Is This Fascism?

What’s happening in the United States bears “family resemblances” to fascism, says Alberto Toscano. But the term has limits and warrants a thoughtful exploration, advises the Italian philosopher and critical theorist. He applies a related term to what Donald Trump and Elon Musk represent: “Caesarism.”

Toscano, a visiting associate professor at Simon Fraser University, is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, published in 2023, and has spent much of his scholarly career thinking and writing about the various forms authoritarianism and fascism can take, past and present.

The repression and seizure of power taking place now in the United States sure look a lot like the classic portraits of fascism as they are conventionally understood. Still, there are aspects of this moment that strike Toscano as peculiar.

“This is a very unique conjunction of the culture war, persecutory politics against trans people, against migrants, against any form of diversity or difference in educational institutions etc.,” Toscano told The Tyee.

“But then, on the other hand, this licence given within the state for a direct dismantling of state infrastructure, carried out by the world’s richest man and his minions — that’s not anything that one can find, I think, in the annals of fascism.”

So where have Trump, Musk and the MAGA moment delivered us?

Toscano urges that we contemplate recent historical events like the financial crisis and “the deep shaping force that histories of colonialism and imperialism have on reactionary fascist thought.”

He believes there are lessons to be drawn from Black liberation and anti-colonial thought through the works of early and late 20th-century radical Black intellectuals including the U.S. sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James, U.S. activist Angela Davis, pan-African journalist George Padmore and Martiniquais politician Aimé Césaire.

Some of these thinkers observed first-hand colonial domination by powers that considered themselves liberal democracies, like the British and French empires. Others, like Du Bois and Davis, lived in the United States, a country that prided itself on being “the land of the free,” while institutionalizing racial repression.

For this group, the idea that liberalism is antithetical to authoritarianism was theoretically, historically and, on the level of lived political experience, unpersuasive.

Toscano reminds that for decades the United States had Jim Crow laws that imposed racial domination and disenfranchisement — without being termed fascist.

“There’s a lot of plasticity in authoritarian directions,” he said. “Part of what we’re seeing now is that [the Trump regime is] doing everything they can within the capacities of the state that are given to them.”

The cautionary lesson Toscano draws is that “you can durably transform these liberal democratic constitutional polities in extremely authoritarian directions without necessarily anything that straightforwardly looks like a break.”

In a video call last month, The Tyee spoke with Toscano about what we mean when we say “fascism,” Elon Musk as a modern Caesar, lessons for Canada and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: A lot of people are watching the escalation in the U.S. and are asking themselves: Is this fascism?

Alberto Toscano: There are certainly enough family resemblances to [revisit] the ways in which fascism has been thought about and understood in the past and using that to reflect on the present.

Things are rendered trickier by the fact that there’s also a delight that’s taken in provoking and in trolling and in exploiting the shock value of historical symbols of authoritarianism. The infamous Musk Nazi salute is also just a very knowing, very deliberate action of global trolling, “owning the libs.”

One of the issues that we face as critical thinkers, citizens, commentators is to parse the spectacular and the provocative and the shocking from the structural and consequential changes.

We’re seeing efforts to really dismantle in an irreversible way any state infrastructure that contributes to regulating capital and corporations and/or that further social rights for vulnerable or poor and working-class people in general, across a whole set of different axes of gender, race, sexuality.

And there’s parts of the ideology — this revelling in domination, in the hatred of difference, in grotesque forms of masculinity and patriarchy — that obviously resonate with different experiences, both historical and contemporary, of far-right politics.

But there’s also elements of this that are peculiar to the United States and are also peculiar to this very unusual alliance that is Trumpism. That plays on a kind of populism, or at least a kind of populist address to a supposed genuine working or middle class.

One of the things significant about the MAGA phenomenon is that it is fairly explicitly a way of looking into U.S. history, looking into the capacities of the state, looking into what the constitution, interpreted in a certain manner, permits you to do. And then combining those into this authoritarian American assemblage.

It’s not an accident that these things are symbolized, when Trump comes in and puts in a big portrait of [former U.S. president] Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. [Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, infamous for imperial ambitions and Indigenous dispossession.]

That tells you something about their tradition and their way of imagining a future from combining together different aspects of this political past.

You recently wrote about “Caesarism” as a way of seeing the current rise of authoritarian strongmen figures. Why is that reference to Roman times a useful framework for understanding this moment?

It’s a term that was used by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, writing in his prison notebooks after having been incarcerated by Mussolini’s government [between 1929 and 1935].

It’s also a term that plays a very prominent role for possibly the bestselling radical, conservative intellectual of the interwar period, Oswald Spengler, author of the famous book The Decline of the West [published in 1918].

It takes different forms, but it’s this notion of the emergence of acclaimed or self-appointed men of destiny or providence as the carriers of a solution to the crisis. The debate about Caesarism is also a debate about the forms dictatorships or autocracies can take in modern mass societies, with modern mass media.

One of the figures that [Spengler] talks about as an example of the modern Caesar was Cecil Rhodes [the British magnate and white supremacist colonizer of southern Africa in the late 1800s]. And Cecil Rhodes is a disturbing and fascinating figure for thinking about the conjunction of capital politics and racial domination, given his ability to create an extremely personal form of domination in this system that involved both the dispossession of land and the brutal exploitation of racialized labour for extractive and mining purposes, many things that are still with us in different forms.

I found this fascinating because it spoke to this issue of “hybrid power” today. What does it mean that we have individuals who are no longer CEOs of corporations understood as these impersonal, massive bureaucracies in their own right?

These individuals instead are viewed and view themselves as these providential figures — engineer, inventor, ruler, all kind of wrapped up into one.

It’s interesting because it suggests that in the capitalist societies that we live in, when these moments of instability and turmoil happen, the figure of personalized power is a figure that is inevitably or necessarily connected to that which generates power in our society — capital.

This moment is unique because Musk is able to exercise this personalized power, not just as that extremely powerful capitalist with mass government contracts and mass influence, who can decide to turn Starlink on and off, whose decisions have consequence for the GDP of different countries.

[Before assuming his role atop Trump’s government, Musk] was already getting invited, basically as a statesperson. When he met with French President Emmanuel Macron or he met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the whole pageantry is like an official visit by another prime minister or president.

But this now is different because he still maintains all of that, and he’s directly tinkering with, or wrecking, the innards of the state. He’s doing this in this weird duarchy, a double rule of him and Trump, which I can’t really think of a precedent for, and it’s a very challenging proposition for what the forms of resistance to it might be.

How does one even challenge or confront this kind of authoritarianism?

As an individual, aside from expressing and circulating your views and opinions, these are phenomena that are happening at such an encompassing scale and are so consequential they can only really be dealt with at some collective level. Now, what those collective forms will be will vary greatly.

Many people have been already organizing around these things because they’re not totally discontinuous with what was happening under Biden. If we take the issue of the punitive detention and deportation of migrants, it’s not an invention. Much of the personnel is the same as before, it’s the same officers, it’s the same sites, it’s the same companies making money off of the detention system.

A lot of people obviously have and are organizing to respond. Likewise with the interdiction of care for trans kids or, indeed, adults. Or with the ongoing repression of reproductive health and all the various abortion bans at the state level.

There’s this classic authoritarian vision of the state as something that needs to be seized and transformed quickly to break the opposition. That’s always been the key thing to moments of authoritarian emergence — to dismantle capacities for resistance.

This sense of “going for broke” is something that obviously characterizes this moment, both in its potentially real and consequential elements, and also in its more spectacular dimensions, which are also like media ploys. It doesn’t really necessarily matter so much what the consequences are as long as you’ve overwhelmed and disoriented your adversaries.

We’re on the west coast of Canada, a country that’s been very good friends with the U.S., has shared history with it and is also what a lot of people would describe as a settler-colonial state. What lessons should we be taking from our neighbours down south?

It’s significant to break that vision whereby fascism is just the explicit celebration of obedience and rigid belonging and following commands, because it turns out not to be the case.

Conceptions of freedom or of liberty as a possession, as a trait, as an entitlement of white settlers, is critical to the ideology, but also to the history of settler colonies. It’s critical to the ways of legitimating and carrying out and giving legal form to the dispossession of Indigenous people. It was also key to the justification of the racial order in the United States, and indeed in Canada as well. The idea that legal personhood and citizenship was presumptively ascribed through belonging to whiteness in some manner or another.

If we want to think about fascist potentials in a settler-colonial North American context, we don’t have to just think about fascism understood as this cult of domination and obedience, but also as something that is driven by the idea that to some, there belongs the freedom and the right to dominate and to dispossess and to rule.

It’s a way of disjoining freedom from a radical or universalist sense of equality and instead treating freedom as a possession, sometimes exclusive, of some over others.

That definitely still animates a lot of the attraction of certain people in North America to far-right politics.

Now, that can also be complicated. Even the Trump coalition has these more or less consistent, more or less superficial efforts to enlist and incorporate racialized people within it, so it’s not just explicit white supremacy even though that’s a definite strand.

The use of the term “fascism” I also think is something that one should be careful of, for analytical reasons but also for rhetorical reasons.

For me, what’s more important is drawing from the historical and political and conceptual lessons of movements and activists and intellectuals who grappled with varieties of fascism and authoritarianism. And it’s less important and significant to decide whether to name or categorize a given moment as fascism.

What would you say to people who are finding it hard to find the energy to resist? Who might even feel despair in the face of our new would-be Caesars?

I think it’s always unjustifiable to say we’re cooked, or to prematurely accept defeat. It’s worth thinking about the fact that [Trump’s] got historically pretty terrible approval ratings, the country is deeply complex and unwieldy and there’s lots of inertias built in.

I actually think one should also have a level of sobriety and an ability to parse. What are the significant struggles? What are the things that are happening that have really great consequences?

I don’t think the counsel of despair is by any means a legitimate one. There’s a lot of incoherence and contradictions, and a lot of ways in which aspects of this could unravel. I think there is that fragility and precarity.