If you really believed former Vice President Kamala Harris and her media allies, the United States has just inaugurated a fascist dictator, Donald Trump, as president of the United States.

Now, you might fail to appreciate the gravity of this moment after watching former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral and a friendly Trump “yukking it up” with former President Barack Obama, a paragon of “progressive” politics. Given Team Biden’s “Trump-as Hitler” narrative, Obama’s cordial interaction with Trump—democracy’s supposed “existential threat”—was puzzling.    

But what do you know? 

Not much, according to the leftist cognoscenti. After all, we have it on good authority that the American electoral majority is made up of “garbage” and that many are “deplorables”; the kind of folks who, over a three-year period, were unable to grasp then-Rep. Adam Schiff’s “compelling evidence” that Trump was secretly colluding with the Kremlin.

Today, in the wake of the 2024 election, most of us remain trapped in ignorance of the imminent “fascist threat.”

Democracy dies, not so much in darkness as The Washington Post insists, but in stupidity. So, perhaps we could all benefit from a little education on the topic. There is, after all, rich political science literature on Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Like communism and socialism, fascism is “collectivism,” where the individual is completely subordinated to the group, and the “rights” of the individual are subordinated to the absolute “rights” of the group—with the group being identified as “The People,” “The Party,” “The Nation” or “The Race.”  

And while there have been various fascist movements in France, Spain, Eastern Europe, and even the United Kingdom, the clearest expression of fascism in power—a marriage of theory and practice—was manifest in Italy and Germany in the 1930s: The Italian regime of Benito Mussolini and the German dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.

Beyond the primacy of power exercised by a single leader in a hypernationalist single party, the fascist agenda in each country was shaped by the unique historical and cultural conditions in each country. In Fascist Italy, for example, antisemitism and racism were minimal, and Mussolini’s efforts to achieve anything like totalitarian control was undercut by pervasive Catholicism, loyalty to the monarchy, and Italy’s rich family-oriented cultural life.

For a governing program, however, the German and Italian variants share some basic ideological assumptions, notably the following:  

The State Is Absolute

In his book, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” (1933), Mussolini was explicit: “The foundation of fascism is its conception of the state, its character, its duty, its aim. Fascism conceives of the state as an absolute in comparison, with which all individuals or groups are relative.” Likewise, on Nov. 8, 1933, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, declared, that “our party has always aspired to the totalitarian state … . The goal of the revolution must be a totalitarian state pervading all spheres of public life.”

Detailing the German variant of fascism in “Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism” (Oxford University Press, 1944), Franz Neumann summarizes the fascist doctrine: “In theory, the state has unlimited power. It could legally do almost anything; it could expropriate anybody.”   

Corporate Power Consolidated in Service to the State

Fascism—which comprehensively suppresses personal, political, and economic liberty—is sometimes described as the ideology of the Corporate State.

A central goal of fascist economic policy is to consolidate the production of major goods and services into large corporate cartels—a form of “monopoly capitalism”—eliminating those businesses, especially small firms, that government central planners consider inefficient.

Germany’s corporate titans, often to their bitter regret, backed Hitler.

This broad policy of corporate consolidation and hostility to free markets was a feature of both Italian and German fascism.

In his book, “European Fascism” (Random House, 1968), S.J. Woolf, a professor of Italian history at Britain’s University of Reading, reports that, under Mussolini, “The tendency of capitalism towards monopolies was to be encouraged, because it increased productivity and so the strength of the state.”

Likewise, describing the Nazi policy in “Behemoth,” Neumann observes, “The federal minister of economics was given the power to create compulsory cartels, to compel outsiders to attach themselves to existing cartels, to prohibit the erection of new enterprises and the extension of existing enterprises either in size or capacity, and to regulate the capacity of existing plants. No indemnification is allowed for damages arising out of such acts.”

Command Economy: Central Planning, Price Controls

With fascism, central planners not only prescribe the quantity and quality of the production of goods and services, but also the permissible limits of profits and targets of investment.

Such tasks require a large, powerful, and deeply intrusive government bureaucracy.

On Oct. 29, 1936, Hitler’s Germany adopted a “Four-Year Plan” designed to increase industrial production—in preparation for war. In tandem with this production control, the Nazi regime adopted a comprehensive system of wage and price controls.

In the language of the plan, according to Neumann, a “federal commissioner for price formation” had responsibility “[f]or the control of price formation of goods and services of every kind, especially for all needs of daily life, for the whole agricultural and industrial production, and for the transportation of goods and commodities of every kind, and for other compensations.” As Neumann further notes, the Nazi price-control regime governed “… rents; transportation rates; fees for doctors, dentists, and lawyers; admission tickets of theaters, cinemas and concerts; dues to organizations; postal fees and railroad fares; commissions and school fees; and the whole sector of agricultural prices with the exception of labor, which is subject to specific regulation.”

Hitler’s Germany enforced its granular economic price-control system with tough criminal penalties. On June 3, 1939, violation of the bureaucracy’s price controls, either by intention or through negligence, was punishable with imprisonment of up to five years.

Needless to say, the National Socialists in Germany destroyed the independence of the German trade unions and created a “Labor Front” to execute the regime’s labor policy. In Nazi labor policy, Neumann concluded, “The worker has no rights.”  

The State Must Exercise Total Social Control

With fascism, there is to be no personal or social life outside of the state. Commenting on the Italian variant, Woolf observes, “All private freedom, whether of individuals or associations, was only acceptable if approved of by the state.”, “All private freedom, whether of individuals or associations, was only acceptable if approved of by the state.”

In “Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939” (Doubleday & Co., 1966), David Schoenbaum cites Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, declaring in 1938 that one’s only “private” affair was sleep: “There are no more private citizens. The time when anybody could do or not do what he pleased is past.”

That comprehensive social control, of course, ended up racializing the laws governing marriage and the family, promoting abortion and sterilization of the officially “undesirable” and the euthanasia of the mentally and physically “unfit,” replacing childhood education with ideological indoctrination, while engineering the mass ethnic cleansing of society, primarily millions of Jews, in the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.

Apologies, Anyone?

Trump has clearly articulated his foreign and domestic policy agenda, including safeguarding freedom of speech and religion, freeing up market forces, reducing the regulatory overreach of the executive branch, and taming the excessive (and too often abusive) power of an unelected bureaucracy.

Given the crystal clarity of his policy agenda, it’s hard to imagine anyone seriously charging Trump with being a “fascist.” That’s mere name-calling and reflects little more than a gross ignorance of what fascism actually entails, a deep personal hostility to the man, or a simple politically motivated malevolence.

There is nothing inherently “fascist” about drawing large and enthusiastic crowds to campaign events at Madison Square Garden or anywhere else; about basing American foreign policy on the primacy of American national interest; about pursuing energy independence to lower Americans’ gas and energy costs; or about enforcing democratically enacted immigration laws.   

If a word can mean anything, logically, it means nothing. Back in 1968, H.R. Trevor-Roper, a prominent British historian, in an essay on “The Phenomenon of Fascism,” noted that the word “fascist” is “… either precisely dated or a meaningless term of abuse.” In the case of Trump, that calumny has spewed from the mouths and pens of practitioners of gutter politics, leftist university professors, Hollywood bubbleheads, historically illiterate campus radicals, and cable news commentators.

Now that Trump is back in the White House, after surviving two assassination attempts and achieving the most impressive comeback in American political history, he has taken his sacred oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution and see that the nation’s laws, including its immigration laws, are faithfully executed.

Not to worry. Chances are Trump will do a much better job upholding the Constitution than his predecessor, and hysterical liberals will not be herded into concentration camps. Many never really believed in their own propaganda anyway.  

Meanwhile, the media elites and the leftist politicians who have poisoned our politics with the irresponsible “fascist” rhetoric should apologize to the president.

But don’t lose your “private” sleep over it. They won’t. 

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