threat is undeniable, it’s too late.

That’s why we’d do well to heed the warnings of the academic heavyweights in fascism studies who now say Trump is swiftly building an autocratic regime that bears all the hallmarks of fascism. Three of them have now left the US, with the powerful message: Fascism is here. Take it from us. 

And the noted authority mentioned earlier, Robert Paxton, is also sounding the alarm. He long refused to decry developments in US politics as fascist. But when he saw Trump supporters violently storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he changed his mind. 

“It’s the real thing. It really is,” Paxton told The New York Times in the fall of 2024. 

Ten tools of fascism

So, what does that “real thing” look like? How do experts recognize fascism-in-action?

In his acclaimed book How Fascism Works, political philosopher Jason Stanley identifies ten tools that characterize fascism.  Each of them alone can also show up in other forms of politics. Only in fascism do they all come together.

Together, they form the fascism playbook—in words, deeds, and policy.

1 – Every fascist invokes a mythic past to justify his tales of a glorious future. If emotion is the fuel for fascism, then a fascist draws on a people’s mythic past to spark that emotion. Adolf Hitler dreamed of a Third Reich in the tradition of the great German Empires, and Benito Mussolini promised to return 20th-century Italians to Roman times.

“We have created our myth,” said Mussolini in 1922. “The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality…. And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.” 

2 – Every fascist uses propaganda to disrupt public debate and stoke a sense of “the enemy.” If a mythic past provides the spark and emotion the fuel, then propaganda is the machine the fascist operates to set the masses in motion. The idea is to sow division by blaming supposed enemies, foreign and domestic, for the nation’s decline. Every fascist points to relatively vulnerable groups. Fascism is like a bully, out to pick on the unpopular kid to build himself up.

To make the enemy image stick, a fascist will have to lie brazenly and systematically, as Adolf Hitler reasoned in his book Mein Kampf: “At first all of it appeared to be idiotic…Later it was looked upon as disturbing, but finally it was believed.”

3 – Every fascist deliberately undermines the independent thinkers who can counter his propaganda. Journalists, artists, academics, and others are sand in the cogs of the propaganda machine because they’ve made critical thinking their vocation and public discourse their workplace. They are therefore per definition suspect.

The fascist will portray them as part of a plot, citing as “proof” that they either ignore or debunk his conspiracy theories. He’ll take every opportunity to taunt reporters and will set up his own channels for spreading propaganda. As soon as he can, he’ll tether the free press and purge educational and cultural institutions.

4 – Every fascist destroys the truth. The loss of a shared reality clears the way for the propaganda machine. This goes hand in hand with the Big Lie, a propaganda technique concocted by Adolf Hitler. The Big Lie is an assertion so colossal that people presume there must be some truth to it—because surely no one would dare make up such a whopper. And, as Hitler says in Mein Kampf, “… the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind, even after it has been nailed down.”

Hitler exploited existing antisemitic sentiment to this end, cooking up the tale of an international Jewish plot against Germany. He kept repeating it until people chose to believe him.

5 – Every fascist establishes a new social hierarchy that’s all about who’s entitled to human dignity and who is not. The rights of minorities are stripped away, and people are persecuted not only for what they do, but for who they are. The people benefitting from this new hierarchy distrust those who speak out against it. An appeal to equal rights and equality is thus suspect and subversive. A mob of the meek helps uphold the new order out of fear they themselves will be targeted.

6 – Every fascist claims their own group is the victim of a conspiracy or plot. An example of this type of conspiracy theory is replacement theory, the idea that one’s “own people” are being pushed out by those deemed alien and hostile. Whether it’s a “conspiracy of deep-state politicians to kidnap babies,” a “flood of immigrants,” or “Jews who corrupt women”—the theory works with “almost any combination of enemies,” says historian Timothy Snyder. ^*

Once so-called enemies at home and abroad are treated as legitimate national security threats, the fascist will leverage the powers of the state to go after domestic enemies and pursue foreign conflict.

7 – Every fascist defends rigid gender roles as a pillar of his power. Just as the leader is the “father of the nation,” the man is the head of the family—and things have to stay that way. Gender diversity is portrayed as a threat to the natural order. Where traditional male roles are few, the fascist leader tells us who’s to blame: “gender ideologues” or “foreigners stealing jobs.”

Women, meanwhile, are primarily there to have lots of babies, thus strengthening the position of the group. Mussolini waged a “battle for babies” for this reason, holding state ceremonies for prolific childbearing women and imposing a tax on unmarried men over the age of 25. Terms like “contraception” and “abortion” were put on a list of words banned in the Italian press. 

8 – Every fascist separates people into hardworking citizens and freeloaders. That division fuels the idea that opponents are inferior and lazy by nature, and therefore don’t deserve a proper place in society. Hardworking citizens are sorely needed, while the others—the intellectual elite, lazy state employees, people on welfare or disability—are not.  “Arbeit macht frei” read the signs posted by the Nazis at the gates of hell.

But that work ethic is a smokescreen. Under fascism, the balance of economic power and the distribution of wealth don’t change much.

9 – Every fascist pits rural against urban. Country life symbolizes the traditional, honest, hardworking man, while cities must be cleared of lazy, leftist radicals with their depraved ideas on gender, diversity, and inclusion. The Nazis saw farmers, for instance, as the “bearers of a healthy folkish heredity, the fountain of youth of the people, and the backbone of military power.”  

10 – Every fascist turns the state into a weapon to destroy his opponents. While he places himself above the law and rewards loyalists with impunity, the fascist claims the power to punish people he deems criminal—and without a fair trial. In this way, he destroys the rule of law without ever formally abolishing it.

Mussolini did this by capturing the legal profession. Lawyers were forced to serve “fascist justice,” so that representing “antifascists” against loyal party members was out of the question.  Hitler, for his part, had an “uncanny capacity for sensing ‘the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law’ and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness,” according to his own attorney Hans Frank. 

A fascist coup then, at its core, is not so much about wiping out democracy as it is about kneecapping its institutions and badmouthing the courts. The endgame? Absolute power, to the greater glory of the leader.

The birth of a fascist regime

Viewed through this lens, what first seems a chaotic mix of scandal, megalomaniac ideas, and US policy failures, now emerges as a clear and persistent pattern in which you can see the ten tools of fascism coalesce.

There it is: the birth of a fascist regime. The Trump regime.

Trump imposes a myth on the United States. You know how it goes: America was once great, then met its downfall at the hands of “criminal illegal aliens” and “corrupt global elites.” Trump promises to Make America Great Again: to put America first, by returning to an imagined time when oil barons would drill unimpeded, no one bothered about climate change, and white men went unchallenged as head of the household and in the country at large.