Some of you may have seen this already, but for those who haven’t: after years of thinking about it, I’ve finally started a YouTube channel!
This is something I’d wanted to do for a long time, but somehow never got around to. It always seemed too much work and too far outside what I knew how to do. But then I found myself surrounded by some brilliant colleagues at The School for Moral Ambition who showed me that it’s actually very doable. And of course, the costs of producing good video have come down a lot in the past few years.
So from now on, my plan is to publish a big essay every one to two months, and you’ll be able to either watch it as a video or – if you prefer the written word – read it right here on Substack.
The subject of my first essay is not a happy one. People have sometimes described me as ‘the optimistic historian’, but I’ve never liked the label. Optimism suggests a kind of complacency, a sense that we don’t need to worry, that things will turn out all right in the end. On the contrary. If there’s one belief underpinning all my books, it’s that history teaches us things can be radically different. Radically better, yes. But also radically worse.
That’s why it’s so important to be clear-eyed about what’s happening, while also developing a positive agenda for how the world could be wildly better. Maybe especially in this era of AI (where a positive agenda is almost entirely lacking), but that’s a subject for another essay. Today, let’s talk about the bad news.
Here’s the video. And if you prefer to read, the script is below.
I want to talk to you about a word. A word that many serious historians, including some of the world’s leading experts, are now using to describe what’s happening in America. A word that makes some people uncomfortable. A word that others think is an exaggeration.
Fascism.
I understand why that word provokes resistance. For many of us, fascism is inseparable from the Holocaust, from the industrial murder of six million Jews. Using it for anything else can feel like a trivialization, a disrespect to that unimaginable horror.
For a long time, I’ve also been hesitant to use this word. As a historian, I know how it gets thrown around carelessly. But in the last few months, I’ve changed my mind – and I want to explain why.
In this essay, I’ll make the case – carefully and precisely, based on what leading historians and scholars are telling us – that yes, we can call what’s happening in America fascism. And more importantly: why we must.
Let me first acknowledge that there is no single definition of fascism. If you ask ten scholars, you’ll get ten slightly different answers.
Robert Paxton is probably the greatest living historian of fascism. He’s now in his nineties. Paxton spent his whole career being careful with the label, and has long resisted applying it to Trumpism. When a lot of commentators started calling Trump a fascist in 2016, he pushed back. Paxton worried that the f-word was being used too loosely. That it had become, as he put it, “more heat than light.”
But then came January 6th, 2021. Paxton watched the mob storm the Capitol. He watched the violence, the Confederate flags, the gallows erected for Vice President Mike Pence. He looked at his television and was immediately reminded of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marching on Rome in 1922, and of the fascist riot at the French Parliament in 1934.
That day the careful, cautious historian – the man who’d spent sixty years warning people not to overuse the f-word – changed his mind. The invasion of the Capitol, he wrote a few days later, “removes my objection to the fascist label. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
When a journalist asked him about it again, Paxton was even more direct:
“It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.”
So how do we identify fascism if there’s no precise definition? The philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein had a really useful concept: family resemblances. Think about what brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts have in common. Not everyone has the same nose. But you see the same eyes here, the same chin there: enough overlapping similarities that you recognize them as part of the same family.
That’s how fascism works. Italian fascism looked different from German Nazism. But they shared enough traits that we recognize them as the same species. And what scholars have done is identify the key traits – the family resemblances – that fascist movements share.
Now, I don’t mean to be exhaustive here, but let me walk you through ten of the most important ones. Here are the fascist traits that we can clearly see, and that make what’s happening now different than ‘normal’ authoritarianism:
First: a mythic past and national rebirth. Every fascist movement invokes a golden age that has been lost and must be restored. In that sense, “Make America Great Again” is the very structure of fascist thought. It posits a time when the nation was pure, strong, uncorrupted, before it was betrayed by – in Trump’s words – ‘the enemy from within’. Fascism promises that the old order will be torn down so that something pure can rise from the ashes.
Second: victimhood and humiliation: The fascist claims that the dominant group – the “real” Germans, the “real” Americans – is the victim of a vast conspiracy. They’re being “replaced,” attacked by elites, by globalists, by immigrants. And victimhood demands revenge. The emotional engine of fascism is humiliation: the burning sense that we have been disrespected, that our rightful place has been stolen. Or as Trump said: “I am your retribution”.
Third: hierarchy and dehumanization. Fascism divides the world into those who belong and those who don’t, an us-versus-them based on ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Some people are citizens, others are ‘illegals’, ‘aliens’ or even ‘vermin’ or ‘cockroaches’. Trump has called immigrants “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. J.D. Vance wrote a glowing recommendation for a book called Unhumans (a title that refers to the left). And once you define people as less than human, you have prepared the ground for treating them as such.
Fourth: contempt for weakness. Fascists worship strength. They believe that life is struggle, that the strong should dominate, and that compassion is decadence. According to fascists, the nation has been “feminized,” made soft and weak. It must be hardened again. Or, as Stephen Miller recently said to Jake Tapper on CNN: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This leads to the fifth family resemblance, which is the cult of action. For fascists, thought is weakness and deliberation is paralysis. Real men take action. The slow, boring work of democracy, with its committees and procedures and compromises, is cast as perverse. “Just get it done”, cut through the red tape: fascism demands the triumph of the will.
Sixth: the leader as savior. In a healthy democracy, leaders are servants of the people, constrained by law and accountable to voters. In fascism, the leader is something else entirely: a mystical figure who alone embodies the nation’s will. “I alone can fix it”, as Trump said. Of course this is Trump being a pathological narcissist, but it’s a structural feature of fascist politics. The leader’s personal grievances become national grievances, and his enemies become the nation’s enemies. To oppose him is to oppose the people themselves.
Seventh: the purification of institutions. In fascist regimes, loyalty to the leader becomes the only qualification that matters. Expertise is suspect and independence is dangerous. The civil service, the military, the universities: all must be cleansed of those insufficiently devoted to the movement. This is why fascism experts were not surprised by the mass firings, the loyalty tests and the dismantling of agencies that might serve as checks on power. It is exactly what you would expect when fascism is taking over.
Eight: propaganda and the assault on truth. Fascists are known to flood the public sphere with lies. So many lies that people give up trying to distinguish fact from fiction. Journalists become “enemies of the people”, universities are defunded, scientists are silenced. Anyone capable of exposing the lies must be discredited or destroyed. The goal isn’t to convince people of a particular falsehood. It’s to exhaust them. To make them give up on the very idea that truth is knowable.
Ninth: the merger of state and corporate power. In its hunger for power, fascism usually builds an alliance with big capital. Industrialists funded Mussolini’s rise. The German dynasties behind Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW pretty much merged with the Nazi regeime. And so it wasn’t surprising to see tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in the front row at Trump’s inauguration. This isn’t ordinary lobbying or corruption. It’s structural fusion: the same bargain the industrialists made in 1933.
Tenth, final and most crucially: violence and terror. Historical fascism was never just an ideology. It was men in uniforms beating people in the streets. Mussolini had his Blackshirts. Hitler had his Brownshirts. These paramilitary squads didn’t just protect the movement, they were the movement.
Now look at what ICE has become. Federal agents in tactical gear dragging people from their homes at dawn. Masked men snatching students off the streets. Tear gas deployed next to cars with infants inside. Citizens and non-citizens alike treated as enemies in occupied territory.
ICE’s budget is now larger than that of most of the world’s militaries. They’re opening hundreds of new detention centers and recruiting thousands of new agents. Once you have such an enormous infrastructure of state terror, the fascist imperative is to use it. For fascists, violence is the ultimate form of action. It purifies, it cleanses, it restores the nation’s honor.
And of course, it carries a coded message: you could be next. This is why the violence is so public. Why it’s filmed and shared. The cruelty is the point
Now, I want to be clear about something. Fascism in America doesn’t come from one man alone, it always comes from a movement. To repeat Paxton words: it bubbles up from below.
But here’s a question worth asking: Why now?
America has always had authoritarian tendencies. It has always had racism and nativism and demagogues. So why did fascism crystallize into a movement that could take power in 2025, when it couldn’t in 1995 or 1935?
Historians emphasize that fascism emerges under specific conditions:
It needs democratic deadlock: a sense that the institutions have failed and cannot be fixed through normal means.
It needs elite fear of the left: conservatives so afraid of progressive change that they’re willing to ally with radicals.
It needs economic dislocation that leaves people feeling abandoned by the system.
And it needs a critical mass of people who feel that their status, their identity, their very way of life is under existential threat.
All of these conditions exist in America today:
I’m talking about a political system paralyzed by polarization and a media ecosystem that has fractured shared reality.
About a left that has been successfully portrayed as an existential threat to traditional America.
About decades of wage stagnation while the super rich captured nearly all the gains..
And about immigration and changing demographics that have triggered profound anxiety among many Americans about their place in a changing nation.
Now, here’s what I want you to take away from all this. If you’ve been feeling shocked by what’s happening – if every new headline fills you with fresh disbelief – then I understand.
But I want you to stop being surprised.
Not because you should accept it. Not because it’s normal. But because once you see the pattern, you stop being caught off guard. You stop expending valuable energy on shock and start directing it toward resistance.
When Paxton studied fascism, he emphasized that it doesn’t arrive with a manifesto and a plan. Fascists say whatever they need to say to gain power. Their “contempt for doctrine,” as Paxton put it, means they’ll contradict themselves constantly. What matters isn’t the words. It’s the pattern of behavior.
And the pattern is unmistakable now. The mythic past. The propaganda. The violence. The list of family resemblances keeps getting longer.
In his classic 1998 paper ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’ Paxton argued that fascism not just an ideology, it’s also a process that moves through five stages:
Fascism begins with intellectuals lamenting national decline, with talk of lost greatness and betrayal.
Then comes the movement, exploiting polarization and deadlock to break onto the national stage.
Then the arrival to power—often because traditional conservatives, more afraid of the left than of the fascists, invite them in.
Then the exercise of power, where the leader bends the state to his will while bargaining with the old elites, like the generals and the billionaires.
And then comes the final stage: either radicalization – an endless escalation, as in Nazi Germany—or entropy, a slide into ordinary authoritarianism, as in Mussolini’s Italy.
We are currently in the fourth stage. The movement has come to power. Their leader is bending the state and the billionaires are making their bargain.
So if this is fascism – real fascism, not an insult but a clinical diagnosis – then what does history tell us about how it ends? Usually badly. Through war, or through slow decay over decades. But it has been stopped. And understanding the pattern is the first step.
I’m not saying we should all start shouting “fascism.” That’s not an effective political strategy. In 2024, Kamala Harris made “democracy” her closing argument, even though for swing voters it was a low priority compared to “affordability”.
So naming fascism isn’t about messaging, but about urgency. It means we should be bloody serious about winning the next elections, because we may not get another chance. That means no more purity tests on the left. That means building broad coalitions that can actually win. It means supporting what the data shows works – organizations that steer resources toward the most cost-effective interventions (see my recommendations below).
I’ll be honest: the window is narrow. Even if Trump loses the next elections, we can be sure the next violent insurrection will be better organized than the one on January 6th, 2021. But when we see the pattern, we can stop being surprised.
And when we stop being surprised, we can start being useful.
Key sources and further reading:
Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) – The definitive work by the scholar who changed his mind after January 6th, 2021.
Robert Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History (1998).
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books (1995) – Eco’s essential essay on fascism’s features.
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018).
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017).
The best recent essays I’ve read about why this is fascism:
My top picks for donating: