If there is one thing you are supposed to know about Mark Lilla, it is his status as a public intellectual. A professor of humanities at Columbia, Lilla is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books who frequently writes about other intellectuals like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. His writing shows the strengths and also the self-deceiving limitations of his class when he writes about subjects that intersect with politics.
To briefly summarize Lilla’s most recent foray into our current national predicament, he argues emphatically that Trumpism is not conservatism, and is also not fascism. Well, then, what is it? He posits that “the MAGA right is fed not by conservative ideas but by chthonic forces in human nature that at different points in history gather like a hurricane and can level any decent political order.”
Say what? Are we to regard people like Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem as gods of the underworld? His formulation might have the virtue of sending readers to the dictionary to learn a word from Greek mythology, but as a political categorization, it does not strike this observer as useful.
In a separate interview Lilla reiterates his claim: “At its root, all that we’re currently seeing has nothing really to do with conservatism.” As for fascism, what makes him hesitate to label Trumpism as such is “what you might call ‘vilification inflation,’ by which I mean the overuse of certain terms that bring with them automatic moral judgments [emphasis mine]. . . . That is why I think it wise to think of Nazism and fascism as terms referring to specific European movements that grew out of the twentieth-century interwar period in Germany, Italy and Spain.”
Let us examine his claim about fascism. Political systems that resemble one another in their fundamental structure and function are like species in the animal kingdom: A chihuahua is not a golden retriever, but they are both dogs. To say that fascism as a political system is confined to three European examples from the 1930s is equivalent to saying that we cannot describe Switzerland as a democracy because the term properly applies only to ancient Athens.
By the same logic, Trump cannot be a dictator (a term Lilla never uses), whatever the enormity of his unchallenged executive orders, because a dictator was elected by the Roman Senate. If that were true, then even Hitler was not a “real” dictator. Lilla boggles at labeling a system as fascist simply because it is a taboo word that one should not mention.
To say that fascism is confined to three European examples from the 1930s is equivalent to saying that we cannot describe Switzerland as a democracy because the term applies only to ancient Athens.
Any critical examination of the Trump regime in relation to fascism must attempt to define fascism and compare it with what we are now enduring. What follows is a partial roster of policies, attitudes and habits usually common to the various strains of fascism. They can be present to varying degrees depending on the system, and the absence of one or more does not mean the system isn’t fascist:
National renewal: The country must be reinvigorated from its decadence by a kind of shock therapy; this trait is a function of an exaggerated nostalgia and a hatred of the present.
Nationalism and xenophobia: There are endless proclamations of national superiority and hatred of foreigners; yet despite this claimed superiority, wily foreigners are always seen to be getting the better of the national community.
Militarism, love of violence and machismo: Trump and Hegseth’s performance before the generals at Quantico offers a trenchant example.
Cult of the infallible leader: While the leader is of course indispensable, his supremacy and dominance would be impossible to maintain without the sycophancy and unquestioning obedience of millions of members of the national community.
Anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and feverish emotion: These traits best express themselves in a hatred of universities, science and learning more generally, and a superstitious embrace of faith, intuition and gut feelings.
Misogyny: This is the flip side of obligatory machismo, whereby women are not equal to men; their only value lies in conceiving and nurturing the chosen race.
Hatred of minorities: Fascism lacks a rationale and focus for its followers’ emotional intensity without an insidious internal enemy.
Cultural pessimism and an obsession with culture in general: This relates to fascism’s false nostalgia and its discomfort with the pluralism and nonconformity of liberal society.
Economic nationalism: This leads to a preference for tariffs and autarky in manufacturing, both as a symbol of strength and to isolate the country from foreign commercial and cultural influence.
Privileging of business interests and hostility to workers’ rights: This, however, is conditional on business leaders obediently supporting the regime (which they are mostly happy to do); paradoxically, it is conjoined with a loudly proclaimed but false populism and identification with the “working class.”
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Hostility to parliamentary democracy: There is no need for a legislative body when the leader decrees the laws; nevertheless, fascist leaders typically maintain a Duma or a Reichstag as a marionette theater, a role for which Republican congressmen and senators are well suited.
Monumentalism, spectacle and kitsch: Fascist leaders need gargantuan physical symbols of their greatness (as in Hitler’s plan to transform Berlin into Germania); militarized parades and other gaudy spectacles also qualify, and both the architecture and the spectacles, as I have previously described, inevitably trend toward kitsch.
Lying as an existential need: Poland attacked the Third Reich. All true Ukrainians wish to join Mother Russia. Jan. 6, 2021, was a patriotic lovefest. Foreigners will pay the tariffs.
Nihilism: There are no enduring principles or values apart from the changeable whims of the leader; this annihilative impulse is contemptuous of human life and will ultimately lead to social and physical destruction, including widespread violence and death.
Fascist leaders need gargantuan physical symbols of their greatness, and both the architecture and the spectacles inevitably trend toward kitsch.
This is my own summary list, but it overlaps considerably with the characteristics of fascism described by Umberto Eco in an essay written 30 years ago. Having grown up in Mussolini’s Italy, Eco presumably knew what he was talking about. The reader can compare either summary with the current regime in Washington and decide whether Lilla is correct to exclude fascism as an inspiration for Trump and his paladins.
The fact that Lilla’s article appeared just as groups of Young Republicans were revealed to be admirers of Hitler and the Nazi gas chambers demonstrates how events have a way of embarrassing any claim that there are standards beneath which Trump supporters and operatives will not sink. Indeed, long before Trump ever appeared on the scene, I witnessed people in the Republican Party expressing admiration for Nazism. Pour two or three beers into a Republican and he might start singing the Horst Wessel anthem.
It is certainly true that contemporary American fascism will not exactly correspond to the versions that prevailed in the 1930s; technological and social changes, not to mention the enduring differences between American and European culture, will ensure differences in style. “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross” is a well-known quote inaccurately attributed to Sinclair Lewis, but correctly summarizing the theme of his 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here.”
But what about conservatism; why does Lilla think it has nothing to do with Trump and his movement? In his essay, he says (correctly, I believe) that “there is no essence to ‘conservatism,’” meaning that it is not a set of fixed, unchanging beliefs. Just because conservatives now favor industrial policy when they didn’t 30 years ago does not demonstrate they are not conservatives. So why does he declare that Trumpism is not conservatism when tens of millions of Trump supporters consider themselves conservative, and Trump’s electoral vehicle is the more “conservative” of the two national parties? At bottom, Lilla is making the “no true Scotsman” claim: Trumpism isn’t “real” conservatism.
Conservatism in the political sense arose in the modern world as a direct reaction to the French Revolution and, more indirectly, as a response to the Enlightenment. Unlike Marxism or reform liberalism, it has no systematic ideological program; rather, it is a set of dispositions and attitudes. As its origin suggests, it is primarily a reaction against modernity. This is why the godfather of the post-World War II New Right, William F. Buckley Jr., considered it his mission to stand athwart history yelling, “Stop.”. This reactionary impulse is an ever-present tendency in conservatism.
Lilla’s article appeared just as groups of Young Republicans were revealed to be admirers of Hitler and the Nazi gas chambers. Events have a way of embarrassing any claim that there are standards beneath which Trump supporters and operatives will not sink.
Lilla does not see this. In his book “The Shipwrecked Mind,” he tells us, “Reactionaries are not conservatives. This is the first thing to be understood about them.” Uh, no. It might be granted that a reactionary is not a conservative’s identical twin — but he is a sibling living under the same roof.
The transformation of Ronald Reagan’s so-called movement conservatism to Newt Gingrich’s nastier version, and then to the Tea Party and finally to Trump, is hardly novel. Bismarck’s Germany was deeply conservative at its founding, but after Bismarck’s dismissal by the Kaiser and the strong reception of polemics by radical cultural pessimists like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the term “Third Reich”), Germany became more and more reactionary, culminating in the anti-democratic extremism of right-wing parties after World War I. From there it was only a short distance to Nazi dictatorship.
Moving from the tragic to the ridiculous, one could say that Britain’s Tories (aka the Conservative Party) have followed a similar trajectory. It has been a sea change from Ted Heath, the moderate’s moderate who brought the U.K. into the European Union, to Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson and eventually the absurd Liz Truss, the former leader of an important country and nuclear power who now pilgrimages to CPAC conventions like a teenage groupie and apes MAGA rhetoric.
If the abiding characteristic (and besetting sin) of the liberal is caution, complacency and a preference for the status quo (which often lead to hippie-punching, blind obedience to donors and inertia), with conservatives, it is competition against one another as to “who is the most conservative.” This may have its amusingly juvenile aspects in Capitol Hill bars after work, but it is the visible manifestation of a cumulative and self-reinforcing radicalization.
This radicalization has functioned as a mechanistic, almost Marxian dialectic. At every point of crisis in the GOP — after Watergate, after the elder George Bush’s loss in 1992 and after Barack Obama’s apparently sweeping victory in 2008 — pundits, political scientists and even a few Republican graybeards urged caution and moderation. Yet in each case, the party lurched further to the right.
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The bulk of Lilla’s essay is an accurate accounting of the transformation of conservatism from the Reagan presidency until now. He name-checks the principal authors of that transformation, beginning with David Duke, and proceeds through Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh and Sam Francis, ending with the loonies at the Claremont Institute like John Eastman (a failed version of Carl Schmitt), and Michael Anton, who authored the hysterical “Flight 93 Election” manifesto under the pretentious pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus.”
Yet Lilla balks at the implications of what is plainly there to see. Describing John Ganz’s book on the mutation of conservatism during the 1990s, “When the Clock Broke,” he writes, after reading the opening segment about David Duke, “I nearly tossed it across the room. Yes, yes, conservatives are all Nazis. Oh, please . . .” He rapidly reverses his opinion of Ganz’s work, but it is obvious Lilla arrives predisposed to give conservatives every benefit of the doubt.
When discussing the false optimism of the early 1990s, when the Soviet empire collapsed, Lilla cannot avoid browbeating the reader with his bizarre take on Francis Fukuyama’s flawed analysis of the era, “The End of History and the Last Man“: “Not that history as such was over (Fukuyama never said that, so please get off his back).” Aside from the the plain words of the book’s title, Fukuyama himself wrote that history had reached “not just . . . the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Lilla is clearly telling us that black is white.
His naïveté and intellectual stubbornness also led Lilla to believe, as late as 2016, that the Bushes and the Clintons would continue to be the dynasts of their respective parties. One can surmise that this political shortsightedness also makes him bridle at believing that Trumpism is fascist, or that conservatism can morph into fascism.
But the signs were visible, at the latest with the seating of the Tea Party Congress in 2011, perhaps even earlier — in the George W. Bush presidency, with Republicans’ ghoulish enthusiasm for torturing terrorism suspects — and maybe well before that. I recall that after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, a Republican congressional staffer accosted me with the hypothesis that Timothy McVeigh was a scapegoat, and the bombing had been an inside job by the Clinton administration to justify oppressing conservatives. This theory had considerable resonance on the right wing and helped metastasize the militia movement.
As a historian of intellectual movements, Lilla focuses closely on the various lonely cranks of the far right, but never seriously grapples with why their manifestos should appeal to tens of millions of Americans or, conversely, whether these writers were merely symptoms of pre-existing beliefs rattling around in the collective American psyche. Were they a bunch of demonic St. Pauls converting the gentiles, or were they surfers riding the wave of the nation’s collective id?
As is customary with virtually every journalist, political scientist or academic, Lilla obeys a taboo even stronger than that of mentioning fascism: the proscription against seriously assessing the moral responsibility of the American people. Why do people believe that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, or that rioters at the Capitol were tourists, or that consumers don’t pay tariffs, or other absurdities that an intelligent 10-year-old would laugh at? After a certain point, a willful, proud ignorance masquerading as superior wisdom becomes a social menace and a stigma of poor citizenship.
Cultured Germans could not believe that an Austrian vagrant from the Vienna gutter could claw his way to the power of life and death over them and ultimately goose-step a nation into total destruction as millions of other Germans cheered. Our intellectual class, it seems, similarly cannot conceive that an ostensibly washed-up celebrity from the Reagan era could become the personification of fascism in the 21st century, and that millions of Americans prefer him to representative government and the rule of law. Metaphors involving Greek mythology are an evasion rather than an explanation.
Any civilized society must cultivate and maintain an intellectual class. We should nurture them as an occasionally irresponsible group that can go against the grain of society and pronounce hard truths. But when intellectuals refuse to render moral judgments, when they sink into safe conventionality, that in itself is a kind of judgment. If at this late date Mark Lilla is still invoking Godwin’s Law to avoid grappling with the existential issue of our age, we must remember the comment of George Orwell, a frequent critic of the frivolity of Britain’s intelligentsia at an earlier time of civilizational peril:
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
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from Mike Lofgren on politics and history
