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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNYT Magazine: Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.
NYT Magazine - (archived: https://archive.ph/umraZ ) Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.
Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now hes alarmed by what he sees in global politics including Trumpism.
By Elisabeth Zerofsky
Oct. 23, 2024
The historian Robert Paxton spent Jan. 6, 2021, glued to his television. Paxton was at his apartment in Upper Manhattan when he watched a mob march toward the Capitol, overrun the security barriers and then the police cordons and break inside. Many in the crowd wore red MAGA baseball caps, while some sported bright-orange beanies signaling their membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. A few were dressed more fantastically. Who are these characters in camouflage and antlers? he wondered. I was absolutely riveted by it, Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. I didnt imagine such a spectacle was possible.
Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past.
The work seemed freshly relevant when Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination in 2016 and articles comparing American politics with Europes in the 1930s began to proliferate in the American press. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic for The New York Times, was among the first to set the tone. She turned a review of a new Hitler biography into a thinly veiled allegory about a clown and a dunderhead, an egomaniac and pathological liar with a talent for reading and exploiting weakness. In The Washington Post, the conservative commentator Robert Kagan wrote: This is how fascism comes to America. Not with jackboots and salutes, but with a television huckster.
In a column for a French newspaper, republished in early 2017 in Harpers Magazine, Paxton urged restraint. We should hesitate before applying this most toxic of labels, he warned. Paxton acknowledged that Trumps scowl and his jutting jaw recalled Mussolinis absurd theatrics, and that Trump was fond of blaming foreigners and despised minorities for national decline. These, Paxton wrote, were all staples of fascism. But the word was used with such abandon everyone you dont like is a fascist, he said that it had lost its power to illuminate. Despite the superficial resemblances, there were too many dissimilarities. The first fascists, he wrote, promised to overcome national weakness and decline by strengthening the state, subordinating the interests of individuals to those of the community. Trump and his cronies wanted, by contrast, to subordinate community interests to individual interests at least those of wealthy individuals.
/snip
Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now hes alarmed by what he sees in global politics including Trumpism.
By Elisabeth Zerofsky
Oct. 23, 2024
The historian Robert Paxton spent Jan. 6, 2021, glued to his television. Paxton was at his apartment in Upper Manhattan when he watched a mob march toward the Capitol, overrun the security barriers and then the police cordons and break inside. Many in the crowd wore red MAGA baseball caps, while some sported bright-orange beanies signaling their membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. A few were dressed more fantastically. Who are these characters in camouflage and antlers? he wondered. I was absolutely riveted by it, Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. I didnt imagine such a spectacle was possible.
Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past.
The work seemed freshly relevant when Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination in 2016 and articles comparing American politics with Europes in the 1930s began to proliferate in the American press. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic for The New York Times, was among the first to set the tone. She turned a review of a new Hitler biography into a thinly veiled allegory about a clown and a dunderhead, an egomaniac and pathological liar with a talent for reading and exploiting weakness. In The Washington Post, the conservative commentator Robert Kagan wrote: This is how fascism comes to America. Not with jackboots and salutes, but with a television huckster.
In a column for a French newspaper, republished in early 2017 in Harpers Magazine, Paxton urged restraint. We should hesitate before applying this most toxic of labels, he warned. Paxton acknowledged that Trumps scowl and his jutting jaw recalled Mussolinis absurd theatrics, and that Trump was fond of blaming foreigners and despised minorities for national decline. These, Paxton wrote, were all staples of fascism. But the word was used with such abandon everyone you dont like is a fascist, he said that it had lost its power to illuminate. Despite the superficial resemblances, there were too many dissimilarities. The first fascists, he wrote, promised to overcome national weakness and decline by strengthening the state, subordinating the interests of individuals to those of the community. Trump and his cronies wanted, by contrast, to subordinate community interests to individual interests at least those of wealthy individuals.
/snip
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NYT Magazine: Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind. (Original Post)
Dennis Donovan
23 hrs ago
OP
Earthrise
(15,629 posts)1. Great read - fascinating insights.
Abolishinist
(1,800 posts)2. Robert Paxton is one of my favorite authors on the topic of fascism.
Decades ago I was interested in learning more about the topic, so I have books by Paxton, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, Zeev Sternhell and others. And OK, I admit to buying Jonah Goldberg's, but just for a laugh.
All of these authors/professors/philosophers/experts have a somewhat different take on the elusive nature of F(f)ascism, which makes it difficult to conclusively define what it is. A few even state that Italy was a Fascist state, while Germany was not; Sternhell places its origins in France during the fin de siècle, and so on.
So it's an easy word to toss around, but difficult for even the Pros from Dover to agree upon.
Paxton came to this conclusion early in 2021, when he said
Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary. It is made even more plausible by comparison with a milestone on Europe's road to fascisman openly fascist demonstration in Paris during the night of February 6, 1934.
jfz9580m
(14,897 posts)3. Interesting Read. Thanks.nt